PRINTDorm drama
Dorm Life is on a computer screen near you
Courtesy of Attention Span Media
Scene from Season 2 of Dorm Life.
January 22, 2009 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Some things change; others don’t. Living in college dormitories has been and always will be a time of life filled with mischief and tomfoolery.
Capitalizing on the nuances of this well-known rite of passage, the creators of the online program Dorm Life bring the time-honored tradition of messing with the resident assistant to a 21st century audience eager to consume media that extends beyond the traditional television lineup.
Scene from Season 1 of Dorm Life.
Dorm Life is an online show created, written, directed by and starring current and former UCLA students. The show’s successful 20-episode initial run began February 2008. Each webisode runs five to six minutes in length and can be viewed at dorm-life.com. The show is independent of any television station and is produced by Attention Span Media.
As for content, many view the show as a miniature (in length, not laughs) version of The Office. MU Junior David Thiessen points out that The Office parodies supposedly real people in an office setting while Dorm Life parodies real college students in a dormitory setting. The show is filmed in a mockumentary style, and the plot follows the lives and loves of 10 college students living on the same floor. Like The Office, Dorm Life features each of the stereotypical college characters: the jerk RA, the shy nerd, the artist, the sorority sisters (reluctant and promiscuous), the drunken goofball and so on.
Although the creators believe the comparison to The Office is natural, they don’t want to be perceived as a derivative. Writer-creator Jim Brandon explains that throughout the writing process, they weren’t trying to make the show like The Office. “We’re proud of the writing we’ve done, the stories we’ve told, the way that we call back jokes and the world we’ve created,” he says.
Writer, creator and producer Brian Singleton, who also plays RA Marshall Adams I, says he and the show’s other creators often draw from their own UCLA dorm experiences, particularly the ones they shared together. “I took from my personal experiences of being an RA and working in Residential Life and was able to exaggerate and make fun of [dorm living],” he says.
Like Singleton, Brandon infuses his dorm experience into the stories and his character, Gopher Reed. “The idea of Dorm Life definitely spawned from a lot of funny stories we started telling one another from our time in the dorms because it is a unique time in your life, when you’re living on the same floor as 70 other kids,” he says.
The accuracy of college living is not lost on the fans, as Thiessen recalls times where he would exclaim, “Oh yeah, I totally know what he’s talking about there,” while watching the show. “I just find the show very relatable,” Thiessen says. “I saw characters in the show that I knew from living in the dorms.”
By passing over more traditional media outlets, the creators of Dorm Life were able to be immediately creative, instead of letting a pilot television script lie on the desks of network executives, Singleton says.
Brandon adds that the idea of online interaction and social networking is catching on with college and high school kids. “We got excited very early on about creating profiles for people and being able to tell little aspects of the story in a character’s profile, [Facebook] status updates, photo albums online and bonus content that you would find on our Web site,” he says. “That really excited us because we could appeal to our peers and the way they consume content.”
As far as their fanbase is concerned, Singleton describes it as a grass roots effort, founded by word-of-mouth and social networking, rather than commercials, magazine ads and billboards.
Chris Smith, who wears the creator-writer-director-editor hat and also plays Mike Sanders, explains that the online format of the show allowed for a more exponential increase in viewership. Total video views now exceed 4 million. “Truth be told, a lot of the show was consumed after the fact, after our entire season was out,” Smith says. “With television content, there’s an initial spike, and then the viewership tails off. What’s interesting about our show is that there was the initial spike, but it persisted and even started to rise long after our season had already been out.”
Thiessen’s experience reflects these statistics, as he admits, “When I first got introduced to [Dorm Life], they were about eight episodes into the season, and I went home that night and watched every single episode and every single webcam.”
With the arrival of the second season sometime later this year, Singleton says viewers can expect longer episodes and a longer season. “We leave season one with a lot of story lines revved up to continue,” Singleton explains. Smith finishes his response, saying, “We ended our season with a cliffhanger, and there will be answers.”
