Tim Burton's Cadavre Exquis - Crowdsourcing Transmedia Story

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Published on Tuesday, 23 November 2010 14:43

Tim Burton is inviting the public to join in a storytelling adventure involving Burton’s ‘Stainboy’... in helping to build a story by contributing a line of their own based on the last storied Tweet.

Conceived to generate buzz for the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), the scripting experiment runs from November 22nd through December 6th, 2010 . TIFF is honouring Burton's work by running Tim Burton, the first MoMA exhibition to be presented in Toronto in over 20 years. Contributors are invited to Tweet as often as they'd like with the best Tweets of each day will be selected to build the story. The story can be followed as it unfolds on the project's website.

It's not the first media project to be Twitter-driven... following on the surprise success of its Twitter-inspired comedy Shit My Dad Says", CBS has made a script deal for "Shh … Don't Tell Steve," based on a Twitter feed by the same name which will be produced by Ashton Kutcher, and his producing partner Evan Goldberg. Transmedia Light?

Cadavar Exquis or "Exquisite Corpse" is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun") or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed. The technique was invented by Surrealists and is similar to an old parlour game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Surrealism principal founder André Breton reported that it started in fun, but became playful and eventually enriching. Breton said the diversion started about 1925, but Pierre Reverdy wrote that it started much earlier, at least before 1918.

• This story telling experiment runs November 22 - December 6, 2010
• Tweet as often as you like
• The best Tweets of the day will be selected to build the story
• All selected Tweets can be viewed under "All Submissions"
• Follow the story as it unfolds on the "Read the Story" tab
• Inappropriate submissions will be blocked