Telling Stories With Twitter

As you may or may not know I'm making a film shot entirely on mobile phones called Shoot The Summer. It's about festivals and last week I missed my first weekend in Ibiza working for Radio 1 since 1997 so that I could be at the Cambridge Folk Festival.

As it's a project about mobile I wanted to use my phone to tell my story of the event in a film. To do this I Twittered all weekend. I had to slightly adjust my Twittering style so that it worked in the context of the film, but generally just Twittered whatever I felt like Twittering at the time.

After the weekend I took all my Twitters and dropped them in a word document and activated 'Speech' in my Mac's preferences. This turns text into audio. You get to choose form a selection of voices, you can kill a good 2 minutes of boredom with this. I chose 'Vicki' because she sounds like she's hooked on prescription drugs, though I'd advice you to keep away from Princess - she's dark. I then dropped a load of footage into iMovie, sliced up the twitter audio and pulled an Ulrich Schnauss off my MP3 player (my Nokia N95).

I used the annotation function on Viddler in case you can't understand 'Vicki', though I'm not sure if this adds or detracts from the experience. It's all a little rough around the edges but quite an interesting little experiment. It would've been perfect if Electroplankton was playable on my phone then I could have made my own music like Russell Davies has here.

I had an amazing weekend and never missed the White Island for a moment. I met some wonderful people (including Chris from Aylesbury, Ben and Alex and some cranky gay club kids who did something really funny with a phone) so I hope that comes across in the film

Comments

[Kate]

what a lovely, lovely way to capture a festival! inspiring dude - and it looked blinding fun too...

[Hugh Garry]

I had a ball. I was always conscious of the fact that a female Stephen Hawkins' would be voicing it when I was twittering. I think it turned out quite well.