Hello everybody!

“Lost in edition” is part of my project to report how long and hard is the way to viral success on the Internet. My name is Lucia Vazquez and I am a Spanish student of Journalism who is struggling to find a tiny place on the worldwide market of YouTube and the cybernetic world.  When I first started to think about the perfect, awesome, and, more important, popular video I wanted to make with my classmates, I realized we had two clear options: we could go for the quantity (to get as many hits as we could), or rather for the quality. That is, we could make a video we could feel proud of, something artistic, innovative, daring and original (and I could keep listing pompous adjectives for a while), or we could just shoot cats. Surprisingly, we made a bet for quality.

Which are the keys to make a video become a million-people hit? What makes clips such as “Achmed the terrorist” so widely known? What is the secret ingredient for YouTube success? And, more important, how were be going to be able to shoot anything that could get thousands of visits within just several months? After some hard and laborious research- which basically consisted on watching the most popular videos recently uploaded on YouTube and some statistic workout, we realized that there were four things that made a video ear-to-mouth popular: sex (implicit or just hinted), epic fails (accidents, people getting hurt while playing sports, stories of defeat and humiliation, etc), animals and little children (stalking cats, cute dogs with strange skills, Asian boys playing guitar as real rock stars) or humour.

Well, apparently recording anything with explicit sexual content was not the most elegant or suitable thing to do for a University task, so we just dismissed that option. It also seemed that nobody on our group had a superhero pet or an incredibly lovely little brother, so that option was also rejected. Reasonably, none of us wanted to get wrecked in order to achieve viral success, so it just remained the possibility of making a hilarious, funny video. Well, we considered the choices then: we could make a parody of a film scene, a parody of a video clip, a funny monologue, pranks with hidden cameras or a fake tutorial. Since the script needed to be really sharp in order to make it work (and also to avoid being cheesy), and, furthermore, none of us had the profile of a ingenious comedian, we decided that humour wasn’t part of our way to success either.

Therefore, the most popular idea seemed to be making a stop motion, something as unusual and funny as this. We also thought about creating a graphic poem using the aesthetics of Dakota, but we soon dismissed both ideas because we wanted to work with cameras. Then, someone came up with the idea of making a documentary focused on the lifestyle of skaters, making it appealing with different camera angles and a good edition work. But things never turned out as expected, and next week our group needed to split in two...