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 Yet the dozen or so people who select and
release the tiny, ubiquitous characters globally are far removed
from the glitz of Hollywood, where the Sony Pictures movie,
which begins its global rollout on Friday, was developed.
The humans who toil in obscurity to shape and approve new emojis
are part of the Unicode Consortium, a Silicon Valley-based group
of computer and software corporations and individual volunteers
with backgrounds in technology, encoding and linguistics.
From smiley faces to thumbs up, there are now some 2,600
different emojis worldwide and, according to a July Facebook Inc
report, more than 60 million a day are sent on the No. 1 social
media network alone.
The consortium approves about 50-100 new emojis every year, not
counting the different skin tones for people emoji, after a
rigorous application and review process, said Mark Davis,
president and co-founder of the group.
The latest batch, released in June and reaching phones and other
devices in coming months, include a star-struck emoji, an
exploding head, a group of wizards, mermaids and a woman wearing
a hijab.
"We get submissions from all over the world," Davis said in an
interview. "The hijab emoji came from a Saudi Arabian young
woman who is living in Germany who made a very compelling
proposal. I'm looking forward to the exploding head - I think
that's going to be very popular.
"People need to make a case as to why they think their emoji is
going to be frequently used, how it breaks new ground, how it is
different from other emojis that have already been encoded."
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 Logos, brands and emojis tied to specific
companies are not accepted. "We also don't accept specific
people. We did encode a cowboy but we wouldn't encode John
Wayne," Davis said.
Some concepts just do not translate as emoji.
"Anything that needs a lot of detail to explain or
understand is trouble. It's also hard to make an emoji for something
abstract - like good governance, or a responsible president," Davis
said.
Davis said there are 2,666 emojis worldwide. The LOL emoji with
tears of laughter is the most popular, according to a July Facebook
survey of its 2 billion monthly users, followed by the heart eyes
emoji. Italians and Spaniards favor the kissing emoji.
The consortium played no part in the making of "The Emoji Movie,"
Davis said, because all of its work is open-source, available to
all, and no permissioning was needed.
Nevertheless, he never imagined that the computer-generated
punctuation marks that originated in Japan in the 1980s would become
Hollywood stars.
"That's something that never really crossed our minds," Davis said.
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Richard Chang)
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