My brain is overloaded. Subtitles tweeting and #monsters #BCM320
— Michelle Kruger (@MummaK50) July 25, 2018
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Live tweeting diffuses the engagement with the film. I’ve missed half of the content!#BCM320
— Michelle Kruger (@MummaK50) July 26, 2018
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So here I am, head down, fingers flying in my first attempt at ‘live tweeting’. How was I doing? Pretty badly-I was thinking, trying to juggle English subtitles to the Japanese 1954 movie Gojira, whilst navigating the keypad on my Iphone tweeting at the same time as coming to grips with the strange soundtrack accompanying the movie and did I mention I was supposed to be making meaningful comments, ‘liking’ and retweeting? There was a brief moment when I contemplated just putting my phone down. Enough with the multi-tasking. Its a millennial skill anyway that I have not yet mastered. The movie was about twenty minutes in and I was feeling lost when I looked at the screen and saw Neo! Wtf was he doing in this movie? And just for a moment I was drawn into remembering The Matrix. This character seemed so out of place, standing still amongst the Japanese crowd, but as I looked more closely I could see this guy had a patch over one eye and some facial scaring which was probably why he was sporting the sunnies.
Anyway this jolt was just enough to spike my interest in what was going on around me. We were ‘live tweeting’ and I was engaging in a communal viewing of Gojira which reminded me of family viewing time when you would gather together at the end of the day to watch a favourite program on television.
Some ‘tweeters’ were more adept at the process than others and were managing to reference information about the making of the soundtrack, the political environment in Japan at the time the movie was made and other relevant and interesting facts including images.
“Godzilla’s thunderous footsteps were made by beating a kettle drum with a knotted rope.” Also, the special effects were achieved with a stuntman donning a rubber suit crushing a miniature set of Tokyo. https://t.co/P6KxeXSkEU #BCM320 pic.twitter.com/MTeEYi0COI
— Mia (Minh-Anh) Do (@thespecsofMia) July 26, 2018
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I tweeted about my Gojira-esque slippers that I had bought from Kmart.
The process of live tweeting affected the way in which I was absorbing the movie and it was almost like I was watching a series of self contained shorts. Horror scene cut to village scene cut to romantic moment cut to monster etc etc. As I was frantically trying to make sense of these staccato moments, feverishly entering letters on my tiny phone, I became intensely aware of the soundtrack which consisted of a cacophony of bizarre and unnatural manmade clamour. There was a lot of screaming. There was also the roar of the monster which sounded almost metallic intertwined with the haunting militaristic theme music, the kind which stays with you forever (someone tweeted that it had a similar memorable effect as the Jaws soundtrack). The imagery was as powerful as the sound. At one point there was an iconic scene depicting a burning city, a menacing sky and the distant silhouette of Gojira, completely absorbed by its killing spree.
Overall, the Gojira experience, which included the movie itself and the ‘live tweeting’ task, left me with a long lasting and thought provoking impression of Japan and its culture and the impact that nuclear weaponry had upon Japan as a nation. The black and white format intensified the dramatic experience. I found myself being transported back to the early 60’s when I watched B&W TV as a kid. Growing up, my knowledge of Japanese history was limited but everyone knew that atomic bombs were bad. Watching Gojira gave me a sense of what it must have been like to experience it first hand and the horror it represented to the Japanese people who lived through it.
The jury is still out on how I rate the experience of ‘live tweeting’. Its almost like an out of body experience where you are witnessing the film through global eyes. Perhaps I will grow to love it as I have with most other things digital that I have experienced.
Tell it like it is. Thanks Chris! https://t.co/nP5yWX0QPI
— Michelle Kruger (@MummaK50) July 27, 2018
Welcome to the Machine 
Reblogged this on Digital Asia.
Your live-tweeting experience was a pretty interesting perspective to hear and I gotta agree especially with your point of looking up from tweeting and finding yourself in a completely different scene very confused, making up the empty spaces of story that you lost. Hopefully you are getting use to live-tweeting now because I am curious to see how much more you can interpret next time. You said some interesting stuff, especially about the end but not so much for overall besides the fraud Neo cameo.