Swirlee

Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m really getting into Lonelygirl15. Not the girl, but the saga or, if you prefer, the brand. At this point I have no doubt that it’s fiction, but what’s significant to me is that up until people started calling it a hoax, I didn’t really have any interest in it. Now that its “hoaxiness” seems a foregone conclusion (though I still don’t think the “confession” is authentic), I find it much more interesting. Someone out there is creating a fairly interesting and entertaining video serial exclusively for the internet, anonymously.^† And they’ve amassed a huge audience, relatively speaking. I think we’re at the tipping point where more people believe that “Bree” and “Daniel” are actors than don’t, and though a lot of viewers have undoubtedly abandoned the “show,” I think it’s gained a lot, like me, who find this sort of thing fascinating.

I don’t want to get too deep into the philosophical/psychological implications of all of this. I dislike “reality” TV but have a certain degree of affection for readymade dramedies like Gilmore Girls and now Lonelygirl15, and I’m sure an astute observer of human nature could glean something from that. But I’m really just along for the ride. LG15’s producers are crafting an intricate plot combining the mundane—boy meets cute but naive girl, girl rebels against unseen (a la Peanuts) parental figures—to the serious and somewhat more intriguing—religion and the occult—and I, for one, am all the more interested equipped with the knowledge that this isn’t just some suburban teenager with a webcam, and might actually be going somewhere.

^†When I say anonymously, I don’t mean to suggest that I think LG15’s creators don’t intend to reveal themselves eventually. I believe their goal is to reap immense benefits, both financial and professional, from this affair. If they’re not producing an MTV original series by this time next year, I’ll be surprised.

I killed most of the afternoon writing a Ruby script that takes a directory full of video files, goes through them one at a time plucking out a frame every X seconds, and then averages the frames into a single image. My guinea pig? lonelygirl15. The YouTube-ingenue-who-might-be-a-hoax seemed like an easy target for some deep metaphor about synthetic art or art imitating life imitating art or something, but that’s a metaphysical rabbit hole I don’t really have the energy for today. It’s left as an exercise for the reader.

The technical details I can handle, however: The above image is a mathematical average of 25 videos (all of lonelygirl15’s videos to date except the first two, which you might consider “non-canon”) which total about 49 minutes. One frame was taken every 15 seconds, for a total of 209 frames. The script is about 75 lines of Ruby code, but the real heavy lifting is done by the spectacular RMagick and FFmpeg (sadly, there were no rmovie binaries available for Windows, so I had to talk to the command line). After the script grabbed the frames and averaged them, all I did was up the contrast a bit in Paint Shop Pro.

The script is theoretically limited only by memory and processor cycles. The image above took six or seven minutes to “render,” about half of which was capturing the frames, but the averaging itself ate up pretty much all of my memory, so working with more frames or higher resolution captures would require a bigger commitment, or at least a spare Linux box (working on that).

To be perfectly clear, I’m not at all the first person to do this sort of thing. Jason Salavon has done it with Playboy centerfolds, real estate, talk show hosts, and even porn, and Meggan Gould has averaged the results of Google Images searches to fascinating effect.