InterviewShe has 2,720 friends on Bebo who give her advice, send her "luv" and watch her life unfold via the webisodes. The not-so-secret diary of Sofia Taylor - aged 17 - is about to get even bigger. Dublin-born Triona Campbell Bernardo thinks we'll fall in love with Sofia, writes Fiona McCann.
SOFIA TAYLOR is 17 and beautiful. Sounds tough, right? But Sofia has problems just like any gal her age. Having recently been dispatched by her mother to live with her dad in London, she's having trouble making friends, getting on with grown-ups, and feels there's nobody she can talk to about what's going on in her life.
Fortunately, through social networking site Bebo, she has made some 2,720 friends who give her advice, leave her comments, send her "luv" and watch her life unfold via the webisodes - episodes on the internet - of her life currently streamed on her site five days a week. Yet Sofia Taylor is a fictional character, created by an international team of writers whose clever twist on the traditional soap opera has taken it to a new generation of technologically savvy and highly participatory viewers.
Dublin-born Triona Campbell Bernardo is an integral part of this team, as director and founder of Campbell Ryan Productions, the Irish company producing Sofia's Diary. A Trinity graduate, she has worked for US horror film producer Roger Corman, as well as producing content for RTÉ, TG4, TV3 and ARTE France and garnering a Tribeca First Look Award for the children's feature film The Crooked Mile. All this before she left her twenties.
Now 30, she first got involved with Sofia's Diary when Nuno Bernardo, the man behind the show's original Portuguese version, who she has since married, asked her to help bring it to a UK and Irish audience.
"It started as an internet-based weblog way back when there were no social networking sites at all," says Campbell Bernardo of the project's Portuguese origins. "About five years ago they started going with a webisode and then that spread from mobile to radio, to cable TV, to the national broadcaster, to books, DVDs, to merchandising." This is the genius of Sofia's Diary, incorporating as it does so many different delivery platforms and through this, revenue streams. "It was a really clever concept and it had worked so well in Portugal that they'd sold the franchise of it," she says, adding that versions of Sofia's Diary have already been made in Vietnam, Chile and Brazil.
When it came to making a version for audiences in Britain and Ireland, Campbell Bernardo and co were charged with creating a believably local Sofia.
"It really had to feel that she was living next door, and that she fell somewhere between the Disney extreme of High School Musical, where everything is all happy and singing and dancing, and Skins, where there are very strong problems, very serious issues. We wanted it to play bang straight in the middle where 95 per cent of teenagers have their lives," she explains. "That's where the drama is experienced."
The drama in Sofia's life revolves around her problems fitting in at school, relating to her father, being targeted by the school bully, falling for a self-obsessed idiot, and the various moral dilemmas that come with growing up. The issues she grapples with are written to represent those facing teenagers in the noughties, and how she communicates them is equally reflective of a teenage audience that is increasingly to be found online.
"The main reason they go online isn't to watch clips, but to communicate with each other," explains Campbell Bernardo. "So it was really important to us that we could create characters who were fully rounded, who they could interact with and feel some kind of emotional connection to." The interaction is such that Sofia's fans even get a say in how she behaves, voting at key moments to decide how she will react to a dilemma, with two versions of some episodes filmed to allow the viewers a hand in how the drama unfolds.
"If you give people the choice about the decisions she makes in terms of her dilemmas and they're voting on it, they become very emotionally attached to that character," explains Campbell Bernardo, who says that the teenage audience have proved much less craven than they are often depicted.
"Surprisingly our audience are incredibly moral," she says. "They really care about what happens to her. it just shows how much they've taken her into their hearts."
The danger, perhaps, is that they have taken her into their hearts to such an extent that vulnerable teenagers lose sight of the fact that Sofia is a fictional creation, yet Campbell Bernardo feels that some suspension of disbelief is necessary to really engage with the show. "Sofia is a bit like Santa Claus - the experience is better if you almost feel that she could potentially be real," she says.
It's a formula that has clearly worked, with almost half a million viewers tuning in for each episode in the first series which is currently running on Bebo. Sofia's Diary has also just been bought up by UK television channel FIVER, and is set to start television broadcasts from the end of this month.
Although in some ways it may seem that a show such as Sofia's Diary only points to how outmoded even television has become, Campbell Bernardo feels the FIVER version will offer something new. "I think it's a different experience because when you watch it on the internet you're watching it alone on your screen . . . but we think that by bringing it to FIVER it'll become much more of a co-viewing experience," she says.
The key is to maintain the attention of what she describes as a notoriously fickle audience, with teenagers skipping between the internet, mobile phones and television with an alacrity that can alarm their predecessors. This is where the cross-platform nature of the project comes into play. "Ideally what we're working towards is that you can catch a 60-second radio soap on your way into school, or as a podcast on your iPod, and as you come home from school and check your Bebo mail you can watch an episode online. If your parents don't allow you to go to the computer during the week, you can watch it on FIVER. If you don't have those options and you pick up Ms magazine, which we also have a partnership with, and you can read her bi-monthly column. And if you're in the UK, you get a free text service to tell you what she's doing twice a week," says Campbell Bernardo.
It may seem like a whole new concept for traditionalists, but Sofia's Diary is not the only one of its kind. Two years ago, a 16-year-old called Bree began broadcasting her video diary on the internet site YouTube under the name lonelygirl15. It was testimony to her appeal that even when she was outed as an actor playing a fictional character, fans continued to follow her story, which emerged as a complicated murder-mystery thriller played out over the internet in short episodes. Such has been its popularity that lonelygirl15 now even has its own spin-off series, KateModern, which is set in London. So is Sofia's Diary simply more of the same?
"It was around for two or three years before lonelygirl15 appeared in the US, but it does get compared to it a lot," admits Campbell Bernardo. Yet there are key differences in how Sofia's Diary is presented. "[ Lonelygirl15] was very much direct video grabs to camera. The quality was sometimes grainy and it was a little big shaky, and that all added to the idea that this was directly user content and not pre-manufactured drama," she says. "I think the audience has grown a little more sophisticated since then, and they want to see something that is a television quality production on the internet."
Sofia's Diary also takes advertising to a whole new level, incorporating products and brands bare-facedly into the three-minute episodes, which are kept brief to maintain the short attention span of the online audience.
For Campbell Bernardo, being involved in writing and producing for a new medium has been an exhilarating opportunity to define and shape a genre at its genesis. "No one really knows what the rules are so in some ways we kind of get to make them up as we go along and that's just incredibly liberating," she says.
It may seem a strange progression from a degree in drama studies and classical civilisation from Trinity College Dublin, but Campbell Bernardo claims there is a connection. "I think a lot of our storytelling is very classical," she says. "I'm sure that if I went back and talked to people in Trinity they'd be quite proud that we reference Aristotle's Poetic sometimes with our writers, in terms of classic storytelling structure and what kind of beats you should have in those three minutes."