Today, everyone has a voice. You can hide behind faceless blogs, tweet under the guise of a pseudonym, air opinions, heckle and praise all from the comfort of your beige IKEA sofa. You no longer need to hide your feelings in the chambers of your mind. You can now whine, moan, smile and share your feelings instantly with millions of people, all with one push of the enter button.

Inevitably this means that true reviews can be cast about anything from products to TV shows, the arts to Film, and that’s something that excites us. Enter the ‘Orange Film Pulse’, building on Orange’s long standing affinity with film through likes of ‘Orange Wednesdays’ and their sponsorship of the BAFTAs. Working with Orange and digital creative agency POKE, we built a system that brings film closer to the people that matter… the film lovers.

The idea is simple. Instead of relying on a review from one person, from one movie blog, magazine or newspaper, Orange Film Pulse groups together all noise that a film causes online – across Twitter, Facebook and review sites. It analyses sentiment too, assessing opinions about films from across the web. Clever eh? Every time there’s a tweet, a review or a Like, Oranges’ finger is firmly on the pulse. All of these ‘real time reviews’ are beautifully calculated in to one easy, digestible score out of 100. The buzz and hype, good and bad, all contribute to the score.

So, now when we are choosing what to go and see at the cinema or vote for during awards season we can see someone in Manchester opine that ‘The Artist was beautiful but would of preferred it with some words’ and see film buff from Hackney candidly admit that 50/50 made him ‘weep like a baby’. These true insights may even be more likely to influence our decision than an overly pontificated blog post.

Orange’s Film Pulse ultimately changes the way we assess a film’s success, never mind the mammoth Box Office sales. We now know the truth from the people who matter most, the audience.

As an added bonus, if you can’t tear yourself away from Facebook, there’s a version of the Film Pulse there too.

Here’s a rather exciting one — on November the 9th, as part of Internet Week Europe (IWE), we’ll be running a large-scale Twitter wall that integrates into a comedy performance by The Boy with Tape on his Face, produced by BBC Comedy. Here’s a clip of The Boy in action.

We’re not sure if this is the first comedy with gig with Twitter featuring as a core part of the performance (rather than a parallel ‘bolt-0n’); it’s almost certainly the first silent comedy featuring this kind of deep Twitter integration. Regardless of the technology, The Boy represents brilliant (award winning!) live physical comedy performance, and as this is an experimental night, tickets are free.

Details and tickets for the event are available via IWE.

Once more we are ably assisted in design and frontend build by our friends at Sennep.

Addendum: the gig was fantastic fun; I was going to do a write-up, but @loooooren has done an amazing job already. We’ll post images and video clips when they’re available.

Update: some set-up photos; more of the performance to follow.

Smesh was both chuffed AND thrilled to provide its Twitter commentary software running on a cinema-screen scale for the Huffington Post’s UK launch event on the 6th of July, 2011.

Held at the Curzon cinema in Millbank Tower, the invite-only event featured a panel debate including Richard Bacon, Arianna Huffington, Alistair Campbell, Celia Walden, Kelly Osbourne, Shami Chakrabarti and Jon Gaunt.

Smesh’s software filled the cinema screen behind the panelists, showing a flow of tweets submitted by the very enthusiastic audience, many of whom competed to get their tweets promoted to the ‘hero’ spot in the centre of the screen.

Highlights of the Twitter wall in action.

Blogger A Modern Mother observed “It was very Question Time confrontational, and sort of entertaining, but the highlight was the cool Twitter stream that was projected on the big screen behind the panel.”

Smesh provided a fully-featured moderation system. With the help of some expert human operators, this shaped the flow of online commentary and thankfully bested some very creative attempts to circumvent profanity requirements[2].

Credits: Flash design and build work by Sennep; creative direction and management by Poke.

[1] http://themediablog.typepad.com/the-media-blog/2011/07/twitterwall-huffington-post.html

[2] Tip o’ the hat to Mr Michael Hunt

The Internet tends towards open standards where its infrastructure is concerned, not least because there are so many different interest groups operating on the net who stand to benefit (though of course there are massive tussles over lower-level technology that place restrictions on usage, such as DRM on video, music and games). There follows some musing on what is happening in this regard in the space of social media and where such activities are leading.

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