Introducing… Away We Happened (2012) by Wong Fu Productions and AT&T !
Why this video?
I have been a huge fan of Wong Fu Production so I decided to use this film as my case study. Wong Fu consists of three Asian-American who graduated from the same college about ten years ago and they moved to Los Angeles to start a company. They are mainly on YouTube making short skits and some short films – varies from comedy to drama. They have a huge fan base with 2.4 million subscribers. Their audience are mainly young teenagers who spend most of their time on YouTube.
What is this video?
It is a web series called ‘Away We Happened‘ and it stars celebrity YouTube artists like Victor Kim, Jen Buescher, Ki Hong Lee and so on. This mini series is revolves around the relationship of this couple, Daniel and Jean who had their suitcase swapped by accident at a cafe in New York. They met up to return the respective suitcase and their love story bloomed from there.
This show is not fully scripted during pre-production because Wong Fu made this an interactive video so they film the first episode and they give the viewers to continue the story. They will put a list of questions for the people to answer at the end of each episode. At the end of the week, they will vote the best way to continue the film and Wong Fu will post the next video. The series ran for six weeks with six episodes. Each episode is about 5-7 minutes long with the finale running up to 14 minutes long. It is naturally the standard online video duration – short and concise.
Is this series sponsored?
This was a collaboration film of Wong Fu Production with AT&T. It was a low-budget film sponsored by AT&T. Product placement advertising is very heavy here because throughout the video the phones are extremely visible. AT&T used this collaboration as a crowdsourcing tactic as there are plenty of young viewers watching Wong Fu’s films. Within the 6 weeks of the web series, AT&T gathered six million views.
For further analysis, I posted it on my next blog post. Check it our here !