On Friday 13th, sometime before 9PM, Graham Linehan had had a great idea he called Bad Movie Club. I heard about it from Phil Jupitus' twitterings. I'd hastily followed him before I realised it was THE Phil Jupitus, dur!
The idea was brilliant-ish and was for everyone to get hold of and watch a really bad movie called The Happening (trust me it is really bloody awful) and after all hitting PLAY at 9PM everyone would be free to use the "#badmovieclub" hashtag whilst twittering.
The experience was hilarious. Some people had clicked play a few seconds early and were spoiling the film for the rest of us. I spent most of my time reading the comments rather than watching the film and giggling at the tweets which were automatically refreshed if you used TweetDeck to automatically show anything (see below).
The actual experience of course could have been better, there were far too many people tweeting at once, it was almost impossible to keep up with the fire-hose flood of tweets, some of which weren't very good - such as the endless "EXPOSITION!" heckling but despite all that I loved it. It was like going to see a film in a cinema where the audience are guaranteed to be rowdy, which for most films would be your worst nightmare but for some films, this approach is perfect.
I know it's as corny as bees but I felt like I was part of something, which for a medium which is becoming increasingly fragmentary as people simply don't get together to watch anything.
But the really important thing, for me, was that Graham has shown us with a simple experiment a perfect prototype for what video content such as films, football matches and even education could be. This is the future and it's a future where the asynchronous, such as DVDs and YouTube videos and films you've downloaded can be re-synchronized with the added goodness of the juice of real people.
Imagine... what it would be like to watch a really bad film, only instead of having to use a different application the tweets appeared nicely overlaying the film - that'd be sexy.
Now imagine if you could limit the tweets to just people you follow, that would cut out a lot of noise. But it may cut out too much noise, so let's maybe let through tweets from people outside our immediate circle of friends that have been thumbs-upped by their friends, this might just let the funny ones through. Or maybe, what if you received tweets at a certain rate, so that if your friends weren't commenting on the film then "outsiders" tweets would bleed through.
Now imagine you were late to the party and were watching the film on Saturday, that needn't matter because you could still see the film with tweets because they have all been time-synch-ed with the film. So, not only will it feel like a synchronous experience, you can add to it in a way that the person hopelessly late to the party on Sunday can still enjoy (and contribute to).
Now imagine, that someone writes a search engine that searches for "bees" or "cheese and crackers" that simply assumes what people are tweeting about whilst watching a film (no matter how you do it) has something to do with what's going on onscreen (even if it's just a piss-take). Then, we have a means of gathering really messy meta data about a film and become able to search it (or link to it) textually for the first time. There would be groups of film buffs collaboratively adding the dialogue to "the classics" just as people pitch in and help with mapping streets for the open source community in no time. Film courses would create a meta-layer where they offer their commentary on a film "just look at the camera angles used here" and you can watch it and here's the good bit, even if you don't have access to the movie but do have access to tools like BitTorrent.
Imagine a group of comedians being assembled to "watch and comment" on a film. I'd pay to be able to switch on the layer that made the film funnier. Imagine a pair of glasses that did that for a romantic film you really didn't want to watch, I don't know many blokes who wouldn't pay for a pair of those... with earplugs.
The next step this experiment needs to take is to create a software player that can play stuff from wherever (YouTube, DVD, hard disk, stream) and that hooks into twitter. It's not hard to do and then you'd be able to layer comments on a film, and then choose to filter those comments to just friends or just film buffs or even "selected hilarious tweets" from Graham himself.
The important bit is that the movie industry don't need to know about it, we don't need their permission or copyright to share time-coded knob jokes and if people are watching the film in a cinema, playing a legal DVD or an illegal download doesn't make any difference. All that matters is the people, the timing and the quality of the gag.
So there, The Happening was awful, great fun and massively important - you should've been there - it was the future of film ... ish.
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