Bad Movie Club

Goodness me, I have had a busy few days!

My Twitter followers have nearly hit triple figures and I have won a super secret competition! It's been excellent wicked fun, and the product of being in the right place (twitter) at the right time (last week).

Bad Movie Club was born of Graham Linehan's brain (you know Grahan Linehan - he wrote Father Ted, The I.T. Crowd, and co-wrote the first series of Black Books. Fantastic stuff). The simple premise is a lovely one. And simple, too. Also, it is a premise.

Basically, it was a mass sychronised watching of a bad movie with mates. Only, instead of the front room, it was with thousands of twitterers, via the hashtag #badmovieclub. And, oh, it worked perfectly. The screen ran with comments from "WTF?" (this exclamation applicable to most lines of dialogue) to wry, pithy remarks that made me and Sj cackle like crones. There were few - if any - trolling posts, possibly because the phenomenon spread through word of twitter-mouth (or 'fingers', as I like to think of them), trotting gaily along the grapevine of folks who liked the idea of such a thing; I think I saw one or two not entirely positive comments, and they were mainly by people who were bored or just not understanding what the point of the whole thing was, which is no problem at all.

M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening was chosen as the eponymous Bad Film for the night. This pleased me as I'd heard how rubbish it was, but not watched it yet. Just a few weeks ago, Sj begrudgingly tolerated War of The Worlds with me when it was on telly. I can tell you now, War of the Worlds was a piece of art compared to The Happening.

Yes, so, in the lead up to Friday 13th (nice date for its inaugural run), I drew a logo for Bad Film Club. Beyond all my wahhhhldest expectations, it was properly picked up and put on pages and all sorts. Ace!

Seeing as I have my nice new redbubble account, it seemed churlish not to put the thing on a t-shirt as well (no profit being made on it, because it didn't seem right to take money off people for something that was being cobbled together in such a nice friendly way). I like buying things on t-shirts, I thought. Well, it turns out that other people do too! I know - I was also taken by surprise.It has actually been bought, several times. Now I need to buy one, too, so as not to be the only one without.

Come the night of the 13th there was a 9pm & a 12am showing to choose between. We came in at the 12am one, joining some people who'd already done the 9pm & were ready to go all over again. That's stamina, my friend. Phill Jupitus was also present at the 12am screening, having been getting excited with everyone else in the lead up to the event. I should have mentioned Phill Jupitus earlier, because he was also an integral part of the fun. The Bad Movie Club website had a countdown timer on it & instructions one which part of the screen to pause on, ready for the off. When the timer hit zero, the people hit play. Seamless!

We were watching on my mac laptop, so there was a bit of jigging of tweetdeck/movieplayer/photoshop screens to get it all fitting on right. Photoshop was necessary for me to draw through the film as well, because I do like to draw through things. A few minutes into the film, I had a little drawing epiphany as I realised one of the benefits of watching on the mac was the ability to take screen captures of the film & draw on top of them. Fantastic!

Swift & shaggy though my doodles as they were, they got some very nice feedback & and I had great fun drawing them. I thought I'd get more done, but was consistently distracted by the dubious scripting wonders of the film, and (even better) comments on those wonders being made on Twitter.

Then I gave Twitter a rest for a day or two over the weekend, and returned to find that my drawings had earned me Graham Linehan's super secret prize! Awww, shucks. Also lovely comments on his blog. I feel a special girl indeed.

So, not only have I had a good time, lots of lovely drawing praise, and know that several people shall be walking around with my poo on their chest (not many people get away with that sort of thing in this day and age), but I've won a box set, AND logged onto twitter to find a little pile of congrats tweets from nice people I don't even know.

I've uploaded all my pictures from the evening to my flickr, here.

And here is an article on the bad movie club from The Word magazine website. With familiar picture (wahay!)


So, yes, I have had very nice and productive weekend.

Sj got me flowers on valentines day - I have pink tulips - AND lego Indiana Jones for the DS. That's proper romance. I love her lots and lots. I got Sj this book. She's sat in bed next to me reading it now, and read me out a lovely excerpt a few minutes ago about the differences between "the white man and the black man's brain", when it comes to sex (it's a book of excerpts from The Sexologist magazine,from the 30s to the 60s. That particular excerpt was late '30s). Thank heaven I know now.

In other news - today we went to Pets At Home and looked at the fish. The blue starfish are still there, but the great big bright blue sea slug tumour thing has either found itself a home or snuck off in the night to murder old ladies. I miss it, even though I only met it once.