By BEN FRITZ
![[image]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MK-CD929_SUMMER_G_20130611173226.jpg)
Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal Crew members shoot a promo video with cast members of 'Summer Break' in Palm Springs, Calif.
LOS ANGELESâ€"Two teenage boys sit by the airport here, competing to use their phones to take the best "selfie," or self-portrait, with planes landing in the background.
Trevis and Ray write about the experience on Twitter, post pictures on Instagram and put short videos on Vine. It might be an average day for any American teenager in 2013.
Hollywood producer Peter Chernin is betting it is the future of the entertainment industry.
On June 17, his Chernin Group takes its first step into distributing its own programming with "Summer Break," a reality show of sorts that will exist exclusively on social-media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, and is intended to be viewed on the mobile devices that dominate the lives of its target audience.
"Summer Break" will follow nine L.A.-area teenagers in the final days before most of them head off to college. But unlike traditional reality shows that complete shooting and are then edited into drama-fraught narratives, "Summer Break" will offer tweets, pictures and videos within minutes after cast members create them.
Sixty-second daily "episodes" assembled by professionals will typically post on YouTube within 24 hours of the events they portray. Weekly wrap-up videos will look like marathons by comparison, running three to five minutes each.
"This is on a level so much further than anything anybody has ever doneâ€"it is real life in real time on multiple platforms," said Mr. Chernin, a former president of News Corp . "I love the riskiness of it."
By Hollywood standards, the financial risk is actually quite low. The entire eight-week season of "Summer Break" is said by several people involved to cost under $5 million to produce. Mr. Chernin said "the lion's share" of that amount was paid for by sponsor AT&T Inc., which has been involved throughout the development process. Roughly half the total budget is going toward marketingâ€"all on social media, just like the show itself.
Though a risk, the experimental format also highlights the opportunity independent players like Mr. Chernin have to challenge broadcast networks and film studios as their old monopolies on distribution have been supplanted by smartphones, tablets and game consoles.
In addition to being asked to tweet his or her daily activities as frequently as possible, each "Summer Break" participant has an application from Dropbox Inc. on his or her phone that lets producers see every photo they take and video they record.
"If you're at a party and you take 50 photos you wouldn't Instagram until the next day, we're going to post them for you," said Lauren Dubinsky, a social-media consultant who is helping with the show, speaking about the participants. "And if you tweet you're at a party, we send a text asking, 'Where are the pictures?'"
The monitoring goes on 20 hours a day, courtesy of a 45-person production and social-media crew who work out of a small office in Culver City, Calif. The only time someone isn't digitally chaperoning the teenage charges is between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m.
The team also manages the @summerbreak Twitter handle, which already has nearly 98,000 followers. The account was acquired when the show hired Caroline Harkleroad, a 19-year-old from Atlanta who has built a series of Twitter handles popular with teens (her first, @HighSkoolProbs, has more than 500,000 followers). Ms. Harkleroad repurposed her Twitter feed of "summer bucket list" ideas for teenagers and transitioned it into the core "Summer Break" Twitter feed. At the time it had about 88,000 followers, giving the show a much-needed head start.
Participants in "Summer Break" are followed intermittently by a professional television crew that puts together videos meant to complement the cast's social-media activities. A group of experienced reality producers will work on rotating shifts day and night, editing the daily and weekly videos.
The teens were selected using traditional reality-TV casting methods, including recruitment at schools and sporting events. In addition to seeking kids who are attractive on camera, the producers also judged their savviness at social media. Four of the teens come from one high school and five from another.
Through Chernin Group, Mr. Chernin has become one of the most powerful producers and investors in Hollywood, with backers including Providence Equity Partners, the Qatari sovereign-wealth fund and Victor Koo, the founder of Chinese online video giant Youku .
Founded in 2009 after Mr. Chernin left News Corp. (the parent of The Wall Street Journal), Los Angeles-based Chernin Group is known best for its investments in startups in the U.S. and Asia, as well as producing movies including "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" and television shows like "New Girl."
Though it works with partners in traditional media, Chernin Group is seeking to forge its own future online. It is currently bidding to acquire online television distributor Hulu LLC (possibly in partnership with AT&T), and is an investor in FullScreen, a company that distributes and promotes user-generated videos on YouTube and is assisting with marketing for "Summer Break."
A recent Nielsen Co. study found that 12-to-17 year-olds spend significantly less time watching television than older peers and more watching video on phones. Though teens still watch far more TV than mobile video, the shift to smartphone is expected to accelerate.
Producers will have only modest influence on what the "Summer Break" teens do each day, meaning drama isn't guaranteed. A few sample episodes already produced included the airport visit, the breakup of a couple who met in casting, and lots of scantily clad cast members on the beach.
"We're going into this blind in a sense," said Brandon Wilson, an executive producer. "I don't know where the show is going moment to moment."
He added, however, that future episodes' focus will be determined in part by analysis of which characters and events fans respond to on social media.
In a broad sense, the show's producers are attempting to prove that they are still relevant in the world of social media, where teenagers increasingly create and consume their own stories.
"I want it to feel almost user-generated," said Billy Parks, a production executive for Chernin Group overseeing the effort. "But because we are filmmakers and marketers, I hope we can craft a story a little better than they can."
Write to Ben Fritz at ben.fritz@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared June 12, 2013, on page B1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Reality TV Show, Without TV.
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