CS50x Movie Night*

The Emoji Story

The Emoji Story, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, explores the complex, conflict-prone, and often hilarious world of the creators, lovers, and arbiters of emoji, our world’s newest pictorial language.

The rapid rise 📈 of emoji (Japanese for “picture character”) is a global 🌍 phenomenon without precedent. Their widespread use and ability to convey complex messages have not only cemented emoji’s place as an emerging digital language 🗣, but prompted difficult questions 🤔 about the creation of a language and digital communication’s fraught ties 😣 to identity and inclusion. In THE EMOJI STORY, Directors Martha Shane and Ian Cheney lead viewers 👀 on a deep dive into the ever evolving world of picture characters, from their humble beginnings in Japan 🇯🇵 to mobile keyboards 📱 the world 🌎 over, and shed fresh light 💡 on the private consortium 👥 that approves new emoji offerings and the individuals fighting ✊ to make the language more representative of its billions of users.

How do you create a global language on the fly? This film charts the evolution of emoji and investigates what they may reveal about our increasingly technological world.

Trailer

About Jennifer 8. Lee

Jennifer 8. Lee is an emoji activist, documentary producer and CEO of Plympton, a literary studio that works on innovative publishing projects. A former New York Times reporter, Jenny produced The Search for General Tso and The Emoji Story, both documentaries which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. She was also an executive producer for The Price, which premiered at SXSW, and an associate producer for Give Me Liberty and the Emmy-winning Chasing Coral, both of which premiered at Sundance. She has co-led an Angel List seed investment fund for Y Combinator and was a Fast Company Most Creative Person in Business in 2018. Jenny is cofounder of Emojination, a group whose motto is “Emoji by the people, for the people,” as well as vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee. She graduated from Harvard with degrees in applied mathematics and economics.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Adobe, for making educational screenings possible!