Well, that sort of semi-worked! True, I broke Twitter, probably lost a few hundred followers, was utterly confounded by the whole hashtags business and never properly coordinated proceedings with @badmovieclub, but people seemed to have a good time anyway. (More details here).
Pressing the ‘play’ button at exactly 9.00 proved a MASSIVE rush, for some reason, and by the time my heart rate had slowed to a manageable gallop, we were fifteen minutes into the film. The rest of the evening was insane–my focus was constantly torn between laptop and movie, and I never really worked out a good way of staying abreast of things. (Monitter, for example, was just a blur!). I hadn’t seen the film before and I presumed I’d be able to wing it, but I just couldn’t catch up with all the silliness. Nothing makes sense in ‘The Happening’! Every time I looked up, something preposterous was, well, happening, and by the time I’d thought of what to say about it, typed it, and looked up again, it was a new scene. I still feel like I only half-saw the film. (I want to go back and hear that whole speaking tube/mood ring conversation. Holy cow, that sucked!)
And there’s a Tweet limit! Who knew? I wasted a lot of Tweets by nattering on about the countdown etc and one hour into the film, Twitter shut me out without my knowing it. This was really disorienting because I was sending stuff out and getting no feedback. After a few minutes I realised that I was doing the written equivalent of talking to myself like a crazy person.
I don’t want to sort out another one until I’ve had a bit of a think about how to improve it. The BMC is a nice idea but the implementation was all over the place. That said, I am deliriously happy about the way other people took the idea and ran with it…Kat’s brilliant badmovieclub site, complete with GMT countdown clock (so we could all ‘synchronize our watches’)… Lauriepink’s cheerful logo (and T-shirt!)….the thousands of tweets that everyone contributed….even the ways people chose to enjoy the evening. It truly felt like a happening, in the hippy sense of the word, and I was absolutely chuffed to be part of it.
Ah! By the way, the super secret competition was won by @lauriepink. I was looking for the most creative take on the experience and I could not let her go unrewarded for the logo/t-shirt/cartoon comments. A signed box set of ‘IT Crowd’ 1-3 will be in your hands very soon, Laurie.