Starting on the 22nd of December we recreated the movie ‘Home Alone’ using 22 different twitter profiles collected into a single twitter list. The @HATProject was an experiment, a test to see if transplanting the full narrative of a film on to a social network would work and to see how people would respond. The video below (not made by us, but by this chap, explains it better than we could ourselves)

There was no money in it obviously, but we thought it’d be an interesting use of twitter, entertaining for the people that followed it and a fun project for Nation and it was. Several people that followed the ‘tweet-movie’ as it played out asked for a blog post explaining how we accomplished it. So here goes nothing…

So at some point last year Tom wrote on a post-it note “All the characters from a movie, talking to each other through Twitter. In real time.” It stayed stuck to the wall sitting amongst a stack of other similarly off the cuff ideas, most of which never go anywhere. Two weeks ago we started wrapping up our paid projects in preparation for the Christmas break and we realised we might have enough time to make the ‘Twitter Movie Narrative Project’ thing… happen.

The project owes a debt to things like Six to Start’s ‘We Tell Stories‘, Tom Davenport’s Peep Show tweets and a nod to our friend Simon Whybray who dabbled with putting the characters from ‘Hackers’ onto twitter. So it’s not a new idea or massively original but we wanted to see how it would play out especially involving other mediums like Twitpic and Youtube.

Home Alone was actually one of the first films we considered; most of us already knew it off by heart, it’s set at Christmas over a definite number of days, has a relatively small amount of central characters and it’s very likable. Starting the project on the 22nd and finishing on Christmas day seemed perfect.

The Tech
So we started looking at the best way of making the @HATProject happen, admittedly we could have just all sat around furiously typing in tweets for 4 days but we figured there must be an easier way of deploying hundreds of tweets across multiple accounts at specific times. The furious typing still happened to an extent as we adjusted, fixed and tried to improve tweets (for example Mitch Murphy was added in at the last moment). We toyed with using a server-side Twitter Bot script, which seemed to work well for one twitter account but not for multiples. In the end we settled on using SocialOomph which can handle multiple twitter accounts, and an infinite number of scheduled tweets.

The Set-Up
The next step was to set up the twitter accounts. We figured out all the characters we needed for the core narrative and some we’d like to include just for kicks like Little Nero’s Pizza and the Illinois Police Department. We wrote short bio’s for each character and tried to add relevant background images to their profile pages. For example @BuzzMcCal‘s profile background came from Googling the issue of Playboy Kevin pulls out of the trunk (which is from July 1989, if you’re interested) followed by a quick image search.

We got a core version of the script by grabbing a subtitles (.srt) file to gave us a base, but on watching the film we realised the file didn’t match up exactly, swear words were deleted and lines were shortened. We wanted it to be as accurate as possible so we went through the text file, watching the movie side-by-side and edited lines, added the @twitternames to denote characters, added in ‘looks’ using emoticons and UTF8 characters like ✈ where it was relevant. We grabbed images we felt might pass for character’s photos to upload to twitpic, and found the unedited version of ‘Angels With Dirty Souls’ which was already on Youtube.

Once the script, images and video were sorted we started adding them into the socialOomph account and figuring out the timeline.

Mistakes & Artistic License
We made one quite big mistake but managed to gloss over it relatively seamlessly, we missed a day out. Technically the film starts on the night of the 21st, the 22nd the McCalisters leave for Paris, the 23rd Kevin runs into Marv and Harry for the first time, the 24th The Wet Bandits return and Kevin defends the house with the conclusion on the morning of the 25th. Due to an oversight (which we’ll put down to our excitement in getting the thing kicked off) we ended up starting on the 22nd and smashing together the 23rd and 24th into one single day.

Another issue arose with timing. Due to the way SocialOomph works it can only publish tweets down to the minute. Obviously there’s a set order to the script and if tweets are published in the wrong order it breaks it. So if you schedule multiple tweets for the same minute they’re published in no discernible order. We resolved this by basically scheduling one tweet per minute, which again doesn’t exactly correlate with the ‘real time’ aspect of the project. For example Kevin and Old man Marley’s conversation in the church is about 5 minutes in length in the film but due to the one-tweet-a-minute restriction we had it play out over an hour. While this is a discrepancy of sorts it did mean that tweets were published at a rate where followers could keep up and hopefully didn’t feel like they were being spammed.

We also took a fair amount of artistic license with certain parts of the script. For example the scene where Kevin talks to Santa Claus we basically made into a one-way conversation to avoid having to create more twitter characters. The same applied to the scene with Kate in airport right before she meets Gus Polinksi for the first time. We also added in a tweet or two to squeeze in stuff we thought was interesting, for example Gus’s Polka paraphernalia which is from an old John Candy sketch we stumbled upon.

The Future
The obvious next step would be to do Home Alone 2: Lost in New York next year, which I’m sure we will, but it might be fun to try other stuff out too if we have the time (Die Hard was suggested by one follower ) and hopefully we’ll see other people try their own versions of movies on twitter. Next year we’d like to figure out a way for more audience interaction, and other ways of bringing in things like Youtube to make the whole thing more engaging.

Due to paid work absorbing a lot of the studios time a majority of the set-up and execution was carried out by Tom… not 22 individuals as claimed by some twitterers, and in total probably took about 2-4 working days to set-up (not including the time we spent watching it happen.. just to make sure it was working and reading the feedback we were getting).

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions leave a comment below or you can drop an email to tom@wearenation.co.uk