Miles Beckett is the Principal Founder and an Executive Producer, Writer and Director of the Internet video series lonelygirl15. In this capacity, he oversees all facets of the lonelygirl15 production, ranging from the creative to the technological. He is also Co-Creator and Executive Producer for KateModern, the story of a London undergrad, which contains many of the exciting interactive and mysterious elements that make LG15 an international phenomenon. After graduating from medical school and practicing to become a plastic surgeon, Beckett came up with the idea of posting a serialized drama on the Internet and along with Mesh Flinders and Gregory Goodfried, created lonelygirl15.com in the summer of 2006. Since then, the videos have received over 60 million views and are consistently the most subscribed to, most viewed and most discussed on YouTube. lonelygirl15 was named VH1’s Big Web Hit and the #1 web celeb by Forbes Magazine. The Season One finale in August 2007 – an event where 12 episodes were uploaded over 12 hours — drew over one million views as an exclusive on MySpaceTV.
The lonelygirl15 team has changed the way that web-based entertainment is made and perceived. With a web cam and skeleton staff, they have a produced a video series with a larger audience than some cable television programs with million dollar budgets. Since it was “revealed” that the series is scripted, the videos have steadily increased in popularity, garnering a fan base akin to The X Files and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. LG15 and KateModern integrate puzzles and hidden clues, and fans can interact with and influence the story by writing comments, uploading their own videos or sending messages to the characters at lonelygirl15.com or KateModern.bebo.com. In an extension of the model created by lonelygirl15, KateModern launched with brand integration arrangements with such major names as Gillette, Pantene, Microsoft’s Windows Live, Disney and Orange.
Beckett holds a B.S. in Neuroscience from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.D. from the University of California at San Diego. He completed an internship year in the Integrated Plastic Surgery residency program at Loma Linda University Medical Center and one year of tissue engineering research at the National Institutes of Health as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Scholar. He was the founder and Editor-In-Chief of “The Pulse,” a UCSD Medical School newsletter and “The Inhuman Condition,” a UCSD Medical School underground comedy newsletter as well as the design editor and staff writer for “The Heuristic Squelch,” the UC Berkeley humor magazine. As an expert on the convergence of entertainment and technology and online video, Beckett has recently been a panelist at Argues 2007 in San Francisco, on the Film/Interactive Panel at SXSW and is a co-host with Greg Goodfried of Mixed Media, a live streaming web show at nowlive.com. He is also the founder of SHOUTBOY (shoutboy.com) a comedy video podcast website and the creator (writer/director/producer) of the political spoof, “West Wingers.”
Along with producing partner Greg Goodfried, Beckett has formed the digital studio, LG15 Studios with the purpose of creating original content and marketing campaigns for digital platforms (internet/mobile/IPTV).
