A Twitter Tale
Alison MillerIssue date: 11/12/09 Section: News
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Instead, film professor Brad Gyori's students are busy tweeting - a screenplay, that is.
While there is still time set aside to discuss required readings, a majority of the class is spent collaborating on a juicy murder-mystery story that takes place on Twitter.
The actual screenplay follows the story of several high school students' conversations on Twitter following the death of a fellow classmate. But when Kelly, the dead girl, starts communicating to them through Twitter, their whole world gets rocked. The students want to know who is tweeting from her account, and a lot of questions arise about how she died and if she was murdered. Everyone becomes a suspect, and none of the characters know who to trust.
The idea to write a screenplay using Twitter originally came from Gyori's wife, who noticed some people writing works of fiction on the site. However, it mostly consisted of haiku-like poems or the re-broadcasting of existing narratives, Gyori said.
Looking at what fiction had already been written on Twitter, Gyori then came up with the idea to create an original narrative using the social media site.
"It hadn't been done, and it was kind of an interesting challenge," Gyori said.
"It also kind of speaks to what we are doing in class, which is figuring out how to do a three-act structure, how you tell a story, and how you break down the story and the different character arcs," Gyori said.
LIVE ACTION
When the plan was proposed to the class, the students immediately accepted. The original syllabus was scrapped and students began coming up with potential story ideas that would work using Twitter. Ultimately, the class decided to write a teen-drama about a group of high school students.
"The restrictions of Twitter kind of killed a couple of the ideas because it wouldn't work with the medium and you can't include a narrator very easily," said Patrick Carroll, a student in the class.
The class did discuss several other options to write the screenplay, including Facebook. But, because of the age of the characters in the story, Twitter seemed to make sense.
"They would really be Twittering," said Allison Miller, a student in the class.
Gyori's class is broken up into teams, and each group is responsible for writing dialogue for one day of the week. Then, the class meets as a whole every Monday and Wednesday to discuss the overall story and read what people have written for the upcoming week.
"We hash out different things like 'oh this could work a different way' or 'someone needs to say this here,' 'bring this conflict up,' 'maybe this beat should come up later,' and different kinds of elements like that," said class member David Kurihara.
The script each week is then edited by a few classmates before it is posted on Twitter. Since the story is anchored in contemporary reality, a time delay service is used on the site to make sure the tweets are posted at the right time of day that makes sense to the story.
While the class came up with a basic outline for the entire story at the beginning of the project, with so many people working on a single screenplay, the story sometimes flows in unexpected directions.
"We have a character arc and we know vaguely what's going on each week, but when you hand over an entire day to two people, over the course of seven days, a bunch of stuff you just never expect to see happen, happens," Carroll said.
CHASING REALITY
But, the question that all the students have to constantly think about is, why is this on Twitter?
"The one thing that has really helped is this dead girl tweeting. The only way you can communicate with her is on Twitter," Carroll said.
To make the story feel more realistic and to tackle some of the hurdles of writing a screenplay using Twitter, the students have started to add multimedia elements to the story. For example, a link to a fake news article was posted about Kelly's death, and even a cell phone video of a fight that one of the characters witnessed was created and posted on the site.
"We need everything we can get to show a little more personality [of the characters]," said Trevor Spinks, a student in the class.
Miller is also in the process of creating individual Twitter profiles for each character to help get a better sense of their individual traits.
While there is an end in sight for the story (when the semester finishes), no one is quite certain what will happen to the Twitter page afterwards.
"If enough people really get involved in it, I mean why not, they may want to continue on with it," Miller said.
"It mostly serves as a model to another group if they want to do something very similar," Carroll contends. "For the rest of us, it ends up on a resume."
But one thing is for certain. As far away as Twitter may be from a typical teacher's teaching methods, Gyori's innovative project seems to appeal to his students.
Normally, in this type of class, students would be writing and editing 15 to 20 pages of screenplay, Carroll said.
"It's these big projects that are spaced out over time, and in that amount of time we cover four or five chapters of this textbook, but you never get a chance to apply them. Whereas when you are working on an actual screenplay every single week, whatever you have pulled from the textbook you can apply immediately," Carroll said.
"In my last screenwriting class, we did a lot of structure and learned forms, and we did it from a theory standpoint, whereas here we are doing the reading stuff, we still have our textbook, still learning the concept. But we can actually apply these things with each other as a class," Spinks said.
Gyori will be teaching this class next semester at ASU, but there are no guarantees that he will repeat the same project.
"I might try something different. I will see what the class wants to do," Gyori said
The class's screenwriting story can be followed at twitter.com/Kelly_4ever, and a summary of each week of the story can be found at followkelly4ever.blogspot.com.
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