LBD – The journey and not being afraid to try.
So this is the first week in a year where The Lizzie Bennet Diaries doesn’t produce a single video. No, I’m not counting this. I know several of the team members have posted reflections on the journey and I wanted to do something to the same effect but I really don’t know how to really wrap my head around it all right now. Even though the show is over, there is a lot to do for the property. We have the DVD, Welcome to Sanditon, the follow up adaptation, etc.
There’s a lot of business stuff to take care of and for better or worse, I haven’t had the time to really absorb it all. The morning of Ep 100, when so many of you were watching the last episode, I didn’t get to really process it. I was working on something with Ashley, Laura, Julia, and Mary Kate at one point later that day and as I looked at the four of them together the entire past year just flashed before my eyes. All the work, meetings, late nights, editing, tweeting, world building, story telling, character designing, the praise, the criticisms, the fan art, the hangouts, the ups, the downs, all of that was personified by the four extremely talented and lovely ladies that stood in front of me. It was… a lot… of feelings.
By chance, I ran into Daniel at a coffee shop yesterday and we reflected on more things. Even though the last episode was released and even if the actors or writers never appear in anything in universe again, there are things to come that we won’t know until they happen. We looked back at the show and its potential legacy. This show will be analyzed and studied for years. It will be honored for what it did well and criticized for what it didn’t do well (perfectly fine to me). I am still under no delusions that what we did was perfect because nothing is.
The idea that people will study what we’ve done and learn from it is an amazing feeling. Knowing that thousands of people will or have picked up and read Pride and Prejudice because they saw The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is just incredible. The promotion and the appreciation of the classics is just awesome.
I’ve been asked several times if there will be “copycats” in the format and as I am sure there will be, I have no problem with it. I just hope the other adaptations/story in vlog form/whatever style they are copying is done well. I genuinely want everything to be good so I hope they go for it.
In LBD, I’m really happy that we as a team always just went for it. Even the stuff we didn’t end up doing (or do well) we genuinely tried our best to make happen given our resource constraints. Running out of time was an excuse. Running out of money was an excuse. Being lazy? Never an excuse.
I remember over a year ago sitting in a coffee shop talking to Ashley for the first time and discussing how if this goes well this would be a year+ long journey. I didn’t know how big we’d get and I didn’t know whether anyone would like it, but we were going to try.
I’m sure I’ve pointed it out before, but of all the vlogbrothers videos in history (I haven’t seen them all), THIS ONE was the most important to me and this project. This single video informs so much about the LBD and I’m pretty sure Hank didn’t make it to specifically influence the show but it has in so many ways.
Aside from the obvious “this is how to vlog” subject matter, the most important thing in the video he says is at the 2:23 point.
“Do not be afraid to try.”
Thank you everyone for watching the show. The team gave it everything and we left it all on the field. Though our adaptation of Pride and Prejudice has come to an end, the universe we built as an experiment continues to Sanditon and beyond.
Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/46972723604.
