Twittamentary explores how lives meet and affect one another on the fast growing micro-blogging phenomena that is Twitter.
As Twittamentary is a social media film, it currently has been screened at many social media clubs around the world including New York, London, Tulsa etc. We've screened in the towns, the cities and now we're going to b screening in the islands! Watch out for a screening of Twittamentary from Social Media Club Hawaii on June 30th! Details are as follows:
Date: Saturday June 30 (Social Media Day)
Time: 6PM
Location: GreenHouse Innovation Hub – Honolulu, HI
If you are an educator or trainer that teaches social media, education or innovation, you can also download the Twittamentary case study for FREE here
PS: YOU too, can help organise a Twittamentary screening for your community, please see guidelines here..
Zoey
Associate Producer, Twittamentary
Twittamentary will screen it's Theatrical premier in NY tomorrow evening (Tuesday 19th) at 8pm. It will be available to download at twittamentary.com from tomorrow and on other sites such as amazon.com very shortly.
Getting Twittamentary to its “theatrical premier” has been an amazing, fun and thought provoking project to work on. Director Tan Siok Siok invited me to join her as Producer back in February last year after we'd met over a coffee (thanks to @colinmiles for the intro!).
At that point the documentary was still in rough cut form and Siok had started showing it to audiences to help her work out what the movies evolution could and should be. I watched the movie at a screening at Hackerspace in Singapore the next evening and was immediately hooked.
The documentary presents Sioks personal and genuine exploration of “what Twitter is”. Something of particular intrigue to her and her as a Beijing resident where Twitter sits on the wrong side of the Great Firewall of China. As Twitter is a “social network” it soon becomes clear in the movie that Twitter is and will always be whatever it’s users, or tweeps, want it to be. Where they find value is where the networks purpose and value lives, or dies.
Through our conversations it became clear that the natural next step should be to extend this ethos into the evolution of the movie. Through 2011 we ran fifteen “beta” screenings across 3 continents including Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, SF, NY, Chicago London, Singapore, KL and Beijing.
After each beta screening we captured the live audience twitter conversation. This input was used in creating a new iteration of the movie. Characters & scenes were added, expanded, edited and cut, iteration by iteration, as a flowing, organic crowd-sourcing experiment.
By the end of the year the movie had evolved through fifteen of these iterations, carefully and skilfully curated by Siok. And all done whilst she simultaneously managed and grew her start-up business in Beijing – quite an amazing feat, I’m sure you’ll agree!
The movie completed post production in Beijing and LA at the end of February 2012 and has been screened at various festivals and community screenings including: the Cinequest (Silicon Valley) Film Festival, Oldenburg Film Festival, Urban Tribes Film Festival and fringe screenings at festivals like SxSW (with pop-up screenings for crowds at SxSW from the back of a FedEx truck being the most crazy – and fun – to date).
This week will see it’s theatrical premier in New York City at the 42nd street AMC on Tuesday at 8pm. It’s being screened as part of the 140conf, Founded and curated by Executive Producer @JeffPulver (and yes, pizza will be served!).
So what’s next?
Distribution
Well, as mentioned, the movie will be available for download via the websiteand various blogs this week and will be available on other sites such as Amazon over the next few weeks.
We’re using Distrify to help us with blogger and web distribution, Distrify provide a very exciting set of tools for independent movie makers and we’ll post further updates about how this as distribution progresses.
Requests for community screenings continue to flow and we have a number already confirmed for July and August in Europe, Asia and the Americas including our first in India, Indonesia and Latin America.
We’ve also received enquiries about purchase of TV screening rights from media companies in countries such as Israel, Australia, NewZealand and Singapore. We’ve held back on these to date to avoid any confusion with (the frankly archaic) Geographical exclusivity requirements before we had made the movie available for download online.
Case Study
The “making of Twittamentary” has also been made into a case study by Michael Netley (@communicateasia) , Corporate Communications professor at Singapore Management University. The case study has been made available, free of charge, to graduate and post graduate institutions via the www.ecch.com website and will be used as teaching material at various educational institutions around the world from next semester. It’s being translated into Spanish by a faculty of the university of Madrid. Later this month Michael will start on a “b” case study about distribution of the movie. More news on this as we have it.
Lessons Of..
We’ll be putting together some “lessons from Twittamentary” using clips from the movie. Twittamentary is becoming a popular teaching & insight tool for corporate, media and government organisations. The use of social media is becoming so pervasive, so quickly, that it’s easy to forget just how nascent and embryonic the whole ecosystem is. And how much and how fast we, as massed humanity, are evolving the way that we communicate and interact. These notes will be made”open” for people to edit, use and customise as they require.
‘Open Sourcing” Twittamentary
In the past month or so we’ve seen audio and video content from Twittamentary starting to be reused and repurposed in different ways. For example DJ’s in Singapore are working on mashups of audio clips in new trance and house tunes. It’s wonderful to see this happening and we’ll be making more of the raw audio, video and soundtrack content available on web over the next month or so.
If you have any other suggestions, we’re all ears, please tweet us!
Meanwhile, HUGE thanks and special @jeffpulver style hugs to everyone who's participated and contributed to date! You've created a very special, unique and social experience. Thank you!
As Twittamentary introduces the use of Twitter as a tool, not just for journalism but for a wide variety of purposes and Channel News Asia recognises the importance of being online savvy, especially being a regional news agency, Channel News Asia Singapore has decided to host a Community Screening for Twittamentary! Details are as follows:
Location: CNA Anchor room
Date: Wed 30 May
Time: 12-3pm
CAN twitter handle: @cnalatest
If you are an educator or trainer that teaches social media, education or innovation, you can also download the Twittamentary case study for FREE here
PS: YOU too, can help organise a Twittamentary screening for your community, please see guidelines here..
Zoey
Associate Producer, Twittamentary
Twittamentary will be having its first screening in India this coming July! The screening event will be a part of a daylong talk, it will be held in the Birla Auditorium in Jaipur and over 1000 people will be expected to show up to be part of the experience! More details as follows:
Location: Birla Auditorium in Jaipur and more information here.
Date: July 16,2012 for
More information here.
If you are an educator or trainer that teaches social media, education or innovation, you can also download the Twittamentary case study for FREE here
PS: YOU too, can help organise a Twittamentary screening for your community, please see guidelines here..
Zoey
Associate Producer, Twittamentary
I have been working on the Twittamentary project for close to 3 years and this past week has been one of the most exciting. Not only did the film make its debut at the Cinequest Film Festival in the Silicon Valley on Mar 3rd, we also had 11 screenings around the world. Most of these events are community screenings hosted by Twitter'ers who want to share the film with their tribe.
Our next stop is SXSW interactive. We will have screenings on Mar 9 at 2:30pm and Mar 13 at 3pm at the Alcatel-Lucent Trends Lounge, one of the hotspots for SXSWi action. Tickets are running out fast, so grab them here!
I will be speaking on the panel for the mini 140 characters conference on Mar 12 3-6pm.
We will also doing smaller, more spontaneous 'pop-up' screenings on the fringes of SXSWi so watch out for a flash mob on the #twittamentary hashtag.
Feel free to give me a shout via Twitter @sioksiok or the Twittamentary crew @twittamentary. We'd be happy to do a tweetup or even an impromptu screening.
Siok Siok
Director of Twittamentary