YouSaid · the spoken record

Cameron Dallas

lines on the record: 64
first: 2023-03-30
most recent: 2023-03-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I 100% agree. The Shane Dawson one was really cool. And I think it was any time there was a thing that kind of made it real to me. Because for me, the thing that I was always worried about when I got there was like, is this just a reactionary thing? Like people see Michaela and on Instagram, they have a reaction, right? But when you could see fans really engage and like, so somebody would respond to Michaela and then there would be a whole bunch of fans that would come to her defense and like explain the whole story and they track down all this stuff and you see how much people really cared and there were fans that knew more about the backstory than I did at certain points where I was like, oh man, this is really deep.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These things that kind of disrupt these patterns that you're familiar with, like make you pause and say what's going on. And so much of what we were doing was really trying to create these parafictional moments where you're like, wait a minute, Michaela's at Coachella. Is that really Coachella? Wait a minute. Like a brand. Is talking about her being at Coachella, and that led credibility to the idea. And so the moments that I think that for me that jump out obviously was like Shane Dawson, when Shane Dawson made this YouTube video that included Michaela in these conspiracy theories”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, I get kind of like theory brained, and I'm like talking about these concepts and ideas that I'm really excited about. And often they don't apply in the real world. But I talk a lot about this idea of like parafiction, this idea of telling fictional stories and spaces reserved for nonfiction. And the big one being professional wrestling, WWE or whatever it is. This idea that you're washing people in a ring where you watch sports take place, boxing other things, and people are getting hit with chairs and they're really getting hit, but you're told that it's fake. In a kind of an infinite scroll world where, you know, nothing makes you take pause”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Assumptions about what narratives would work and how we could kind of imbue these ideas of tolerance, of like otherness. And then you just try things. I think people were probably like, wow, how'd you know that she'd be so revered in fashion? And like, I had no idea. We want her to look cool, and all of a sudden, fashion raised their hands.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People engage with media that it's like five to seven years older than them. So Hannah Montana is running around high school, but it's like kids that were middle school younger watching that program. And so Michaela being 19 was quite intentional because I really felt like in a post PG 13 America, like movie ratings really neutered middle ground of cinema and television where I used to have these kind of like John Hughes films, he's like coming of age tales that really talked about the issues like people were facing and didn't talk down to them. And so one thing we always talked about early on was like we wanted to tell stories like eye level. Like we didn't want to talk down to kids. We wanted to address them like they were adults and they had complicated lives and you know they're aware of the turmoils in the world. They're well aware of like impending climate change. They're well aware of like economic strife, like pandemics, like these issues affect everyone. It's not just, you know, cliche saved by the Bell motifs. We can go deeper. And then beyond that, we just made.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, in the narrative, I definitely wanted to engage young people, especially people who spoke Portuguese. And so Michaela was programmed to be like half Brazilian, half Spanish, right? And the idea that we could engage kids.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's an interesting question because when you're doing things like this, it's so open-ended. The other idea is Mikhailo didn't need to be a fixed aesthetic or character. It could be this kind of like shapeshifter, ever-evolving in the narrative, Michael's 19 forever. And so there were decisions like I wanted to create constraints because as a creative person, I like having constraints. I think it kind of like breeds really interesting ideas. But some of the kind of early things I had worked in like making music as an artist and as a producer for a very long time and it was like pretty clear to me that there were these like underserved, really passionate audiences in Latin America. And so if you ever look at some like pop stars Instagram, 10% of the comics have come to Brazil, come to Brazil, come to Brazil.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it really did resonate. And I've heard Trevor, you talk about, again, all of these little decisions that you had to make about exactly what she looked like. I mean, when we're influencers online as ourselves, like you only have the face that you're born with. But when you're starting new with a virtual influencer, you literally can make that influencer look like anything. And that's amazing because you have this clean slate, but it also is like, yeah, does she have freckles or not? Like, how long's her hair? What race is she? How old is she? What are her beliefs? And so given Trevor used the term terminally online, how did you use your background? I mean, you also worked at Spotify. You've like toured with Katie Perry. Like you have this cultural understanding of what people like and how did that feed into ultimately what you built into this character?”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think it's always really hard, but I think we got lucky in a lot of ways in terms of Mikado's design. One is we had a CEO and Frevor who actually dove into some of like he found Daz 3D and these softwares and kind of like started making that design. So when I came in, it's really just like taking that, like looking at what's working already and saying like, okay, now let's turbocharge that. Let's make this able to be look realistic. Let's make it able to be animated and all these other things, right? So I think for us, it was a little bit of like having a really good sense from Trevor and from some of the cultural savants we had on the bread team that really understand internet culture and kind of like how to connect with the audience that they were targeting right and you know luckily we found something that obviously resonated with a whole lot of people.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we were interested in, I think, doing something, A, on social, and that was already going to be challenging a lot of norms. There was still this perception that social media was for non-fiction. We tell them a fictional narrative inside of that space. And they'd be doing it with a character. And if we could minimize as much of the novelty as possible and keep as much of it familiar as possible, I thought we had a better chance of succeeding. And I thought it would be really easy. I was like, yeah, we could just make a virtual human, no good deal. And six years later, you know, trying to figure it out still. But Isaac really was like really the key in getting that figured out.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, they were like zero, and that's largely why Isaac is in the picture. I mean, no one was doing photorealistic, like bipedal human characters. There's this concept of the uncanny valley that there is this kind of middle ground between what an actual human likes and what like a cartoonish looking like hello kitty human looks like where it looks too human, but not human enough and you get freaked out. It's like a polar express girl is often excited in this stuff. But as a result, you didn't really see anyone doing any of that stuff. And, you know, there were things happening in Asia, Hatsuni Miku, you know, were standing on the shoulders of giants like Miku.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I love that you mentioned some of these other characters or influencers that we see in TV shows. People have shown that they have an affinity to not just humans, but characters and TV shows and these illustrated characters. But was there some sort of insight that you saw where to me, I don't know if we saw very many virtual influencers that looked like humans? What was the insight of like Lol Michaela is fake, but she also looks super real. She was like almost like a new breed. You know what I mean?”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How effective those can be, and the double edged sword that presented and kind of in parallel and falling in love with this data set around a show called Will and Grace that I love that said that like Will and Grace was largely responsible for gay marriage in the US, that like public polling was tied to the ratings of that show. And so it seemed like there was an emergent new media social visual platforms that could be used for telling fictional stories. And that was really the dream. It was like, if you were going to build a modern Disney or Marvel now, you probably wouldn't want to start in comic books or in theaters. You'd want to start where the eyeballs are, which was really on social. And so that was a vision. It was like, can we create Disney on social? Can we tell stories that are as engaging as a Kardashian or Jake Paul, but kind of imbue these ideologies that make for a more tolerant, empathetic world? And that was kind of like the impetus for all this madness.”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and me just being terminally online had kind of spent these different evolutions from like web one to web two into like web three of the present and seen these different media moments and the narratives they could create and how that could shape the ideologies and belief systems of young people especially and being in the states was hyper aware of like what happened on 4chan and what was happening on social and meme magic and what it meant to create narratives that could you know capture heart and minds and”
2023-03-30 · a16z Podcast · Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source