THE FIRST MOVIE ROLLED OUT OVER TWITTER
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I was aware that this hadn't been done before.
The more I used Twitter the more I was convinced this form of visual storytelling hadn't been tapped into. Sure people had tweeted out Shakespeare, but no one had tried a transmedia story over Twitter.
With this knowledge and with my desire to see my ideas come to life, I knew I could create a way to produce a story in a cost effective way and get it out to a decent sized audience.
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Then I took a walk through Croham Hurst, a woodlands in South Croydon and Karen Barley was born.
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I came up with a concept and created a proposal to share with the people I wanted to be involved.
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Two people became instrumental in making this possible. Danny Tate of Jellyfish Media provided his technical and creative skills. His calm and reliable professionalism was exactly what I needed considering this would be my first steps into the world of guerilla filmmaking, and his judgement and creativity with the trailer and behind the scenes footage was spot on.
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With great feedback from multimedia writer and filmmaker Tim Clague, I knew I had a unique story to tell.
Tim gave me advice on how to build tension for this kind of project and audience, and what I should be thinking about in terms of marketing. When I sent him the final script (full of 120 character tweets), he came back with even more enthusiasm, and gave me support all the way. So with a new found confidence, I locked the script and began the search for Karen Barley and Darren Jessop.
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The calibre of actors who auditioned were fantastic! I felt emotional that people were interested in my idea and how they tried their hardest to impress. It was very humbling. This dedication at such an early stage made it very hard to cast, but also gave me confidence in what I was trying to do.
After a casting session with the horror aficionado Mark Vella of Venom Pictures, we came up with our two lead actors - the fantastically talented, Gemma Giddings and Benjamin O'Mahony. Their challenge was to behave as if being filmed all the time by one another and to also film themselves for the footage. They had to convince the audience that they're doing this for Twitter. They did an awesome job!
They have graciously let me show their auditions below.