Arts & Entertainment

Are You In This? White-Hot YouTube Video Was Shot In Laguna Beach

Austin Dodge and Elliot Barbernell's "Take A Photo" video was shot Saturday in Laguna Beach, then exploded everywhere.

Laguna Beach is playing a lead role in one of the hottest-trending YouTube videos of the past few days.

Crafted by Laguna Beach resident Austin Dodge, 18, and his creative partner, 14-year-old Elliot Barbernell, the clip, titled Take A Photo, shows how random passersby behave when they’re invited to be spontaneously creative.

Shot over two hours just this past Saturday evening (and chopped down to an easily-digestible two minutes and 46 seconds), Dodge and Barbernell bought a disposable camera, wrote TAKE A PHOTO on the inside lid of a pizza box, then left the camera in the box at different spots in downtown Laguna.

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Then they rolled the video and recorded what happened.

"A lot of people were confused by it, they weren’t sure what to do," Dodge tells Laguna Beach Patch. "But some people just went for it and took a picture."

Find out what's happening in Laguna Beachwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The resulting photos are intercut with the video. Some people shot the typically amazing Laguna Beach sunset. Some got friends or family to pose. Some turned the camera on themselves. Others just shot what was down the street.

And somehow, nobody ran off with the camera.

The point of the project comes at the end, when the words EVERYONE HAS A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE flash by.

After editing, Dodge—who attends the Orange County High School for the Arts in Santa Ana—uploaded it to his YouTube channel, InsideLimeTV, where, as of Thursday morning, it’s been viewed a whopping 156,671 times, thanks to reposts from Reddit and an Italian website. Views on Barbernell’s own heavily-clicked channel number an additional 34,808.

The response, Dodge says, has been great, a prime example of the power of the Internet.

"Elliot was in class, and they were talking about YouTube and videos, and he mentioned what we did, and someone else in class said 'That was you?'"


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