ON PRODUCING "CRUSHING IT": The Beginning by Cathleen MacDonald

For me, it started appropriately enough with a friend’s post on my Facebook wall feed.

“Check out this chance to be involved with a very exciting story telling project! We need writers, actors, organizers ...”

Organizers? Hmmm. So I emailed Jill Golick, the visionary behind this project.

Back came the reply, “I need a producer.”

At this stage, Jill had assembled some people – via social media, of course – and was trying to catch her breath as she realized she had started a train rolling downhill and it was very quickly gaining speed. Knowing a good idea when I saw one, I signed on to produce CRUSHING IT.

We are now in the week leading up to our air date and the writers are working out their stories, the publicity is circulating, and there are myriad details surrounding the website, blogs, vlogs, Twitter accounts, and how to make it all work together. In the subtext of this project, we are about to challenge some notions about storytelling on social media.

One of those notions states that storytelling is limited because of the brief and fragmented nature of social media communications. In my humble opinion, that is like saying a film is limited by the brief and fragmented nature of a shot. Or a novel is limited by the brief and fragmented nature of a sentence. The trick to making the story flow is to put it all together into a narrative structure. That is what CRUSHING IT will do. The key is to pull it all together. Tweet by tweet, vlog by vlog, the story will unfold.

Now back to work. There’s much to do before we go live on the social media-sphere.