Posted by If you thought the notion of snackable content was crazy, this should make you nuts…
Arjun Basu is one of the more interesting people on Twitter (full disclosure: by day, Basu works at Spafax which owns enRoute Magazine and he has become a personal friend). Each and every day, he creates a "twister" – a 140 character short story on Twitter. They are funny, smart and awkward.
Here’s a sample:
"They tolerated the ennui of their jobs, bought off by promises of spectacular riches sometime in the future. At retirement, they bought guns."
Arjun has nearly 8500 followers of his Twisters and one of those followers, James Cooper, made a minute-long film based on the above tweet. The film was recently named a finalist in the Filminute competition (voting is still open).
You can view (and vote) for the short film here: Life – James Cooper.
It’s interesting to think that a tweet on Twitter inspired a one-minute film. It makes you wonder if the next step is that a tweet inspires a full-length Hollywood blockbuster.
(side bar: Arjun also tweets about media and life here: @spafax_arjun)
Never another podcast episode or article 
Hey Mitch. Just two things to clarify. James doesn’t follow me on Twitter. We were hooked up. By a matchmaker of sorts. And for those interested in learning more about James, he has a website: http://www.echosystem.ca/
Whoops! Thanks for the clarification. I guess my years in Journalism have not paid off 😉
I came. I saw. I laughed. I voted. Thanks and good luck. Hope you win!
If a story an be told in 140 characters, wouldn’t a feature-length film made from it be, by definition, a bloated mess?
I, for one, would never want to see a movie made from Hemingway’s infamous six-word short story (“For sale: baby shoes, never used. “). The power of that story comes from what each reader brings to it.
Some stories only need 140 characters (or in Hemingway’s case, 33). I hope we can leave them at that.
If a tweet were ever to ‘inspire’ a full length feature film, the writer would have to pay the original tweeter for the intellectual property. Therefore, it follows that at some point, someone will sue someone else, on the premise that their tweet was used without permission. Will be interesting to see the ramifications of that…. I wonder if there’s something obscure buried in the Twitter TOS about who owns your tweets?
Hilarious. Great idea. Thanks for sharing.
After watching GI Joe, Im pretty sure the script was pretty much 140 characters.