2016

This article examines how the story of the making of the independent Spanish feature film The Cosmonaut resembles traditional narrative structures and story elements. It relates the ongoing sharing of the film's production process, and argues that this sharing provided the basis for the film's audience-building. Independent films no longer have to be standalone products that are marketed only after their creation. Related events or products allow the story of the making of a film to transcend the film's temporal boundaries and even the limitations of its medium. The paper concludes that telling the story of a film's making while it happens (a) helps to create communities and audiences, who (b) individually experience the making of a film and (c) view a film merely as an end-product while " watching " takes place over an extended period of time. Such ongoing storytelling allows continuous audience growth that helps the filmmaker to self-distribute.

Besides the Screen

If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections.

2011

Not long ago we were spectators, passive consumers of mass media. Now, on YouTube and blogs and Facebook and Twitter, we are media. And we approach television shows, movies, even advertising as invitations to participate—as experiences to immerse ourselves in at will. What we are witnessing is the emergence of a new form of narrative that’s native to the In­ternet.

In the lead-up to the release of some feature films, fake and fan trailers are created by users and uploaded to YouTube and other Web sites. These trailers demonstrate that users are literate not only in the form of the trailer itself, but also in the Hollywood system and how it markets products to audiences. Circulating in a networked environment online, these texts, which play with the form of the trailer, perform and embody users' and fans' desire to see not just the feature film but also the official trailer itself. I discuss these fake and fan trailers in relation to cinematic anticipation and describe how they navigate both spatial and temporal bounds. Using the architectural concept of the desire line, I argue that spatial frameworks can be usefully employed to consider how users navigate online spaces, media, and concepts through the form of the trailer.

During the recent lead-up to a Secret Cinema event a compelling conflict played out between the creators and the audience in public social media space. Secret Cinema, founded in 2007 delivers live, immersive, participatory cinema-going experiences and is shaping a new and highly profitable event-led-distribution-model. Prometheus made more money as a Secret Cinema event than at the premiere and Grand Budapest Hotel’s No1 box office position was largely attributable to the £1.1m generated by Secret Cinema. These commercial successes mark a notable shift in both the organization’s approach and the type of audiences they are starting to attract. The events, which have previously been marketed in a highly clandestine way via word of mouth and social media where knowing participants are instructed to ‘tell no one’ are now being launched through high-profile press releases. This has inevitably led to tensions between the expectations of an early adopter ‘hipster’ elite and this much broader public. These ‘events’ begin their life online via social media channels weeks before the physical event and it is these online spaces that are the key site of our analysis. Crucially, it is these spaces that both the audience members and organisation have sought to shape, control and influence in conflicting ways.The latest Back to the Future event has spawned an unprecedented extension of the fictional world into these online spaces in which the fictional community of ‘Hill Valley’ has been recreated in meticulous detail across social media and in numerous in-fiction websites. A dichotomy has emerged as Secret Cinema use these spaces to build audience narrative engagement whilst also deploying these same sites to market, sell and instruct their audience in key preparations for the event, as well as issuing requests for audience-generated content to be taken down. A confusing communications strategy which interchanges between fiction and non-fiction registers has manifested in what Phillip’s would refer to as ‘badly-drawn play space’. Through a close textual analysis of the Back to the Future event and its constituent social media streams, this paper illuminates the conflicts, tensions and re-negotiations of control embedded in both the experience and surrounding anti-fan discourses, in which the event and organization is dismantled in public view and we argue that the audience reclaim both the social media spaces and the filmic text of Back to the Future as their own.

Markets, Globalization & Development Review, 2018

His academic work focuses on visual communication and media production, including new media.

Psychology & Marketing, 2009

2015

The turn of the millennium bore witness to a phenomenon: the use of promotion trailers for a variety of products. Both stage theatre and the publishing industries came under the media spotlight for using trailers to promote their wares throwing into sharp contrast the normativity of film trailers. Despite increased academic study of the film trailer, few have considered the trailer outside the industrial context of the film industry. Coupled with this trend in focus, is the tendency within the literature to suggest that the trailer exists as a unique form because they exist in the same medium as the product that promote. Added to this is the tendency to rely on an a priori definition that is not explored fully. By way of intervention with these key issues, this thesis considers the aesthetics and emergence of the trailer in entertainment industries other than film and serves as a counterpoint to the cinema centric imbalance within the study of the trailer. Using a corpus of audiovis...