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'The first feature film on Twitter.'

To raise awareness for The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. @flipper01, @tomkilehartshorn & I had an idea that went a bit like this: “Hey, let’s run Back to the Future live on Twitter”. 2 years of prep later and voila - www.theHillValleyProject.com.

We registered 50 separate Twitter accounts for all the characters (and some of the objects) in the film and starting on October 25th at 7.45 am (the exact time and date the film starts), they all started telling the story of the film in real-time. It takes 6 days for the whole story to play out.

There’s lots of times in the story you just have to hit, like the time the car first time travels, or the lightning strike on the clock tower, so we had those as starting points. The rest we worked out by events like the school day starting, or looking at the position of the sun and working that out for California at that time of year. (I know what you're thinking... Nerd Alert!)

We then had to re-write the entire film in tweets, adding in any screenshots that looked like they could be Twitpics, links to YouTube videos for the soundtrack and just making the tweets sound like tweets with the odd #LOL, ;-), and the occasional #FML. We ended up with 1211 tweets, all handwritten and all cross-referenced each other with @replies. We gave each account it’s own biography, background image, profile image and cover image.

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