Thoughts on Crushing It!
Performing the Crushing It! Twitter shows married some of the best things about both writing and acting: the enjoyment of writing when you know just enough information about where you’re going with the story, and the excitement of live improvisation when you’re ready to inhabit a character. I seem to be using the superlative “fun” a lot these days, but that’s exactly what it was. We even had our own backstage, a Skype chat window with questions and comments flying back and forth before, during, and after each session. On Thursday evening, we got together in the same physical space to do the show, setting up a row of laptops by the pool tables on the second floor of the Rivoli, where we could literally run around and talk to each other, instead of just virtually.
The Rivoli is also where we held our panel discussion on Crushing It! on Thursday afternoon. In addition to sharing the practical considerations in putting the project together, we also discussed topics that went beyond Crushing It!, like the potential applications of social media storytelling. Our moderator, Christopher Bolton, suggested that while it isn’t the kind of thing that can be tied up with a bow and sold, it could be an online extension for an existing property’s multiplatform marketing strategy (as such a thing was for the online game promoting the recent Sherlock Holmes movie, for which one of our writers, Sophie Sampson, tweeted as the character of Sherlock Holmes’ landlady). On a grander scale, it could also be something akin to Second Life or World of Warcraft, where being able to sign up as a character and participate in the fictional world is the attraction.
To answer the question about why we should tell stories in this manner at all, for me personally, there are many reasons, all of which were reinforced by this experience. The immediacy of it is a big one. The interactivity that can take place with other writers, and directly with the audience. The writing challenge of driving story, establishing character, and being entertaining with every 140-character tweet. The freedom and ease with which other elements can be incorporated into the experience. In our case, that included videos, blogs, comment threads, and the odd photo.
A couple of pretty neat accomplishments for Crushing It!: #cistory (the Crushing It! hashtag) made it to #1 on trending topics in Canada twice, once on our first day, once on our last. And we were able to secure a Special Guest Appearance by Gary Vaynerchuk on our Friday afternoon show, in which he sent a few tweets to Scott Albert’s character Dave (see above), giving him that extra push to go after his dream woman.
Visit the Crushing It! website to read all about the project and the people behind it, and Jill Golick’s site for all of her latest happenings. Thanks to Jill and all the other members of the team for making this whole experience such a great one.