On the road with Twitter

When I first started working on Twittamentary, a crowd-sourced documentary about Twitter in 2009, I wasn’t sure if I could even get the film made. Sure, I knew how to make a film, the conventional way. But I had only a vague idea of what “crowd-sourcing” a film entailed. I didn’t know if people on Twitter would respond to my call to action.

The idea of crowd-sourcing a film about Twitter came to me because of my own experience as a tweeter. I understood that what made Twitter powerful was not the tweets themselves but the open community that discovers and gets to know one another by tweeting. I could think of no better way of showing how this web of connections works than to leverage those same connections to make a film about Twitter itself. The very making of the film becomes the meta-narrative of how Twitter has transformed our world.

My quest to make a film about Twitter, in collaboration with the people on Twitter, brought me on a road trip across the United States with a collaborator I had met via social media. People tweeted us story leads in real time as we travelled from city to city, came out to help us when we were stranded in unfamiliar places and served as our fixers and producers.

Crowd-sourcing had an impact not only on how the film was made but also on what stories got told. My favourite stories were the ones that came out of left field, through a tweet or a phone call; the unexpected encounters that ended up being the heart of the film.

I stumbled on the story of homeless tweeter Anne Marie Walsh @padschicago because homeless advocate Mark Horvath @hardlynormal called us on the phone, telling us we had to film her story while we were in Chicago. It may seem unconventional to make a homeless woman the protagonist of a Twitter documentary, but Anne’s story is not so much about homelessness as it is about someone’s quest for a new identity and community via Twitter. Her search for a new and better “self” on social media is a universal theme with which we can all identify.

My Twitter odyssey continued in the post-production phase as tweeters across three continents organized more than 40 beta screenings of the film. They shaped the final cut of the film by giving feedback in person, as well as via Twitter. Each screening features a dual-screen projection, with a live Twitter wall alongside the movie projection to encourage real-time interaction and feedback.

What I learnt through this process is that the difference between conventional film-making and open web collaboration lies in the building of a dynamic, real-time community. As digital tools empower everyone to create and share, the audience is no longer locked into the passive role of the recipient or consumer. Instead they can participate in the creation process, in ways both great and small. They may even help take the project in a way the filmmaker never anticipated.

In tribute to the people on Twitter who helped me make Twittamentary, we will be presenting a special Beta Zone session at the Summer Davos. Tweets gathered from our screenings around the world will be projected alongside the movie itself.

How apt, as this may be one of those rare cases where the Twitter conversation around a film is an essential part of the story itself.

Author: Tan Siok Siok is a film-maker, who is participating in the session The Truth About Twitter at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian, China.

Image: Men are seen looking at their mobile phones in front of a Twitter logo REUTERS/Dado Ruvic.