Steven Spielberg, Harisson Ford, George Lucas in Seesmic this morning

Pic by sizemore showing the impressive setup in Cannes with Seesmic on the computer, ready to receive the movie stars!

Guardian Journalist Jemima Kiss was one of the Seesmic community members who asked questions to Steven Spielberg, Harisson Ford, George Lucas, Shia Laboeuf, Karen Allen and Cate Blanchett. Here is how Jemima describes the experience (you can see here all Jemima questions and reactions):

"It's a simple enough idea but incredibly exciting; I just posted a few direct questions to Spielberg and Karen Allen (Marian was always one of my favourite heroines) and it's quite a buzz watching them reply directly to your own questions. Seesmic is quite intimate too - like most people, I just use my webcam and was still wearing my pyjamas when I recorded. But hey, pyjamas have a good internet heritage."

I wish we would have given some notice to our community but we did not know obviously until the last minute if it would happen or not and the production team had requested the videos being posted in private first, then unlocked, which would not have allowed us enough interactivity. Some videos were posted in real time, but it was a good surprise and not planned, so no way to tell people to show up. I have to give full (internal Seesmic) credit to my partner Cyrille de Lasteyrie (who describes it in French as his best day in his life!) aka @vinvin who made this happen with the Picture Production Company.

Dan Light (dannyboy on Seesmic and danlight on Twitter) is behind the original idea. Dan Light since the beginning wants to get Seesmic closer to the cinema world and we had already collaborated to promote a movie in Seesmic in January, Untraceable. Since then Daniel Light and Vinvin have worked to make such an event happen and they finally did it.

Mike Atherton Sizemore and Gia Milinovich giagia (thanks!!!), Seesmic members were in Cannes and installed the computers, explained how Seesmic works and worked with the production teams to make the entire event happen as well as the conversation with the celebrities.

The original idea was to have journalists around the World ask private questions to the actors and they would answer in private, as a way to give access to them. Instead of a fully private interview, most of the conversation has been public during about two hours but there were also many private videos which were posted and answered by journalists.

To be perfectly honest, I was even sure it would not happen and promised Cyrille to cut myself a **** if it would happen, now what... I would like to thank all the team behind this amazing project and all the Seesmic community members who helped so much make it happen.

This experience illustrates how video on the net and Seesmic can be a fantastic way to get our community closer to celebrities and ask them questions directly. They would not have accepted live and the asynchroneous Seesmic format worked very well. They took many more questions from journalists that they would have in face to face as Seesmic passwords were distributed to journalists around the world.

What we had agreed with the production team was that the videos would be posted private first, and then after the event (a few hours after) they would become public (request from the team). To our suprise they finally accepted to post videos in real time and in public. This is why we have some videos posted with a few hours delay and others with reactions from the Seesmic community. Most videos were private then made public while others were posted immediately like the Harisson Ford one. If we had not accepted the principle for a first experience to post in private first then unlock them, they would not have done it. They wanted to see how it went and also reserve some exclusive answers to the press. Again, the fact that some were directly posted to Seesmic was a surprise, everything was agreed to be posted with delay, explaining why we could not tell the community in advance and guarantee they could ask them questions in real time. There is a high chance that based on this successful experience now they will accept near real time next time.

Here is the footage if you want to check it out:

STEVEN SPIELBERG

Steven Spielberg who is now seesmic.com/steven you can find all Steven Spielberg videos under his profile, Steven replied to 5 questions: here, here, here, here and here

HARISSON FORD

one of the rare videos posted in real time here and here

GEORGE LUCAS

Here is George Lucas in Seesmic.

More stars who answered questions in Seesmic this morning:

Shia Laboeuf here and here
Karen Allen here and here
Cate Blanchett here, here, here and here