Such Tweet Sorrow ¶
Such Tweet Sorrow is a project to bring Shakespeare's work to a brand new stage - Twitter.
The story of Romeo and Juliet was played out over a five-week period by actors using Twitter accounts to tell their part in the story, interact with each other, and most differently, interact with the audience too. The audience was encouraged to follow each character on Twitter or use the Such Tweet Sorrow site as a place to watch the drama unfold in real time. Substrakt built and designed the website for Such Tweet Sorrow and designed the brand, logotype and composition of the site to reflect the contrast between the urban setting of the modern work with the original Shakespearian ethos. The branding also needed to reflect the heavy association with the Twitter brand itself.
The Such Tweet Sorrow website was built on the Django platform. This allowed us to fulfill our biggest challenge: building in the functionality that allowed us to pull each Tweet from each character into the site in both chronological order and by scene. We also provided the ability to filter the timeline by character as well as an optional switch to pull the audience responses into the mix. This meant each scene could be viewed in a number of ways for maximum dramatic effect.
Such Tweet Sorrow is part of the Channel 4 network. Substrakt worked in conjunction with digital experts Mudlark and The Royal Shakespeare Company to bring the vision to reality. The website received over 16,500 individual visits in the first 24 hours, with characters such as Juliet amassing over 5,000 followers on Twitter over the five weeks.
