Beyond the Screen: Emerging Cinema and Engaging Audiences 9781623566371, 9781628929966, 9781623568238

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Beyond the Screen

Beyond the Screen Emerging Cinema and Engaging Audiences Sarah Atkinson

N E W YOR K • LON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Sarah Atkinson 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Atkinson, Sarah. Beyond the screen : emerging cinema and engaging audiences / Sarah Atkinson. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62356-637-1 (hardback : alk. paper)  1.  Motion picture industry-Technological innovations. 2.  Motion pictures--History--21st century. 3.  Motion pictures--Distribution--Social aspects. 4.  Motion picture audiences. 5.  Digital media--Influence. 6.  Convergence (Telecommunication)  I. Title. PN1995.9.T43.A85 2014 384'.809730905--dc23 2013046892 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6637-1 ePub: 978-1-6235-6924-2 ePDF: 978-1-6235-6823-8 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

To Mum, Dad, Layla, Maisie and Martha.

Contents List of Figures Preface Acknowledgements 1 Introduction 2 Extending Cinema 3 Mobile Cinema 4 Socially Layered Cinema 5 The Ethics of Emerging Cinema 6 The Business of Emerging Cinema 7 The Grammar of Emerging Cinema 8 Epilogue Filmography, Appography, Gameography, Platformography Bibliography Index

viii xi xiii 1 15 61 101 141 171 207 225 236 242 265

List of Figures 1.1 Identification of the narrative level classifications used within this book 2.1a  On_Line, 2002 2.1b  On_Line, 2002 2.2  Department of Human Management, Copyright © 2013 Mirada LLC. All rights reserved. 2.3  Department of Human Management, Copyright © 2013 Mirada LLC. All rights reserved. 2.4 requiemforadream.com created by Hi-ReS! 2000, Website to promote the film Requiem for a Dream by Darren Aronofsky 2.5  Cloverfield, 2007. The Slusho! T-shirt deliberately framed on a number of occasions 2.6  Cloverfield, 2007. Still taken from video blog 11, Jamie’s last post and still taken from party scene, adjacent 2.7  Cloverfield, 2007, Satellite fragment falls into the sea 2.8  Pandemic 1.0, 2011 3.1 The iPhone mounted onset of Paranmanjang, 2011, Image courtesy of Moho Film 3.2 Images courtesy of ‘OLIVE’, 2013. Photos by Golnaz Shahmirzadi 3.3 Film stills from Rage, 2009, © Adventure Pictures Ltd 3.4 Sally Potter on set of Rage, 2009, © Adventure Pictures Ltd 3.5 The Silver Goat App, 2012 with photos by Martin Hampton 3.6  The Silver Goat premiere 2012, Photo by Sam Pearce 3.7 The Haunting Melissa home screen interface. © Hooked Digital Media 2013 3.8  Haunting Melissa, © Hooked Digital Media 2013 3.9  The Craftsman, Portal Entertainment, 2013 3.10  MirrorWorld in production, Copyright © 2013 Mirada LLC. All rights reserved. 3.11 The MirrorWorld app interface, Copyright © 2013 Mirada LLC. All rights reserved.

7 20 20 21 22 23 40 40 41 45 62 63 65 65 66 67 68 70 72 73 74

List of Figures

3.12  MirrorWorld’s gyroscopic-routing feature, Copyright © 2013 Mirada LLC. All rights reserved. 3.13  APP, 2013, Photo and Copyright by Raymond van der Bas 3.14 Printed with permission of RIDES.tv 3.15 Printed with permission of RIDES.tv 4.1  The Power Inside, the third in the Social Film series © Intel/Toshiba 4.2 The data landscape in Cloud Chamber, Cloud Chamber/Investigate North, 2013 4.3 The data landscape in Cloud Chamber, Cloud Chamber/Investigate North, 2013 5.1  Forgotten Silver, 1995 5.2 Collapsus.com, produced by: Submarinechannel.com, directed by: Tommy Pallotta, copyright: Submarine Channel 5.3 In the authentic fiction World Without Oil, 2007, a global oil shortage occurs. Image from Pachinko_chance, a character played by Krystyn Wells. Courtesy of Ken Eklund and World Without Oil 5.4 In the fiction of Future Coast, 2014, voicemails made in possible futures take a physical form, and appear in our time as chronofacts. Images courtesy of Ken Eklund and Future Coast 5.5 Lizzie (Lizabeth) Davis interacts with attendees of the Future of Learning Summit at Institute for the Future. Lizzie, one of the Zed Omega characters of the authentic fiction Ed Zed Omega, was played live by teen Lauren Lindquist. Image courtesy of Ed Zed Omega 6.1 Examples in which iconography from The Cosmonaut’s diegesis translated into merchandising opportunities 6.2  The Cosmonaut, 2013 6.3 Art parallels life in The Cosmonaut. Photo by Daniel Torrelló. 6.4  The 7 Transmedia Families game, courtesy of @ TransmediaReady http://www.transmediaready.com 6.5 Polly Courtney’s Feral Youth in Conducttr, © Transmedia Storyteller Ltd 6.6  Conducttr outputs interactive multiplatform stories in the format of a traditional movie script, © Transmedia Storyteller Ltd

ix

76 88 93 94 122 125 129 145 156

158

160

163 185 186 187 191 196

197

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List of Figures

7.1 An inciting diegetic portal, Heroes, 2007 7.2 An inciting diegetic portal in The Umbrella Sword, Galahad, photo courtesy of The Shadow Gang 8.1 Heart rate & GSR finger sensors (Filmtrip/Sensum) 8.2 Story option paths (Filmtrip/Sensum) 8.3 Audience responses on screen (Filmtrip/Sensum) 8.4 POD was inspired by Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, 1999

213 214 229 229 230 232

Preface From the ages of about three and five, I would often hear my daughters ask a question of one another to clarify the current context of their play. If one was unsure of the status of a statement the other had made, they would ask ‘do you mean in real real life?’ It was as if one real just wasn’t enough to clearly distinguish the realities of their everyday existence from that of fiction. It is the second real that denotes their actual lived experience – the first utterance appears to imply the existence of a liminal space between the two, a place of ‘not quite’ real existence. This charming linguistic negotiation not only reveals a fascinating insight into how play, reality and fiction are imbricated within early childhood storytelling literacies, it also frames the space to which this book seeks to illuminate through the prism of the current cinematic moment. It is this liminal space denoted by the primary real in real real life that is indicative of a persistent overlay of fiction which is perpetually accessible through digitally networked communications devices. It is within this space where compelling new cinematic forms are starting to emerge and where complex audience encounters are negotiated. My doctoral thesis completed in 2009 was concerned with the study of interactive cinema. This earlier work is the key point of departure for the development of this current book. When I look back through the pages of the thesis – relatively recently completed – it is striking to see just how dated some of those case study materials appear. Images of computer interfaces of timesgone-by which were once at the vanguard of developments and described as cutting-edge, groundbreaking and pioneering now take their place within a historical genealogy of interactive cinema, as do the associated theories, ideas and conceptual frameworks. This does not undermine the value of such research; rather it highlights the speed of technological advances and the fast pace of social and cultural adoption and adaptation of these new forms. It underwrites the need to remain cognizant in the impacts of emerging cinema and also illuminates the importance for revealing the absorption of new sociotechnical practices within cinematic production and consumption.

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Written in 2010, my initial proposal for this monograph made frequent reference to the terms ‘multiplatform’ and ‘transmedia’. Over the past three years, we have been witnessing platform and medium dissolution, rendering these terms palimpsestic and transistory. These terms cease to have either the descriptive or analytical purchase they had just a few years ago. The launch of the iPad in April 2010 has had a profound impact; touch screen tablet computers now conflate ‘platforms’ and mix mediums and networked communication modalities into one screen. Television, film, text, books, telephone, GPS, the internet and games can now all be accessed simultaneously via one device. We are now entering what could be considered a post-transmedia era, an epoch that is characterized by dematerialization, transience and ephemerality where timebased, experience-led cinema proliferates. Emerging cinematic phenomena exacerbate the need for sustained critical engagement, since much of the temporally based projects dissipate into the digital ether so quickly after their inception; their legacy resonates in secondary and subjective online media, but the original materials and documentation can rarely be accessed by the many academics, students and media producers who are keen to source them. The challenges of attempting to capture an ever-shifting, mutating and anamorphous object of study in media res at the incisive edge of the field is an enervating endeavour. This book has been written in tandem with seismic shifts in the field in order to capture and expound the first, pioneering forms of an overwhelming precipitation. The various interviews that I have undertaken with the creators, industry specialists and thought leaders all portend the imminent expediting of emerging cinematic forms. In the coming months and years, as manifold projects emerge from their beta phases, readers will be struck by all the new cases studies, examples and innovations that have not been covered, as they will no doubt emerge as this book goes to print. The significant changes in this field which have occurred in a very short space of time are indicative of a need to continue to pursue this endeavour of mapping, historicizing and critically engaging with these forms in this epoch of hyperobsolescence. This book was completed in October 2013 and presents an assimilation and synthesis of the work up to that date in the emerging cinema field. Further studies will be required in the near future to avoid potential lacunae, and one can take this work as a point of departure as heretofore unimagined, unanticipated practices and techniques emerge.

Acknowledgements This book just wouldn’t have been possible without the generous help, support and time of numerous wonderful people and organizations. In no particular order, my sincere thanks and gratitude go to: The University of Brighton for funding the sabbatical which enabled the research for this book and to the Faculty of Arts Centre for Research & Development for supporting me in my original sabbatical application. Dear friends and colleagues too numerous to mention within the School of Art, Design & Media at the University of Brighton for their kind words and gestures of encouragement throughout the writing of this book. In particular to Rebecca Bramall, Julie Doyle and Olu Jenzen for their support and feedback in my initial book proposal, and for reviewing some of the chapters. My other lovely chapter reviewers: Kathleen Griffin, Irmi Karl and Helen Kennedy. My 2012/13 MA students for opening my eyes to numerous projects, films and games: Alex Bielski, Ashley Dobson, Max Jacobson-Gonzalez, Zala Jamnik, Tanya Neuss and Hanyan Shi. All of those who have allowed me to interview them and are quoted herein: Bobby Boermans (APP), Helen De Michiel, Neal Edelstein (Hooked Digital Media), Ken Eklund, Christian Fonnesbech (Investigate North – Cloud Chamber), Cornelia Funke (MirrorWorld), Billie Goldman (Intel), Caroline Gomez and Andy Merkin (Mirada), Corey Jay Lenhart, founder of the We’re trying to save Christina Perasso Facebook Group, Joshua Lamb (Galahad), Julian McCrea (Portal Entertainment), Gawain Morrison (Sensum – Film Trip), Alison Norrington, Robert Pratten (Conducttr), Carola Rodriguez and Nicolás Alcalá (Riot Cinema Collective – The Cosmonaut), Jim Stewartson (RIDES.tv), Lina Srivastava, Paula Vaccaro (Pinball – The Silver Goat) and Lance Weiler. In addition to those listed above who have also kindly given me permission to use their images, also to: Henry Arlander and Molly Parsley (Pereira & O’Dell); Alexandra Jugovic (HiReS!); Hooman Khalili and Patrick Gilles (Olive); Moho Film, Stella Corradi, Clare Holden Mike Manzi, Sally Potter and Christopher Sheppard (Adventure Pictures); YanivWolf (Submarine –

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Collapsus) and TransmediaReady – all of whom have kindly supplied and given me permission to use their images. All those who have suggested and shared possible people and avenues of exploration, including Vicki Callahan, Carolyn Handler-Miller and Fabrice Lyczba. In particular to Vicki for generously opening up her contacts book and initiating so many of the introductions to the people who I have interviewed. All members of the We’re trying to save Christina Perasso Facebook Group, for contributing to the research and enriching the contents and insight of Chapter 4. The TMDB online team for helping to sharpen and fine-tune my thinking in our many transatlantic video conferences: Jeff Aldrich, Vicki Callahan and Robert Foster. My partner Layla, my girls Maisie and Martha, my Mum and Dad and my family for their unconditional love, support and understanding. I couldn’t have done it without you. And finally to my little dog Jess, who was sat at my feet throughout.

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Introduction

1.1 Emerging cinema Cinema has not yet been invented! André Bazin, 19671 Cinema is and always has been in a perpetual state of becoming. Cinema as a concept, construct and social activity is in need of constant revision, as are its frameworks for understanding, analysis and study. There are now more ways to produce, view, explore and experience films than ever before. The expansion of cinematic and spectatorial spaces through the pervasion of portable networked screens means that the traditional auditorium is just one of the many viewing and experiential conditions of a film. In times of rapid technological and industrial change, opportunities to creatively and critically explore the affordances of new cinematic modalities and outlets are in abundance. Many have long since declared the death of cinema. Peter Greenaway famously proclaimed, ‘Cinema’s death date was 31 September 1983, when the remote-control zapper was introduced to the living room, because now cinema has to be interactive, multi-media art’.2 By tracing the current contours of the re-birth and re-formation of new forms of cinematic expression and experience, this book attempts to revisit Bazin’s fundamental question, ‘What is cinema?’ which has recently been augmented with the question, ‘Where is cinema?’3 The concept of a unitary cinema is being questioned by heterogeneous constellations of digitally networked and intertextual spaces within the context of the recent digital turn in which, as David Bordwell attests, ‘films have become files’.4 This renders the defining of cinema as both a form and a province with

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exactitude challenging. A multitude of new delivery channels, which according to Barbara Klinger, ‘weave movies firmly into the audience’s routines, rituals, and experiences’,5 has led to a diffusion of both cinematic space and audience modes of spectatorship. By framing these forms as ‘emerging cinema’ within the book’s title, I attempt to harness the currency of the projects encompassed within; many are new, recently released, or still in development and production. Multiplatform, online, non-screen based, touch-screen tablet experiences, transmedia, live exhibition experiences, social films and networked stories across both the mainstream and the para-cinematic are all herein assigned to the category of emerging cinema.

1.2 The fourth factor We are all subjects formed in the wake of cinema, citizens of the cinematic heterotopia which is today the condition and site of a variety of extracinematic practices. Victor Burgin, 20126 The dual inference of the term ‘engaging audiences’ of the book’s title denotes the simultaneous status of the audience member as both subject and object; that is, to engage an audience and to be engaged by an audience. It indicates the myriad of ways in which audiences are integrally shaping emerging cinema, and is indicative of the new satellite social formations that exist around emerging cinematic forms. The cinematic audience was validated as an object of study in the 1970s when Thorold Dickinson identified the audience as the ‘fourth factor’,7 arguing that ‘the diffusion of cinema as a science which requires as much study as production’.8 There has been an upsurge in interest around audiences initiated in 1991 by Ien Ang’s seminal study ‘Desperately Seeking the Audience’,9 which spawned a growing body of literature and research. Recent and emerging studies into audiences of media,10 including those of Karina Aveyard and Albert Moran, seek to address ‘the significant gaps in knowledge that exist around the experience of film screening and viewing in spaces outside the cinema’.11 Audience studies into new media and online spaces have also proliferated.12 In a recent study of transmedia television, Elizabeth Evans states that ‘There is a need to continue to ask questions about the impact of transmedia texts on audience engagement with television drama (along with other televisual and cinematic genres)’.13

Introduction

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Audiences are increasingly centralized in cinematic discourses and rhetoric as illustrated by the 2012 report published by the Department of Culture Media Sport in the UK into the Future of British Film, entitled ‘It begins with the audience’.14 To develop understandings of cinema spectatorship is to understand the behaviours of digitally networked citizens. The discursive construction of the viewer within digitally networked spaces has often been reduced to the 90/9/115 rule which is defined by Jakob Nielsen as thus: ‘In most online communities, 90 per cent of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9 per cent of users contribute a little, and 1 per cent of users account for almost all the action’. This rule and the ‘1 per cent’ will be frequently referred to, evaluated and contested throughout this book within the consideration of new and emergent audience behaviours. This book is concerned with how new modes of viewing change the nature of the spectatorial relationship with the cinematic text. It explores how narrative comprehension in audiences is becoming more sophisticated within new frameworks for cinema engagement which capture the physical, the cognitive, the corporeal, the visceral and the haptic.

1.3 The current context I believe we need to get rid of the proscenium. We’re never going to be totally immersive as long as we’re looking at a square, whether it’s a movie screen or whether it’s a computer screen. We’ve got to get rid of that and we’ve got to put the player inside the experience, where no matter where you look you’re surrounded by a three-dimensional experience. That’s the future. Steven Spielberg, 201316 Within the commercial arena, advertising and branding imperatives have driven new cinematic forms, and have dictated particular aesthetics and audience engagements. In the emergent period of the advent of any new media, there is a tendency to showcase the technological capabilities of a form by presenting story as spectacle. This lineage originated with the introduction of sound and The Jazz Singer in 1927, of technicolour with The Wizard of Oz in 1939, and with the third wave of stereoscopic storytelling17 with Avatar in 2009. The ‘show-case’ imperative in which explorations of the form are embedded

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into the features and diegesis of the story is redolent of Tom Gunning’s theory of the ‘Cinema of Attraction’, in which the spectacle ‘is interest in itself ’.18 This tendency is conflated within digital storytelling in which it is not just an unveiling for the capabilities of the technologies but also as an advertisement for an associated piece of proprietary software or hardware. An early webbased example included the Yahoo campaign Trixi which launched a twelveweek online drama in August 2006 in which the fictional character Trixi encouraged viewers to engage with the Yahoo 7 ‘priority products’ (including instant messaging, podcasts and radio). Most recently the Random Adventures of Brandon Generator (2012), an interactive animated story, provided a showcase for the capabilities of the emergent HTML 5 standard whilst acting as a promotion for Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. New industry nomenclature and rhetoric pervade the current moment in which programmes are now ‘content’,19 titles are denoted as ‘brands’ or ‘properties’, what was previously recorded has become known to be ‘captured’, what was transmitted is now ‘delivered’ and what was watched is now ‘consumed’. The superlatives and hyperbole associated with these forms are indicative of an industry seeking to establish a mass-market opportunity (early parallels can be drawn to the gimmickry of early cinematic practices attempting to do the same20). Categories of entertainment content delivered within digitally networked spaces include branded content campaigns, networked entertainment, engagement based media, connected entertainment, advertainment, advergaming, digital entertainment properties and branded entertainment. It has been said that the Cannes International Film Festival in 2013 would be remembered as the festival where branded entertainment came of age.21 Storytelling is increasingly being used as a device by which to drive users to consume, and there has been an emerging trend of studios and brands habitually expanding across multiple mediums arbitrarily creating extraneous content: As Lance Weiler22 stated, ‘It’s a dangerous proposition, because if you’re not working it for the DNA of what the project is […] you run the risk of just deluding the quality of what you’re actually producing’.23 Experimental, independent and avant-garde innovations within paracinematic contexts are spearheading developments in the evolution of new forms and dramaturgies which inevitably influence coalesce, interrelate and cross-pollinate with the commercial forms. The Sundance ‘New Frontier’ Storytelling lab is endemic of the recognition of the potential of emerging cinema which seeks to ‘identify and foster independent artists innovating in

Introduction

5

the art and form of storytelling at the convergence of film, art, media, live performance, music and technology’.24 Narrative-led terms used to account for emerging forms (which tend to emanate from the independent sector) include ‘online Drama’, ‘social film’, ‘cinema ARG’,25 ‘authentic fiction’ and ‘responsive cinema’. With every new project comes the proclamation of a new genre and these dizzying neologisms can be considered as a desire for creators wanting to lay claim to new terminological terrain, many of which have hitherto elided substantial scholarly definition and investigation.

1.4 Theories, frameworks and methodology of analysis Film Studies has been predicated upon the primacy of the cinematic viewing experience and as such, according to Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘we’re all still using the same terms for practices and objects that are radically different from one another. Our terminology is developing at a far slower rate than either our technology or what we call our film culture’.26 The speed at which these developments take place has also been acknowledged by David. N. Rodowick who attests, ‘the velocity of the changes taking place [..] have rapidly overtaken the capacity of academic disciplines to comprehend them’.27 Similarly, Laura Mulvey notes that we are ‘at a time when new technologies seem to hurry ideas and their representations at full tilt towards the future’.28 The proposition of divergent and expanded conceptions of the cinematic which question the primacy of the cinema screen have been met with resistance and conjecture, as expressed by Raymond Bellour: ‘…  neither television nor computers, not the Internet, mobile phones or a giant personal screen can take the place of cinema’.29 The credence of new forms such as ‘cinematic’ has also been met by vociferous declamations from the industry including director David Lynch, who believes for cinema: you need a big picture in a dark room with great sound. It’s a spiritual, magic experience. If you have the same movie on a little computer screen with bad sound – and this is the way people are seeing films now – it’s such a shame. It’s a shameful, shameful thing.30

Film is no longer a discrete object of study; textual and formal qualities of new cinematic storytelling are influenced by a confluence of factors. The field of film and cinema studies is constantly renegotiating its terrain of study as the

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landscape shifts beneath. As Vinzenz Hediger observes, ‘The current ubiquity of digitized moving images puts film theory at a loss as to what its object really is’.31 Of the practice of textual analysis, Glen Creeber notes, ‘Knowing where a “text” starts and ends seems increasingly difficult to ascertain, a problem clearly heightened in the multi-media age’.32 In the early years of the twenty-first century there were numerous scholarly projections of what cinema was to become in a digital era.33 Similarly, this moment was marked by a multitude of explorations into ‘interactive cinema’,34 a term which has waxed and waned over the past two decades. Prior notions of interactive cinema models were based on assumptions that audiences needed to change or affect the narrative. The syllogism that all media had to be interactive because of its innate capabilities was met with polemic from Peter Lunenfeld,35 who denounced interactive cinema as mythical hype. The term has recently experienced a resurgence within film studies whereby Burgin has returned to considerations of interactive narrative.36 Since that time ‘transmedia’ became the structuring and prevailing discourse within which to hitherto understand the emerging cinema forms which is considered within this book. The term was first used by Marsha Kinder, who in 1991 identified the ‘commercial transmedia supersystems’37 of children’s cinema. Henry Jenkins later took up transmedia to refer to instances of ‘integrating multiple texts to create a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium’38 whereby ‘each medium does what it does best – so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics, and its world might be explored and experienced through game play’.39 This conceptualization assumes the prevalence of monomedia forms and the existence of media-specific boundaries such as book, film and game (Jenkins’ original promulgations were exemplified by the example of The Matrix trilogy). If transmedia was emblematic of the first decade of the twenty-first century, this book seeks to capture what will characterize this, in what could be considered to be a post-transmedia, post-platform-specific and platform-agnostic age. Assuming the complete dissolution of these boundaries, I seek to question what will happen to new forms of cinema when they are emancipated from these circumventions. By marshalling multiple strands of critical inquiry, this book represents a continuity of ideas pertinent to film studies, narratology and new media theory. Frequent reference will be made to the principles of narration as defined by Bordwell,40 Fabula (story), Syuzhet (plot) and Style

Introduction

7

(cinematic techniques). In addition, a narratological framework of identification to articulate various depths and dimensions of cinematic representations and audience engagements will be used for extrapolating narrative and dramatic complexity (see Figure 1.1). These are most usefully applied to the analysis of emerging cinema as conceived within this book where a confluence of cognitive, corporeal, visceral and haptic engagements are engendered through audience encounters. I use the term ‘Omnidiegetic’ to infer the world of the surrounding materials, rhetorics and discourses of the creators. ‘Extratextual’ is a term proposed by Astrid Ensslin41 to account for the audience’s ‘reality’ in her conception of interactional metalepsis. Metalepsis is the concept which is used to account for the traversing and transgressions between these narrative levels, translated simply by Karin Kukkonen as ‘a jump across’.42 Metalepsis is configured on the notion of the existence of distinct ontological boundaries, and an audience (or characters’) discrete inhabitation within those boundaries. Instances will be elucidated throughout the book, whereby viewers are frequently moved between these ontological spheres within their experiences of emerging cinema. I will propose the concept of an unconscious metalepsis in which audience members not only unthinkingly traverse these layers, but exist simultaneously within and between them. The listing as suggested in Figure 1.1 should therefore not be considered as diacritically or hierarchically ordered. The different diegetic categories will be used to account for the manifold and multi-levelled ways that audience members can engage within and outside of an emerging cinematic Narrative Level

Description

Omnidiegetic

The mediated level of the creators or producers (Authors own category)

Extratextual

Reality of readers, viewers or players (Proposed by Ensslin)43

Extradiegetic*

The narrational level – the real world of the story, not of the reader (this is most visible within fictional literature, although not always apparent in audio-visual media)

Intradiegetic*

Character level, fictional world

Hypodiegetic*

An embedded fictional world (stories within stories)

Figure 1.1  Identification of the narrative level classifications used within this book, building on Sonja Klimek’s* levelling.44 Note the Hypodiegetic level is not to be confused with the term ‘hyperdiegesis’.45 * The asterisk is used to denote which terms originally appeared in Klimek’s levels.

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experience since to understand cinema at this conjuncture is to understand and appreciate the triangulation of text, industry and audience, and the complex interrelations between them.

1.5 Chapter summaries The constituent chapters of this book venture into only some of the potential areas of the emerging cinema canon, providing insights into its vicissitudes through a number of previously un-studied case studies. The chapters are replete with examples, some of which are at their incipient stages at the vanguard of developments, which span collective and individuated modes of cinematic engagement. Chapter 2 initiates explorations into current extended film phenomena as a continuum of cinema–audience relations. The chapter maps the historical roots of filmic interventions into everyday life and instances where the textual borders of the film extend into the ‘real’ world. Within the context of the experience economy where ‘diversification strategies’46 and ‘narrative expansion’47 imperatives pervade, cinematic paratextual extensions and their functions within fictional contexts are considered. The chapter traces the impact of the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) through a genealogy of examples before progressing to an in-depth study of the film Cloverfield (2008), in order to consider how films are reconceptualized within social-textual networks and interpretive communities. In its focus upon evanescent and temporal experiences in collective experiences, the chapter also highlights concerns of mapping the provenance of emerging cinematic forms. Expanded viewing conditions which embed theatrical encounters are also considered through a case study of Secret Cinema exploring new modes of audience engagement within instances of collective cinematic consumption which occur beyond the traditional auditorium. Chapter 3 turns to considerations of individualized and personalized cinematic experiences through instances of mobile cinema, whereby films become portable and manipulable objects and audience members are able to ‘travel’ through un-site-specific cinematic milieu. The chapter considers new cinematic apparatus and the alternative mechanics of viewing of new technologies such as the touch screen tablet and how screen shrinkage can impact upon the forms, types and aesthetics of emerging cinema. The chapter considers how the

Introduction

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rapid absorption of mobile media into new cinematic viewing conditions has contributed to the dissolution of boundaries between diegetic levels whereby multiple concurrent streams of information are facilitated through new screen consumption modalities such as ‘second screen’ experiences. Various instances of iPad cinema are considered in order to gauge the transformative impact upon audience encounters with the film as ‘object’ through a consideration of its portability and hapticality, and its effects on fragmented and disrupted patterns of engagement. Themes of haunted media, surveillance and the unsettling presence of mobile technologies pervade throughout various examples, including two in-depth case studies of APP (2013) and RIDES.tv (2011–), which in addition to exemplifying new mobile cinema forms explore and illuminate the impact of computermediated communications upon everyday life. Chapter 4 continues considerations of cinema’s evolution within a networked society through an exploration of virtual manifestations of socially layered cinema. The chapter considers tensions between art and advertising and the influence and impacts of the televisual upon conversational formats of emerging cinema. Issues of digital identity in public and private digital spaces and social surveillance are also explored within the context of the dual imperative of social media as both a data collection tool and a generative storytelling device. The chapter considers two diverse case studies: The Inside Experience (2011), an emblematic example of the branded entertainment form and an explicit symbiosis of advertising and entertainment, and Cloud Chamber (2013), an avant-garde ‘premium online mystery’ originating from the independent Danish filmmaking movement. Both can be considered to be pushing the boundaries of online cinematic storytelling by placing sociality at the core of their experiences using the communication substrate of online social networking systems. Through primary research, this chapter reveals insights into the multiple and often unexpected ways that audience members can engage, and illuminates the formations and behaviours of ‘dramatic communities’ within shared socially networked spaces. Chapter 5 turns to considerations of the ethical dimensions of emerging cinema within the contrapuntal instances where fiction is presented as reality and where reality is presented as fiction. The chapter maps and historicizes alleged media ‘hoaxes’, conceptualizing them as tools for guiding and evolving narrative comprehension, advancing audiences’ capacities to decode fact from fiction. Key examples across a range of mediums, including The War of the Worlds (Radio,

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1938), Forgotten Silver (Television, 1995), Nothing So Strange (Web and Film, 2002) and The Truth about Marika (online and Television, 2007), are placed within a continuum of advancing audience comprehension. The chapter then turns to considerations of authentic fictions and purposeful storytelling whereby audience members are fictionally immersed into human rights issues and campaigns for social change and advocacy. By drawing on manifold examples which span explorations into this field, new typologies are proposed alongside a number of modes of engagement of ‘barely fictional’ encounters. This includes the classification of a methodology of ‘displaced fiction’ whereby audience members inhabit alternate personas and moments of temporal alterity within near and distant future environments. Chapter 6 turns to consideration of industrial perspectives and disruptions to current funding, business and distribution models. Through explorations of crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and open sourcing initiatives the chapter considers the co-creation and co-option of these practices in both the commercial and independent realms. The coalescence of the divergent agendas of these realms illuminates the diminishing boundaries between funding and distribution, and the impact that this has upon creative aesthetics and modes of production centralizing the case study of the recent crowdfunded independent transmedia project The Cosmonaut (2013). Drawing on a number of interviews with industry insiders, this chapter reveals a landscape in which the vestiges of mono-media practices, processes and rhetoric still pervade. The conceptualization of an industry still very much in transition is presented which is seeking to achieve the rationalization, unification and massification of emergent cinema forms into mainstream processes, working practices and authoring platforms. Chapter 7 proposes new frameworks and terms for the formalization of a grammatology of emerging cinema by unravelling and synthesizing the observations and insights drawn from the book’s constituent chapters. The multi-streamed, multi-dimensional, narrative complexity of emerging cinematic engagements is evolving new storytelling grammars, styles and aesthetics. This chapter proposes the prevalent genres, themes and participatory modes of emerging cinema and their associated narrative instrumentality and devices. The chapter contends that it is a combination of the depth of access to a fictional world; the complex interrelations between narrative and promotion and the commodification of narrative which collectively reveal the velocity at which narrative comprehension amongst audiences is becoming acutely

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attuned. A grammar of participation is proposed to account for the discursive reconstruction of the audience in which spectators become actors, performers, and players within the inverted proscenium arch of cinematic spaces which exist beyond the screen. Chapter 8 presents an epilogue in which the latest and near-future developments of emerging cinema are annunciated. New content discovery and consumption modalities are considered whereby the pervasion of emerging cinema not only extends into reality and everyday life but also takes the form of physiological transgressions. This book demonstrates how it is a combination of industry process and apparatus (which has been elicited from a number of interviews undertaken by the author with industry figures, creators and commentators), textual readings (of both content and form) and audience reception (through audience analysis) which sheds light on the shifting ontological status of cinema which in turn reveals compelling insights into the contemporary digital human condition.

Notes 1 2

3

4 5 6 7

André Bazin, ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’, in What Is Cinema, 2 Volumes, ed. Hugh Gray (California: University of California Press, 1967). Quoted in Clifford Coonan, ‘Greenaway Announces the Death of Cinema – and Blames the Remote-Control Zapper’, The Independent, 10 October 2007, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/greenaway-announces-thedeath-of-cinema–and-blames-the-remotecontrol-zapper-394546.html, noting that September only has 30 days. Promulgated by various theorists including Vinzenz Hediger, ‘Lost in Space and Found in a Fold: Cinema and the Irony of Media’, and Victor Burgin, ‘Interactive Cinema and the Uncinematic’, both in Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema, ed. Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg and Simon Rothöhler (Vienna: Synema, 2012), 61. David Bordwell, Pandora’s Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies (Madison, WI: The Irvington Way Institute Press, 2012), 8. Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 7. Burgin, ‘Interactive Cinema and the Uncinematic’, 107. Thorold Dickinson, A Discovery of Cinema (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 137.

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8 Dickinson, A Discovery of Cinema, 7. 9 Ien Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience (London: Routledge, 1991). 10 Including Andy Ruddock, Investigating Audiences (London: Sage, 2007) and John L. Sullivan, Media Audiences: Effects, Users, Institutions, and Power (London: Sage, 2013). 11 Karina Aveyard, and Albert Moran, Watching Films: New Perspectives on MovieGoing, Exhibition and Reception (Bristol: Intellect, 2013), 4. 12 Including Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 13 Elizabeth Evans, Transmedia Television: Audiences, New Media and Daily Life (New York: Routledge, 2011), 180. 14 Chris Smith, ‘A Future for British Film. It Begins with the Audience …’, A UK Film Policy Review (London: Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2012). 15 Jakob Nielsen, ‘Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute’, NN/g, 9 October 2006, http://www.nngroup.com/articles/participationinequality/. 16 Quoted by David S. Cohen, ‘George Lucas & Steven Spielberg: Studios Will Implode; VOD Is the Future’, Variety, 12 June 2013, http://variety.com/2013/digital/ news/lucas-spielberg-on-future-of-entertainment-1200496241/. 17 Explored within Sarah Atkinson, ‘Stereoscopic-3D Storytelling: Rethinking the Conventions, Grammar and Aesthetics of a New Medium’, Journal of Media Practice 12 no. 2, 2011:139–156. 18 Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde’, in Film and Theory: An Anthology, ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller (Oxford: Blackwell, Original edition, 1994, 2000), 229–235. 19 John T. Caldwell states: ‘The rhetorical shift from talking about productions as “programmes” to talking about them as “content” underscores the centrality of repurposing in industrial practice. The term “content” frees programmes from a year-long series and network-hosted logic and suggests that programmes are quantities to be drawn and quartered, deliverable on cable, shippable internationally, and streamable on the net.’ John T. Caldwell, ‘Convergence Television: Aggregating Form and Repurposing Content in the Culture of Conglomeration’, in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 49. 20 Mark Thomas McGee, Beyond Ballyhoo: Motion Picture Promotion and Gimmicks (Jefferson, NC: Mcfarland & Co, 2011), 99–123. 21 John Ford, chief executive of The One Centre quoted from AdNews, ‘Toshiba and Intel Named as Best Transmedia Campaign from Cannes’, AdNews, 1 July 2013,

Introduction

22

23 24 25 26

27 28 29

30 31 32 33

34

35 36 37

13

http://www.adnews.com.au/adnews/toshiba-and-intel-named-as-best-transmediacampaign-from-cannes. Recently Lance Weiler has been recognized as ‘One of twenty five people helping to reinvent entertainment and change the face of Hollywood’ – Wired Magazine and ‘One of eighteen who changed Hollywood’ – Business Week, http://images. businessweek.com/ss/08/09/0917_hollywood/17.htm. In an interview with the author 28 August 2013. http://www.sundance.org/programs/new-frontier-story-lab/. ARG - Alternate Reality Game Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘End or Beginning: The New Cinephilia’, in Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema, ed. Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg and Simon Rothöhler (Vienna: Synema, 2012), 31. David N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 184. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 22–23. Raymond Bellour, ‘The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory’, in Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception, ed. Ian Christie (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 211. Tim Walker, ‘An Interview with David Lynch’, The Independent on Sunday, The New Review, 23 June 2013:14. Hediger, ‘Lost in Space and Found in a Fold’, 73–74. Glen Creeber, ‘The Joy of Text?: Television and Textual Analysis’, Critical Studies in Television: Scholarly Studies in Small Screen Fictions 1 no. 1, 2006:82–83. Including Jeffrey Shaw, and Peter Weibel, Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003) and Matt Hanson, The End of Celluloid: Film Futures of the Digital Age (Brighton: Rotovision, 2003). Carolyn Handler Miller, Digital Storytelling: A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment (Oxford: Focal Press, 2004) – at the time of writing a third edition of this book is currently in press and due to be published in 2014; Mark Stephen Meadows, Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative (Indiana: New Riders, 2003) and Chris Crawford, On Interactive Storytelling (Berkeley: New Riders, 2005). Peter Lunenfeld, ‘The Myths of Interactive Cinema’, in The New Media Book, ed. Dan Harries (London: BFI Publishing, 2002), 144–154. Burgin, ‘Interactive Cinema and the Uncinematic’, 93–107. Marsha Kinder, Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games: From ‘Muppet Babies’ to ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Original edition, 1991).

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38 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 95. 39 Henry Jenkins, ‘Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling’, in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 6. 40 David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Routledge, 1985). 41 Astrid Ensslin, ‘Diegetic Exposure and Cybernetic Performance: Towards Interactional Metalepsis’, in Staging Illusion: Digital and Cultural Fantasy, ed. Sally Munt (Brighton: University of Sussex, 2011), 12. 42 Karin Kukkonen, and Sonja Klimek, Metalepsis in Popular Culture (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 1. 43 Ensslin, ‘Diegetic Exposure and Cybernetic Performance’, 12. 44 Sonja Klimek, ‘Metalepsis in Fantasy Fiction’, in Metalepsis in Popular Culture, ed. Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 25. 45 Defined by Matt Hills as the ‘creation of a vast and detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered within the text’. Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 200), 137. 46 Indrek Ibrus, and Carlos A. Scolari, Crossmedia Innovations: Texts, Markets, Institutions (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012), 9. 47 Most recently discussed at the LA Film Fest in a panel session considering the impact of digital media on the movie industry and storytelling. Leo Mars, ‘LA Film Fest: When (Creative) Worlds Collide’, Blogcritics (blog), 26 June 2013, http://blogcritics.org/la-film-fest-when-creative-worlds-collide/ defined as ‘the extension of worlds which float across all media, sometimes for a decade or more’. The panel included author Cornelia Funke who’s book Reckless and Fearless have recently been adapted into an iPad app MirrorWorld which will be discussed in Chapter 3.

2

Extending Cinema

2.1 Introduction Since its invention over a hundred years ago, cinema has pervaded everyday life via other media channels predominantly to expedite marketing and promotional imperatives. In the conventional and commercial film production cycle, the marketing of the completed film traditionally commences during the latter part of the postproduction phase typically through the controlled distribution of an effusive amount of materials including billboards, posters, television adverts, televised interviews with key cast members, cinematic trailer spots, newspaper reviews, production photographs and memorabilia. Exposure to these materials ensures the persistent extrusion of the existence of the film into the public’s consciousness. As Victor Burgin notes, ‘Collecting such metonymic fragments in memory, we may come to feel familiar with a film we have not actually seen’.1 These materials create what Burgin has termed a ‘cinematic heterotopia’, which he says ‘is constituted across the variously virtual spaces in which we encounter displaced pieces of films: the internet, the media and so on, but also the psychic spaces of a spectating subject that Baudelaire first identified as a “kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness” ’2 (My emphasis). The focus of this chapter is upon how the emergence of new technologies, social practices and economic imperatives in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has complexified the role that these materials play within the promotional campaign of a film (or other cultural artefact) and how they are currently shape-shifting to become integrated narrative extensions which pervade and affect the ‘psychic spaces’ of the audience. The chapter explores how pre-release phenomena are becoming embedded into the film’s mythology and respective narrative worlds, and in some more notable instances are

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integrated within the plots and individual dramatic arcs of the characters within the films themselves. This chapter draws on a number of case studies in order to capture these fleeting fictional manifestations, which by their nature are inextricably and temporally attached to a release date, belonging to a time-based campaign, which Thomas Elsaesser states, ‘takes place in a kind of count-down time and that it occupies all manner of urban, mental and media spaces’.3 This chapter particularly attends to the reconfiguration of traditional paratextual ‘promotional surround’ and ancillary materials and their state of becoming integral and concomitant facets of the (fictional) audience experience. Gerard Genette states, ‘whether original, later, or delayed, the authorial annotation of a text of fiction or poetry, by dint of its discursive nature, unavoidably marks a break in the enunciative regime – a break that justifies our assigning it to the paratext’.4 The instances discussed in this chapter focus on those paratextual materials and practices that do not necessarily seek to break the enunciative regime, rather they are seamlessly integrated into the fictionalized narrative ‘whole’; as Jonathan Gray states, ‘The sometimes “invisible”, “peripheral”, “ancillary” entities are as intrinsic a part of a text’s DNA as are the films and television programs’.5 Paratextual study has become a vibrant facet of media ‘off-screen’ studies. This consideration of extended cinema will elucidate the application of paratextual theory even further to consider its reconfiguration as narrative devices aligning to Göran Bolin’s definition of ‘transmedia components’ which ‘contribute to narrative progression’,6 and Andrea Phillips’ consideration of ‘transmedia tools’ which ‘brings something to the audience that wasn’t conveyed in the film’.7 The chapter focuses on a number of divergent permutations of extended cinema which include online additions as well as the more comprehensive and prolonged Alternate Reality Game (ARG) style campaigns. The considerations herein seek to move the examples discussed beyond their commercial implications, to cast light upon their narrative functions, formal features, literal representations and thematic characteristics. The types of paratexts that will be considered herein are manifold and functionally variant, and represent nuanced applications within narrative contexts in that they hold dramatic, expositional or diegetic properties or functions. The chapter will contend that they can be seen to operate within the subtleties of narrative and expositional instrumentality, such as subtext, character interiority, back-story and time-shifting, designed as such to avoid paratextual superfluousity.

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Furthermore, the case studies seek to instantiate and reify the sometimes impermeable nature of these phenomena associated with ARG culture which are often perceived as esoteric, characterized by limited audiences and obfuscatory experiences. The conception that only an estimated 1 per cent of the overall audience fully engage with these campaigns8 will be challenged since the audiences who look in on this activity are far more substantial, illuminating the complexities of the audience experience as they engage at differing cognitive and physical levels within extended cinema experiences. The chapter attends to two seemingly divergent practices: extended promotion engagement with a film prior to its release (also including consideration of other extended artefacts that may not be primarily cinematic, but have cinematic elements) and extended exhibition – engagement with films subsequent to their release within ‘live’ cinematic experiences. It contends that the affective behaviour these experiences generate play to similar ends; relating to the audience’s expectation to be able to participate in the narrative worlds within all levels of the diegesis (hypodiegetic, intradiegetic, extradiegetic9) building upon what Richard Grusin has conceptualized as a ‘mediaphilia of anticipation’.10 Whilst acknowledging that extended cinema manifestations are legitimate forms of study which can be subjected to sustained textual analyses, it also should be noted that this is an exceptionally challenging endeavour. Since there is no commitment from the film’s distributors beyond the release of the film to maintain or preserve the materials for a future public, and by their nature are subordinate to a main event, these materials and experiences very quickly become ephemeral and rarefied, therefore posing a significant challenge to related scholarly activity. The temporal textuality that they invoke (many of which are time-based, time-dependent and predicated upon real-time synchronic activities) should not render these texts un-readable, but it makes the task of their study far more challenging. Furthermore, not only are the texts and their associated syuzhet dispersed, the decoding, formation of fabula and interpretative activity are also dispersed (as well as internalized) across a number of communities. These objects of study are thus far unparalleled cultural forms in that narrative is functioning through complex discursive networks of communication through and within multiple interpretative communities, adding a further level of complication to their study. Just as the constituent members of interpretive communities oscillate between sites of meaning-generation and meaning-making so too does the research

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process into these phenomena replicate this complex traversal. The futureirretrievability of extended cinematic forms renders retroactive analysis within new contexts of meaning increasingly difficult. The explorations captured within this chapter seek to address these challenges. They also serve to reframe the premise of cinema and notions of its ‘space’ which now bleed into everyday life and reality; to explore how audiences are constructed and how the spectatorial subject is imagined; to ultimately retrace the contours of cinema and to extend the scope of its study, documentation and analysis.

2.2 Extended promotion From as early as the 1920s, there is evidence to suggest the existence of covert film marketing techniques which blended cinema and the world of the film into reality, predominantly through the staging of live cinematic events in the locale of movie theatres. This practice, known as ‘ballyhoo’,11 manifested itself in a number of ways, mainly in the guise of the cinema proprietors staging newsworthy events in order to ensure their capture, recording and reporting by the press, and thereby guaranteeing subsequent attention and publicity for the film. These exploitation or ‘stunt advertising’12 stratagems were later dubbed as the creation of ‘pseudo-events’ by Daniel J. Boorstin in 1962. Boorstin suggested that press conferences, presidential debate and the construction of celebrity were used as tools to ‘provide synthetic happenings to make up for the lack of spontaneous events’.13 ‘Routine’ ballyhoos as well as those focused on specific film releases were practised in the 1920s. Within the 1927 Film Year Book14 a whole section is devoted to ‘Practical Showmanship Ideas’, which suggests a range of generic ‘ballyhoos’ that can be applied to any film release by the cinema proprietors demonstrating the extraordinary (and exploitative) lengths that were reached. These include the ‘Street Car Stunt’15 whereby a young girl repeatedly shouts about a film showing at the local cinema into her seemingly deaf grandpa’s ear trumpet in crowded street cars. The book also advised the enlistment of various local authorities in the staging of the stunts which is suggestive of their complicity in these activities. The recruitment of the ambulance service was suggested to stretcher-out a ‘laughing, raving maniac’ from the theatre in an ambulance adorned with the signs ‘He’s gone crazy from laughing at (insert film name here).’16 According to Albert Smith’s autobiography,

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19

a screening of The Black Diamond Express (1927) at Tony Pastor’s theatre in New York (accompanied by train sound effects) was so realistic that at the second performance two ladies fainted. Smith noted, ‘After that Pastor arranged for an ambulance at the entrance to rush overwrought patrons to the hospital, which proved to be the best possible publicity for the picture’.17 Ballyhoos targeted at specific films included for The Covered Wagon film ‘a group of Indians camped in the grounds of Central Park, and earned unusual newspaper stories’.18 As Fabrice Lyczba notes from his extensive research into the ballyhoo phenomena, ballyhoo events invoked an audience literacy, whereby audiences are not naïve when it comes to dealing with the medium of cinema. Indeed, Ballyhoo and publicity discourses that harp on the realism of silent films are striking for their implicit assumption that audiences will hopefully see through them, will understand them for what they are, a playful suggestion to consider fiction as a game.19

Conceptualized within the continuum of cinema’s increasing penetration into the milieus of reality and its ever-expanding cultural surround into multiple media forms and channels, the consideration of the following examples illustrates how the levels and types of these experiences have complexified in recent years. Through mapping the extent of the textual borders and circumventions, the tentative beginnings of a semiotics of extended cinema will be evolved, where narrative is both the organizing logic and the connective tissue for their understanding and interpretation within fictional discourses. Core cinematic extensions include ‘in-film’ websites which allude to a fictional organization or person. Within the 2002 film On_Line, directed by Jed Weintrob, a number of websites were created from the film world which were both accessible to the public and also integrated into the diegesis of the film being the focus of the characters’ on-screen interactions (see Figures 2.1a and 2.1b). These websites were the epitome of internet trends at the time, including Final Exit, a suicide site, Angel Cam, the 24/7 site of a Camgirl broadcasting her life through her webcam (which at one point provided a live feed during the film’s campaign), Intercon-X, an adult channel connecting professionals and amateurs, and Silent City, the main characters’ video log.20 These sites individually and collectively invoked a social comment around the themes of online scopophilia and voyeurism. The parallel film and online world imbricated fact with fiction, and rehearsed ideas and concerns around new communication modalities which were indicative of an emerging surveillance culture.

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Figure 2.1a  On_Line, 2002

Figure 2.1b  On_Line, 2002

Strain (2012), by Mirada,21 was an online campaign accompanying the release of the third book in The Strain trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. Although not a promotion for a film, this example illuminates the deployment of similar strategies across media products whereby traditional promotional materials are mutating into integrated narrative devices, thus contributing to the evolution of extended cinema forms. The Strain book and website launched simultaneously on 24 October 2012, publicizing the link for the ‘Department of Human Management’ (DHM) website22 through social media, which targeted the established fan-base that already existed around the trilogy (see Figure 2.2). The fictional website, which exists within the vampire-ruled world of the novel, expands the mythology of the books by creating an environment which normalizes and institutionalizes the practice of people in the B positive blood group giving themselves up and donating themselves to the vampires. The graphics, logos and presentation of the DHM website emulate that of an

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official organization such as a governmental department or the Red Cross. The site invokes the language of a traditional medical donor site, using benevolent aesthetics such as a ‘donate’ button, subverting the audience’s usual association of such a signifier, when the darker meaning of the materials is revealed. Access to articles, questionnaires, instructional guides and FAQs, which are formatted in a medical institutional vernacular, guide the reader through the routines of blood testing and self-donation, such as how to access the donation centres. Upon deeper inspection, the material’s intrinsic perpetuation of vampire propaganda is revealed, reflecting the intradiegetic level at which they exist: ‘to help the human slave population better understand their role within the new world order, to ease their consciences, and to make them more efficiently offer themselves up to their new terrifying blood-sucking masters’.23 The site includes numerous video testimonials from those who have recently discovered that they are B positive, one in which a mother offers her baby to the vampires, and another in which a couple talk through their intention to have children specifically for the purpose of giving them up to the vampires. These videos which deploy a mockumentary aesthetic bearing slogans such as ‘Donate your loved ones’, imply an advanced level of audience literacy in their assumed ability to be read, decoded and understood as fictional. Using the informational aesthetic and charity vernacular, with minimal indication of the site’s fictional status, apart from the reader’s prior knowledge and understanding of the book, the Strain project exemplifies the seamless merging of fiction into reality, and emergent strategies of extended fictional practices which are played out within discourses of reality and authenticity.

Figure 2.2  Department of Human Management, Copyright © 2013 Mirada LLC. All rights reserved.

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Figure 2.3  Department of Human Management, Copyright © 2013 Mirada LLC. All rights reserved.

Most recently, the 2013 film Side Effects directed by Steven Soderbergh launched a pre-release website which existed in the fictional universe of the film. The film explores themes of depression through the main character of Emily. Diagnosed as suffering from depression and having tried other medication, Emily is prescribed the antidepressant drug Ablixa by her psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Banks (played by Jude Law), which seemingly reveals adverse side effects. The Ablixa24 web page, branded in a medical vernacular, bears the slogan ‘Take Back Tomorrow’, and comes complete with its own video advertisement. The website also invites audience members to undergo a ‘free evaluation test’ whereby they are subjected to a multiple-choice questioning session with the psychiatrist from the film, Dr. Banks, to ascertain whether they are suffering from depression and therefore suited to receive a prescription of the drug. These audience testing strategies used as a method by which to subjectively explore themes within the film are reminiscent of techniques used in 1960s novelty film marketing. In one example, prior to the viewing of the film Dementia 13 in 1963, audience members were required to take ‘Dr.W.Bryan’s D-13 test’ in order ‘to prepare you psychoanalytically for the horrifying experience’.25 Depending on the score received, it was decided whether the audience member got to watch the film or whether they needed a mental health test. The Ablixa website does not capture the entire narrative of the film, instead a fragment of the narrative is revealed. The Ablixa drug functions as the key objectified narrative component upon which the story of the film pivots (and as will be discussed in Chapter 7, fictional pharmaceutical companies are a recurring trope in transmedia fictions).26 On_Line, Strain and Side Effects each created a fictional online environment in which to extend both the textures and textual dimensions of their respective

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fictional constructs into the real-world, rendering palpable their thematic dimensions. Furthermore, they each invoke an authenticity to the main event, with minimal indication of the website’s fictional status (the Ablixa site has a small statement in the bottom left corner, and the appearance of the image of Jude Law implicitly suggests its fictionality to a film-literate audience), but there is little else to discern each of the website’s fictional status. The companion website for Darren Aronofsky’s 2000 film Requiem for a Dream27 was created to re-tell the narrative of the film, and to emulate the visual and auditory effects of drug addiction which are the central preoccupations of the film’s storyline and its constituent characters. The narrative structure, themes and timeline of the film are mirrored within the website. They both tell the story from the three different characters’ perspectives across the three seasons of the film’s timeline of summer, fall and winter. These contrasting seasonal dimensions are reflected in the colour palette of the website of white, grey and black, which progressively darkens as the narrative deepens. Each of the character’s sequences begins with a standardized depiction of a recognizable web interface. In the case of Sarah, a Slim n Happy diet pills (to which the character becomes addicted in the film’s diegesis) interactive order form is loaded, invoking the simplicity with which the tablets can be accessed. This then leads to the Tappy Tibbons website (the host of the television

Figure 2.4  requiemforadream.com created by Hi-ReS! 2000, Website to promote the film Requiem for a Dream by Darren Aronofsky

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Beyond the Screen

show that pervades Sarah’s life). The character Harry’s narrative timeline is progressed through the engagement with a ‘Net compulsions’ website which leads to a casino gambling page, and an animated fruit-machine emulator. As the seasons progress, the images disintegrate, and the sound track, a chaotic mix of repetitious fragments taken from the film, looping layers of nauseating music punctuated by analogue-style sonic (and visual) glitches, gradually degenerates from 16 bit to 1 bit as a sonic metaphor contributing to this overall sense of decomposition and decay. Error messages and corrupted files are interspersed using the language and syntax of computer corruption within an audiovisual agglomeration of the character’s paroxysms, the equivalent of a computational visual aphasia, described by its creators as literally and metaphorically ‘a website which rots, falls apart and finally kicks you out’.28 Symptomatic of the turmoil experienced by the characters and the infelicities that befell them, the thematic portrayal of decay also acts as an implicit reflection of the cultural anxiety felt at the time shortly after the subsidence of global fears around the unknown and unseen impacts of the millennium bug, and the preceding dotcom crash which climaxed in March 2000. Furthermore, through the website’s compression of the story of the film, and its atmospheric recreation and emulation of the tone of the film, the experience re-inscribes the key messages of its cautionary tales of addiction. Aligning itself so closely and metaphorically to the scenes of the film also imbues the website with signature gestures and the directorial imprint of Aronofsky. The aesthetic of computer corruption proved efficacious and resounds in a number of other films and media projects. The Memento (2000) website similarly retells the film’s story through fragments29 and invokes a comparable sense of audiovisual aphasia. Most recently Memory of a Broken Dimension30 (2012) is a computer game based on the concept of a malfunctioning database, which similarly emulates computational corruption. This fear of technological decay – the premise upon which these projects are built – is also the underscoring principle of this chapter, and the ephemerality and evanescent nature of the phenomena it seeks to document. Similar thematic resonances were evidenced in other film campaigns. Preceding Gore Verbinski’s remake of The Ring in 2002, a number of VHS tapes were produced and circulated prior to the film’s release mirroring the film’s events, which involve the mysterious circulation of a VHS tape which results in the death of those who witness its contents, capturing what Nicholas Rombes has referred to as a ‘dread of reproduction’31 and as characteristic of the ‘analogue residual culture’.32

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The texture and tone of the film to which these various extensions allude are thematically and formally evoked within these forms which are also imbued with culture anxiety; a society in a moment of transition between a number of binary oppositions; analogue to digital, offline to online, the tangible to the immaterial, from the physical to the virtual. Moreover, these new practices have started to evolve more sophisticated audience expectations for prolonged and deepening viewing experiences and an appreciation of audiovisual intertextuality, which Fincina Hopgood states, ‘demands greater interaction on the part of the spectator, who is required to synthesise the narrative (of the Blair Witch) legend from a range of diverse audiovisual material’.33 The Blair Witch Project (1999) is of course the preeminent exemplar of the extended narrative campaign which preceded the film’s release. Subject to critical acclaim, cultural recognition and notoriety, it has also been the subject of many academic studies and considerations.34 It was the lesser known Last Broadcast directed by Lance Weiler in 1997 which marked the preliminary investigation into the integration of new technologies and their related social practices beyond the marketing of the film by embedding it into a prolonged narrative experience. These were the antecedents establishing the grammars of transmedia storytelling and the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) before their appellations as such. The emergence of this audiovisual intertextual awareness also elicits Gilles Deleuze’s proclamation, that ‘The brain is unity. The brain is the screen’.35 Whilst the following examples function in the framework of an ARG in that they operate within discernable structures and invoke tacit rules, this carries with it a set of associations relating to their hermetic and esoteric characteristics, which can limit understandings of the complexity of audience engagements. All of the examples explored henceforth incorporate some of the underlying principles, techniques and modalities of the established ARG whilst drawing on the nascent technologies and social practices of the time in their evolution. An ARG is a pervasive game genre, which the International Game Developers Association White Paper into Alternate Reality Games has defined as thus: Alternate Reality Games take the substance of everyday life and weave it into narratives that layer additional meaning, depth, and interaction upon the real world. The contents of these narratives constantly intersect with actuality, but play fast and loose with fact, sometimes departing entirely from the actual or grossly warping it – yet remain inescapably interwoven.

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Sean Stewart stresses the importance of ‘The nature of a pervasive game’ which ‘is to make the “magic circle” of a game not a barrier, but a membrane; to let game and life bleed together so that game becomes heavy with the reality of life, and life becomes charged with the meaning of a game’.36 Markus Montola states that ‘The magic circle of a game is the boundary separating the ordinary from ludic and real from playful’.37 Conversely this can be perceived as a barrier to wider participation. This circumvention highlights the arcane, recondite and abstruse nature of these experiences which tend to appeal to the few as opposed to the many. The ARG is governed by a number of discernable rules and principles, the central conceit being ‘This is Not a Game’ (TINAG), the philosophy of making everything in an ARG appear real.38 Participants are advised to ‘not question the reality of the world or the game in in-game settings or with the game’s characters. Respect the curtain of “This is not a game” while playing an ARG’.39 ARG universes are predominantly negotiated and explored through computer mediated interactions – text messaging, emails, instant messages, video conferencing websites etc – as Paul Booth states, ‘If clues come in a mediated form, they mirror real-life communication’,40 and that ‘by existing solely through mediated technology, ARGs make that mediation the basis of their ontological state of being’.41 The following case studies have been selected since they all exemplify the emerging variant narrative functions which include: to extend and enhance the world of the film (or cultural artefact), its textures, themes and mythology ● to extend the syuzhet of the film which can include: back-story, pre-story, post-story and parallel-story plot extensions ● to unlock and reveal paratextual content; to reveal and rehearse the narrative structuring in order to guide narrative comprehension of the film. ●

All of these function and are evidenced at various levels and combinations to set audience expectation and will be further elaborated below. To extend and enhance the world of the film (or cultural artefact), its textures, themes and mythology. The world of District 9 (2009) literally spilled out onto the streets through its physical installations of benches, billboards, posters and bus-stops designating areas as ‘human’ or ‘non-human’ which served to extend the mythology and textures of the film. The campaign also incorporated a number of in-film websites. These included d-9.com which allowed the viewer

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to elect their species as human or non-human, to then receive subsequent realtime event updates. The in-film company MNU multinationalunited.com also had its own website to which Mnuspreadslies.com was the resistance-blog. Mathsfromouterspace.com originated from MNU and included tests which audience members could take in order to qualify for the fictional initiative. To extend the syuzhet of the film which can include back-story, pre-story, post-story and parallel-story plot extensions. This narrative tactic is used to communicate elements of the back-story (as in the case of Cloverfield, 2008), pre-story (as demonstrated in The Dark Knight, 2007) and post story (illustrated by A.I. Artificial Intelligence 2001), which will be discussed in the chapter, and as shall be demonstrated, in some cases to launch the narrative arcs of some of the characters prior to the film (and to extend them afterwards). To unlock and reveal paratextual content. The Hunger Games (2012), an adaptation of the Suzanne Collins’ novel, was preceded by a prolonged campaign which included the launch of the 100 poster (marking the 100-day countdown before the release of the film). A puzzle was created in which audience members needed to locate 100 different pieces of the poster which were dispersed across different websites. Ari Karpel commented that ‘by turning the release of those traditional campaigns into online events, Lionsgate was able to turn advertising and public relations into the cornerstone of its social campaign’.42 The fans were able to register for one of the ‘districts’ (which make up the film’s narrative vista) via the Capitol.pn website (the ‘pn’ domain suffix makes reference to the film’s fictional universe of Panem). Tumblr was also utilized to develop Capitol Couture, showcasing the fashion and costumes of the characters which are one of the defining aesthetics of the film. The video game–oriented site IGN (Imagine Games Network) featured training activities simulations of those that the characters were subjected to in the films. Fiction bled further into real life in the case of this particular film, which recently saw the launch of a The Hunger Games-themed summer camp in Florida,43 an unsettling proposition given the film’s premise. (Each year, two children are selected from each of the Panem’s districts to compete in a fight to the death, where only one survives). The Dark Knight Rises (2012) employed a similar treasure hunt campaign whereby a website released the details of over 300 locations (globally spread in Australia, the United States and China) in which bat graffiti had been painted. The audience members needed to photograph the sites of the graffiti and upload them to the website. For each one that they successfully uploaded, they were rewarded with a frame from the trailer. These initiatives highlight an emerging industry imperative in which

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ancillary media become a central facet of the fictional experience on a similar scale in terms of audience anticipation and expectation as the feature film itself. To reveal and rehearse the narrative structuring in order to guide narrative comprehension of the film. These campaigns are sometimes used to introduce the complexity of the narrative structure to an audience, and to rehearse them in its navigation and interpretation of the film’s language. Inception’s (2010) syuzhet is structured through multi-layered hypodiegetic44 incursions into the intradiegesis (through the depiction of events that are occurring within the dreams of the characters). Debra Malina has noted that further levels of this can be articulated as thus: hypo-hypodiegetic (H2D) and hypo-hypo-hypodiegetic as (H3D) and so forth.45 In the case of Inception the initial dream operates on the hypo-diegetic level, the dream within a dream on the hypo-hypodiegetic level (H2D) and the dream within a dream within a dream on the hypo-hypo-hypodiegetic as (H3D) etc. The audience is introduced to this complex and confusing structural levelling through the mind-crime game which is initially accessed through the ‘Pasiv Device’ website.46 This exists at the level of the intradiegesis, in which the manual for the Portable Automated Somnacin IntraVenous (Pasiv) device (the tool by which the operator can enter the dreams of others) can be accessed and interacted with. Produced in the style and language of traditional equipment manuals, the user can browse through various basic monochrome animations which demonstrates its use before being directed to the scene of the crime website which provided a gaming environment for audience members to further explore the thematic dimensions of the film. Perhaps the most preeminent ARG example associated with a feature film campaign, and the forerunner for all those that followed after, was created for the 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence directed by Steven Spielberg. The twelve-week ARG campaign entitled The Beast was ‘seeded’ by clues in the film’s posters in Spring 2001. One of the credits in the baseline of the poster was for a ‘Sentient Machine Therapist’ named ‘Jeanine Salla’, immediately recognized as an unfamiliar role to those normally seen in a film’s production credits – people were prompted to search for the name in Google, which revealed Jeanine’s (fictional) home page and blog. In addition to the Jeanine Salla reference, the posters also harboured two additional clues; a telephone number could be generated by counting the small markers that appeared on the letters. Circles and squares were positioned over letters on the reverse side of some of the posters which revealed the messages ‘Evan Chan was murdered’ and ‘Jeanine was the key’. Thus began the game experience which Andrea Phillips stated, ‘turned a fire

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hose of content on its audience’.47 As Sean Stewart the lead writer and designer of The Beast (as well as I Love Bees and Cathy’s Book) from Fourth Wall Studios explained: The game world (was) vast and elaborate. Hundreds of linked Web pages would form the skeleton: personal blogs, avant-garde art hangouts, the entire online catalogue of a manufacturer of geisha robots, political action groups, government agencies, and not one but two complete universities with dozens of departments. The first time we wrote a list of all the things we would need to bring this world to life, it was 666 items long; that’s where the project earned the nickname The Beast.48

This strategy is not an usual one for film marketing, as Elsaesser notes, ‘A film, an object we usually consider to be a self-sufficient work, possessing a narrative with its own mode of closure, is being crafted rather more like a land-mine: to scatter on impact across as wide a topographical and semantic field as possible’.49 This widespread textual scattering was characteristic of The Beast’s experimental and pioneering nature; textual dispersal logics are now much more managed, controlled and predetermined in subsequent campaigns. The Beast was set in the future-distant year of 2142, and all of the associated websites were dated as such. This was fifty years after the in-film events; therefore there are no explicit hyperdiegetic links or references made between the constituent materials of The Beast campaign and the content of the film A.I. itself, being diegetically separate and independent. The only exception is Martin Swinton, a child character in the film (the sibling of David – the sentient being played by Haley Joel Osment), and a grown man of significance in the campaign, with website and diary entries. As Phillip’s states, The Beast works as ‘a study in the long-term consequences of the events of the film’.50 It also served to extend the mythology, texture and themes of the film; for example a website entitled Ballederma sold artificial companions similar to those represented in the film. In addition to websites, The Beast also involved a number of live events including one where audience members were able to call the Statue of Liberty security number in order to talk to a security guard to save a kidnapped teenager. Phillips describes the feeling of agency that this induced through communicating with a fictional character as emblematic of the ARG experience.51 Not only was The Beast a groundbreaking entity, it developed new strategies and vocabularies which have become the established grammar of expanded narratives. As Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros noted, ‘The Beast had to invite

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players to participate in a covert way, one that does not reveal the gameness of the game. The players labeled this mechanism with a metaphor originating from the book Alice in Wonderland (1865), calling it a rabbit hole’.52 This term originally used to identify a concealed entry point into a fictional world is now a commonly used term within ARG and transmedia nomenclature to refer to any entry point at which an audience member can enter a multiplatform or transmedia fictional world. Other rules evolved, as Montola and Stenros note, ‘Even though one design principle was not to establish any rules, the player communities formed opinions on acceptable and unacceptable ways of proceeding in the game. Pretence of belief was essential for both readers and active players’.53 The Beast campaign also signalled complexified levels of narrative comprehension demonstrated through advanced temporal associations and negotiations on the part of the audiences. As Seymour Chatman notes of traditional narratives, a salient property […] is double time structuring. That is, all narratives, in whatever medium, combine the time sequence of plot events, the time of the histoire (‘story-time’) with the time of the presentation of those events in the text, which we call ‘discourse-time’. What is fundamental to narrative, regardless of medium, is that these two time orders are independent.54

In The Beast and A.I. (and other ARG examples) there exists a triple-time structuring in which the experiential-time (the time frame of the audience) adds another layering. In the case of A.I., the preceding campaign is experienced in the future. Multiple story-times are also evidenced within these examples which can include story-times within the hyperdiegesis, some of which can have a separate time frame (in the case of A.I. future and future-distant) or be co-dependent (as in the case of Inception) – therefore, Chatman’s notion of temporally distinct experience no longer prevails within these complexified extended experiences. An audience community known as the Cloudmakers, named after the boat belonging to The Beast’s in-world character Evan Chan, independently established a blog on 11 April 2001 through which to communicate with one another, to make sense of the sprawling content and syuzhet, and to collectively shape the fabula. The blog anchored the experience and became the central locus for all activity relating the ARG experience and the community’s harnessing of their collective intelligence. It retrospectively serves as an archive for the extensive corpus of communications which the experience generated.

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The Beast experience concluded in August 2001 but communication through the forum continued. In September 2011, some users of the Cloudmakers forum responded to the 9/11 terror attacks with a call to use the collective problemsolving skills that were honed within The Beast to solve the real-world mystery of 9/11.55 Symptomatic of the ‘thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life’,56 in which The Beast and The Cloudmakers found their home, this response to the terror attacks could also be seen as endemic of the conspiratorial micro-climate that the Cloudmaker community had created. As Booth claims, ‘What ARGs offer, therefore, is not just a way of examining reality, or a way of playing a game, but also a means through which we can see how communities form and populate the Web Commons’.57 The initial experience of The Beast was not predetermined, and its direction was contingent upon audience responses and interactions. The pioneering nature of this project meant that it was shaped by an iterative process in which the Cloudmakers informed the development of the game in a constant feedback loop with the creators, who could track all activities as they emerged on the forum. I Love Bees, although not a campaign for a film, is worthy of inclusion in the extended cinema genealogy since it crystallized a number of key tropes and strategies of the emerging form. Designed to promote the computer game Halo 2 (a first-person shooter game for the Xbox) the I Love Bees campaign took place in July 2004 and was seeded in a URL at the end of the trailer for Halo 2,58 which was a seemingly corrupted amateur bee-keepers website. In addition, jars of honey were sent out to a select number of game-developing companies which contained letters that spelt out the words ‘I love bees’. The website depicted a countdown clock which was updated with over 200 GPS locations. These were the sites of payphones which audience members were encouraged to answer by speaking a code word which would activate an ‘axon’. Once the axons were all activated, an online hidden message was unlocked. Audio files which included live action audio of various fictional scenes from an artificially intelligent life form from the future were then uploaded onto the website and chronologically reordered by the audience in order to make narrative sense. As noted by its makers, ‘Three million players answered the call and drove sales of Halo 2 into record-breaking territory: $125 million just on the first day of its release! But the real win for I Love Bees was elevating the franchise via national press to pop-culture conversation’.59 The core operating principle of I Love Bees was the use of telephones through which to engage the audience, and this strategy has prevailed in more recent campaigns including the recent remake of Carrie (2013)

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based on the novel by Stephen King. The film’s recent release was preceded by a mobile viral marketing campaign whereby audience members were invited to call a toll-free US based number to talk to Carrie, who responded to the caller’s voice. The promotion uses interactive voice response (IVR) technology. The campaign relies upon the familiarity of the story of Carrie for its impact. The voice of Carrie’s maniacal mother can be heard in the background and several YouTube videos reveal the unnerving and unsettling affect that this is having on the audience. The film campaign for Snakes on a Plane (2006) enabled audience members to create voicemail messages to send to their friend’s using the film’s lead actor Samuel L. Jackson’s voice. Over 1.5 million calls were made in the first week.60 Despite the popularity of the campaign, the main event of the cinematic release of the film was met with critical opprobrium. The Art of the H3ist (2005), although not related to a film or cinematic property, posited the audience in the heist film genre, using a fictional premise with which to promote a car. It was described as a ‘spy movie come to life’ and a ‘living movie’.61 The experience began when a Red 2006 Audi A3 car, upon which the campaign was predicated, was stolen from its showroom. The following day, the plinth at the ‘New York International Auto Show’ was replaced by posters reporting the missing car. Billboards and newspaper advertisements reported the theft of the car in the following weeks, in addition to a television commercial, viral videos and user generated blogs documenting the disappearance. Clues, telephone calls, faxes, messages, receipts and photographs could be viewed on the contracted investigators’ ‘Last Resort Retrieval’ ‘in-fiction’ website. The company had classified advertisements in various ‘outer-fiction’ high-end publications. In addition there were a number of live events, keys to access which were revealed in codes hidden in monster.com, where the audience could meet the characters and help them on missions. For example, the fictional character, video game designer Virgil Tatum attended the ‘E3 expo’, a video game conference ‘in-character’ and gave interviews. David Baldwin, McKinney’s executive creative director, stated, ‘This program has pulled the A3 audience into an idea that we call “part alternate reality gaming meets branded content, part Bourne Identity meets The Da Vinci Code”. It’s a living movie that allows the audience to participate on many different levels’.62 No orienting signals were evidenced within the constituent elements of the experience to denote its fictional status, which is consistent with the ARGs central TINAG principle and the tacit and implicit assumptions made in which the fictional nature of the experiences evade indication as such.

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The Dark Knight ARG: Why So Serious? (2008) campaign allegedly attracted over eleven million ‘unique’ players from over seventy five different countries over the fifteen-month playing period which preceded the theatrical release of the film.63 Tasks were launched at the annual ComicCon conference, and a telephone number was projected onto the sky for audience members to call. Audience members were encouraged to be photographed in full ‘joker’ makeup, and to upload and share these images. The locus of the experience was the Whysoserious.com original authorized website (whysoseriousredux.com is a fan-complied archive of all of the materials that were released). Hidden packages concealed inside cakes purchased at bakeries contained a ‘joker phone’ so that the audience members could be kept in constant contact. A number of commercialized aspects included the in-campaign Gotham City Pizzeria64 site being powered by Dominos Pizza that exemplifies Will Brooker’s observation that ‘Batman – the character, the concept, the cultural icon – is about strategic branding at every level, in a way and to an extent that escapes all other superheroes’.65 Real-world events included protestors taking to the streets at various locations against the fictional character Harvey Dent as part of the campaign’s scene setting of the film’s back-story exposition, extending the syuzhet of the film by revealing how Dent had been elected to become the district attorney of Gotham City. In the case of Why So Serious? the campaign precedes the film’s timeline and the narrative arcs of both of the characters of the Joker and Harvey Dent are triggered within the campaign. The campaign audience were provided with the sense that they had been involved in the storyline of the film having assisted the joker in the theft of the school bus in which he makes his escape in the film’s opening sequence. Phillips notes that these moments create ‘a situation where small elements of the film felt like a big payoff to the audience’.66 Brooker’s survey revealed that 63 per cent of the respondents saw ‘viral marketing and the Alternate Reality Game “Why So Serious” as absolutely integral to the film’s narrative’.67 Despite the claims for their relative success, Jim Stewartson, founder of 42 Entertainment who designed and delivered the campaign for The Dark Knight (as well as I Love Bees and Year Zero for the band Nine Inch Nails68), retrospectively noted that: Almost no one (typically less than 1  per cent of the total audience) actually participated in these projects. Most of the audience just watched the few people who did participate, or simply consumed any linear narrative that came out of the process at the end, or even more likely, just read about it.69

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Stewartson’s retrospective dismissal stems from a commercial perspective and the desire to mainstream these types of experiences, which is exemplified in his most recent endeavour RIDES.tv which will be discussed in the following chapter. However, the influence of the 1 per cent (of users who account for almost all of the action in an on-line setting) should not be underplayed in the context of viral campaigns, where their presence is valued and celebrated. This is exemplified in the recent ‘immersive pre-premiere experience’ designed by Campfire Media to promote Hunted,70 a global espionage series on Cinemax television in which an explicit reference is made to ‘the 1 per cent’. The campaign centres on a recruitment campaign launched by the in-film firm Byzantium Security,71 a clandestine intelligence organization. The posters that appeared throughout New York stated, ‘We’re not for everyone, just the 1 per cent who matter’. This targeted ‘call to action’ presents a self-reflexive acknowledgement to its imagined audience, an allusion to the 1 per cent who will interact with the campaign, and become an integral facet and driving force of its success. Moving towards considerations of recent progenitors of the ARG which although bear semblance and operate within ARG modalities, signal the maturation of the form illuminating more nuanced logics, highlighting instances where audience engagement is broadened and where vicarious engagement is enabled and encouraged. Cloverfield (2007) is subject to the most detailed and close examination within this chapter since it signals an advancement in the extended cinema form; in contrast to the other examples, the preceding campaign is much more closely related and interlinked to the film and its resultant aesthetics and semiotic codes. Such an in-depth analysis has been made possible by the fact that much of the materials associated with the campaign are still accessible. The Cloverfield campaign and film existed in parallel temporalities (in contrast to the previous examples in which the campaigns either precede or supersede the main narrative event). The film’s narrative world was stretched both spatially and temporally in the surrounding campaign which explored the mythology of the world and the explanation of the origins of the Cloverfield monster, a fact unexplained in the film's diegesis. The film tells the story of the invasion of Manhattan Island by an unidentified monster, from the viewpoint of a group of young people. Existing within the post-9/11 milieu of downtown New York, Cloverfield could be identified under the ‘undirected films’ moniker as proposed by Rombes,72 through its simulation of the hand-held video camera operated by one of the characters.73 The film’s rendering of reality and authenticity is enhanced through its implied medium;

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the film itself runs to the same temporal length as a DV tape. The film makes explicit thematic, literal and aesthetic allusions to the 9/11 terror attacks in New York through various techniques and devices including the perpetuation of the familiar user-generated news footage. (9/11 discourses of the film have been covered by other studies.)74 The Cloverfield campaign launched on 4 July 2007 with a theatrical film trailer which published the 1–18–08 website (which, along with Producer J.J. Abram’s name, was the only information for the film that was provided at this point). The 1–18–08 website was the starting point from which the audience members could begin to locate and link to the various constituent elements of the Cloverfield topology which included multiple photographs which were periodically uploaded to the 1–18–08 website throughout the campaign. Myspace social media profiles were also created for the different characters of the film and the campaign (there are some characters in the campaign who didn’t feature in the film itself). Infilm characters included Rob Hawkins, Elizabeth McIntyre, Hudson Platt, Lily Ford, Marlena Diamond, Jason Hawkins, in-campaign characters were Jamie Lascano and Teddy Hansen. These profiles were also maintained and updated throughout the duration of the campaign. In-campaign fictional websites included Tagruato75 (a Japanese deep sea drilling company); T.I.D.O wave76 (a resistance group, their website is set up in direct opposition to the Tagruato site, which shows the Tagruato logo underscored by the slogan ‘bleeding the world dry since 1945’); Slusho!77 (a Japanese high energy soft drink website) and a personal video blog entitled ‘jamieandteddy.com’ which hosted eleven short videos that the in-campaign character of Jamie Lascano produces for her boyfriend Teddy Hansen.78 Textural and textual consistency were maintained across the various elements of the campaign and in some cases were graphically denoted. For example, the Tagruato, Slusho! and jamieandteddy websites each display a small sword icon – a fictional marker which was inconsistently applied, leading to speculation as to its significance and purpose on the associated fan-created forums. In addition a number of YouTube authentic televised news reports were created. A live-event also formed part of the campaign to which those following the ARG were rewarded with an invitation to Rob’s leaving party at the end of the experience, which features in the opening scenes of the film. The Cloverfield Kishin four-part Manga comic was also produced in the Japanese language. A proliferation of fan-created sites evolved which became the locus of interpretative activity, used to collate and interpret the materials and to document and track updates. These included Cloverpedia79 and the Unfiction forum.80 The

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most prolific of these sites appeared to be Cloverfield Clues81 founded by software engineer Dennis Acevedo which allegedly recorded 2.6 million unique visitors and just under 5 million page views. The site was reportedly accumulating 70,000 visitors daily prior to the film’s release.82 These different outlets facilitated collaborations between Japan and the United States, since much of the exposition within the clues required translation from Japanese to the English language. For example, almost all of the pages of the Japanese Manga comic were scanned, translated from Japanese to English and uploaded to Cloverfield Clues. The engagement and concatenation of the campaign elements which at first sight appear seemingly unlinked and tangential to the untrained eye of the casual viewer of the film reveal an entire back-story to the film, enabling access to the epistemic depths of the film which perpetuate an entirely different reading of the film in subsequent viewings. All elements of the campaign act as expedients cloaked in dissimulation, for example the photographs uploaded to the 1–18–08 website depicting pictures of the different characters from the film, mutilated sea creatures and Japanese sushi chefs, when flipped over revealed written messages on the reverse. In the case of the image of the chef, a recipe had been written in Japanese, the last ingredient of which was ‘Kaitei No Mitsu’, which when translated read ‘Deep sea nectar.’ This ingredient acts as a linking narrative device that audience members could follow throughout different elements of the diegesis, and which ultimately reveals the truth about the origins of the Cloverfield monster. Through reading the content of the corporate websites, it is revealed that Slusho’s core ingredient is ‘deep sea nectar’ and is owned by the Tagruato, the deep-sea drilling company. In a later video on jamieandteddy.com (number 5 of 11), Jamie opens a package containing an edible substance marked ‘do not eat’, which is accompanied by a tape recording made by Teddy explaining that he has been captured by Tagruato. Jamie is the only character from the campaign to later appear in the film; in it we see her asleep on the sofa at Rob’s leaving party wearing the identical outfit to that which she was seen wearing in her final video blog post (see Figure 2.4), thus invoking the film and the campaign’s correlative nature. Speculation on Cloverfield Clues assumes that her comatose state in the film is a result of her consumption of the substance from the forbidden package, which is assumed to be the ‘Sea Bed Nectar’. (In-campaign diegesis reveals that the ingredient was classified by the American Food Association as a ‘high-grade stimulant’.) Jamie reads Teddy’s disappearance and lack of contact as a rejection and in a subsequent video (number 8 of 11), Jamie eats some of the substance in defiance; in the latter three videos her behaviour becomes erratic and hyperactive.

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A number of YouTube authentic televised news reports from the United States, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Russia, Korea and Japan showing the sinking of the ‘Chuai’ Tagruato oil rig and the subsequent unexplained explosions of debris from beneath the water were also produced. These videos portend the imminent catastrophe of the invasion of Manhattan Island. This leads to speculation on the Cloverfield Clues blog as to whether the rigs activities disturbed the sea creature residing in the depths below (which had mutated as a result of the exposure to deep sea nectar). The timeline of the campaign is both consistent and correlative with the in-film action. The Myspace profile pages showed posts and videos leading up to the film’s release date (and also the date of the diegetic events in-film) 18 January 2008, or 1–18–08; this synchronic marker was indicative of a culmination of all of the elements of the preceding campaign and a key-date in the story world were drawn together. The posts reveal the character’s planning for Rob’s leaving party, which are the opening scenes of the film. The website of the activist group protesting about Tagruato’s activities83 T.I.D.O Wave shows blog posts commenting on the disappearance of Teddy Hansen subsequent to the oil rig explosion. On the 18 January both the Tagruato and T.I.D.O Wave websites are locked down for maintenance in the former case and by the ‘Internal Affairs Department’ in the latter. Jamie’s last video is posted on the same date as she plans for the party. A photo is uploaded of a beached bloodied sea mammal on 1–18–08. All serve to fuel fervent speculation on the forums leading up to the film’s release. Further materials are then revealed subsequent to the film’s release. These include additional materials supplied by the military in May 2008. These can be accessed using the username and the password84 which are published on the ‘Project Cloverfield’ sticker which seals the DVD that reveals access to the photographic evidence. The penultimate post dated the 1 May on the MissingTeddyHansen Blog is from Alyse Hansen, Teddy’s sister,85 asking for help to find the password to unlock the ‘hidden’ files. The files include pictures which show the discovery of the Cloverfield monster (and parasites) by Tagruato submarines, deep on the ocean floor, near Tagruato’s Chuai Oil Drilling Station. The forums speculate that the submarines may have disturbed the monster causing the Chuai station attack which is depicted in each of the YouTube news reports which show the rig violently collapsing in to the sea. Prior to the Australian release of the film in May 2008, a similar simulated news report was created showing the monster attacking Sydney Harbour in addition to other viral videos, conveying a perceptual and persistent simulated realism around

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the experience, created through hand-held aesthetics as a re-affirmation of their existence within discourses of the real. Watching the Blu-ray release of the film in ‘Special Investigations Mode’ also confirms the speculations and reveals the key exposition hinted at within the viral campaign in the parlance of military report statements. For example, one statement reads ‘Preliminary blood samples from HSPs (Human Scale Parasites) showed high levels of Katei No Mitsu (“Seabed’s Nectar”), the key ingredient in Tagruato’s Slusho! Beverage’. These HSPs are the parasites which propagate from the monster, seen falling from the monster in various scenes of the film, and from which one of the characters Marlene sustains a fatal bite. Another states, ‘Investigations are underway regarding a connection between the Chuai destruction and the Large Scale Aggressor (LSA) attack in New York’. Thus linking the oil rig collapse shown in the YouTube news reports to the monster in the film. A further statement confirms, ‘Bold Futura’s satellite “Hatsui” was instrumental in the search and identification of the Chimpanz III fragment off the coast of New York’. This alludes to the fragment seen falling into the sea behind Coney Island in the final shot of the film (see Figure 2.7). Further reading of the various news headlines on the Tagruato website also confirms this.86 This retrospective information provided to an ‘un-knowing’ audience would again stimulate new viewings and re-readings of the film, and elicit the ‘correct’ comprehension of the film. The dominant (mis)conception was that this splash was caused by the space craft that delivered the Cloverfield ‘alien’. Various YouTube videos reflect this assumption in their titles which include ‘UFO Splash down’. This led to much putative debate and discussion in various online forums after the film’s release. A number of fan-created frame-stepped videos on YouTube reveal audience members retrospectively studying and freeze-framing sections of Cloverfield in order to locate hidden film stills. Freezing the film at the right moment reveals a still image of King Kong pulling an aircraft form the sky, a giant ant from Them and The beast from 20,000 fathoms. These appear at moments where the video camera tape is ruptured in the diegesis (caused by characters stopping and rewinding the tape in order to ‘replay’ what they have witnessed). The inclusion and subsequent discovery of these images irrevocably embed allusions to the lineage of monster invasion films to which Cloverfield is the latest, paying visual homage to the film’s antecedents. In addition, at the end of the credits, the reversal of a section of unintelligible dialogue reveals the words ‘help us, it’s still alive’. Freezing the opening title of the film reveals the ‘dharma’ logo, the fictional company from J.J. Abram’s Lost, thus making reference to the film’s

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creator, acknowledging the film’s derivative position, and invoking conspiratorial associations of the fictional company. The entire Cloverfield experience is one steeped in conspiracy and as such the inclusion of the logo acts as a signifier to its subterfuge. The conspiratorial narrative also invokes the multitude of conspiracy discourses that pervade post-9/11 postulations. Thematic dimensions of Cloverfield also extend to implicit environmental anxieties which are played out both within the film’s subtext and within the extratextual materials. The YouTube news reports allude to various environmental impacts and disasters. In the US reports, concerns are expressed of a potential oil slick affecting Connecticut as a result of the oil rig explosion and speculation that the T.I.D.O Wave action group may have been responsible emanates. In the Australian news report, the disturbance caused by the monster is likened to the seismic activity of the Asian tsunami. As a result of a retroactive analysis such as this, these themes resonate further within the context of recent mediated concerns around the impact of hydraulic fracturing (fracking), of which Tagruato would be considered proponents, thus speaking once more to the cultural moment, in this instance by helping audiences to rehearse and manage fears around global environmental issues. In the final cut of the film, there are a number of retrospective and deictic narrative vignettes, which come in the form of momentary mid-shots revealing references to information that only those who have engaged in the extratextual materials described here would recognize, thus invoking a spectatorial omnipotence. These moments are captured in Figures 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7. These introspective ‘knowing winks’87 to the audience, include the Slusho! T-shirt worn by the character Jason; this is clearly seen in a shot a number of times (see Figure 2.5), the shot in which we see Jamie asleep on a sofa at Rob’s party (see Figure 2.6) and the fragment falling into the sea in the final shot of the film (see Figure 2.7). These instants function as hyperdiegetic reference points, henceforth known as ‘diegetic portals’, which are windows through which deeper access into the varying diegetic levels of the film and its hyperdiegesis can be enacted. These moments of which Marie-Laure Ryan might refer to as ‘rhetorical metalepsis’88 cognitively transport the ‘knowing’ audience member further into the latitudinal depths of the z-axis within a cinematic mise-en-abîme.89 These instants could also be referred to as touch points, in transmedia business parlance or rabbit holes90 in ARG nomenclature, but these terms do not adequately acknowledge the access to the text’s epistemic dimensions which are here facilitated. These function in the case of Cloverfield, as a cognitive

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Figure 2.5  Cloverfield, 2007. The Slusho! T-shirt deliberately framed on a number of occasions

transaction between producer and audience, which invoke a dramatic irony for those audience members who engaged with the preceding campaign. They also act as ‘cohesion devices’ a term coined by Bordwell referring to the ‘formal tactics that link passages at the local level – from scene to scene’.91 They could also be considered as what Siegfried Kracauer referred to as a ‘conduit’,92 moments where memories can be invoked on the screen: ‘In a flash the camera exposes the paraphernalia of our former existence, stripping them of the significance that originally transfigured them so they are changed from things in their own right into invisible conduits’.93 They could also be considered as what Gene Youngblood has termed ‘Parallel event streams’,94 whereby ‘Digital code offers

Figure 2.6  Cloverfield, 2007. Still taken from video blog 11, Jamie’s last post and still taken from party scene, adjacent

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Figure 2.7  Cloverfield, 2007, Satellite fragment falls into the sea

formal solutions to the “tense” limitations of mechanical cinema. Past, present and future can be spoken in the same frame at once’.95 Where once the cinema was a two-dimensional medium, this type of narrative layering on the z-axis is characteristic of the emerging cinematic experience, which requires audience engagement moving beyond a singular viewing experience. Once again freeze framing, pausing, rewinding and replaying are invoked, as Walter Benjamin stated, ‘With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not merely render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject’.96 Cloverfield is a film which encourages the freeze frame, pause, rewind and playing in reverse, rendering the film text manipulable. The textual analysis which the audience members engage in, as a result, is reminiscent of Mary Anne Doane’s contemplation of the close-up; she states that its experience is one of ‘stasis, as a resistance to narrative linearity, as a vertical gateway to an almost irrecoverable depth behind the image’97 (My emphasis). Moreover, these moments instantiate and render indelible the preceding campaign into the fabric and text of the final cut of the film. These plot devices pertain to the underlying mythology of the film and add a new layering of grammar to the film experience, inaugurating a viewing mode which represents a diachronic shift in the evolution of a cinematic grammar. Perceived as hyperdiegetic residual fragments, one of them literally falls from the sky into the film; these diegetic portals are extended ever further outside of the film’s universe, invoking the omnidiegetic universe of the creator which is synonymous with the J.J. Abrams’ brand. For example, the Slusho! drink features in Abrams’

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TV show Alias and the Targuato logo appears on a skyscraper within a futuristic San Francisco skyline in a StarTrek Superbowl advert. Cloverfield is exceptional in its status because it required engagement with its extended campaign materials in order to uncover the meanings and backstories of the film. It had a predetermined timeline that existed prior, during and after the film event. The corpus of material generated by the Cloverfield experience has been archived and managed by the fans, and can be accessed by latter visitors. Others reading these blogs can derive vicarious pleasures from the fervent fan-based activity. A film conceived to be viewed multiple times, Cloverfield reveals latent dimensions and engenders entirely different readings every time that it is re-watched. The Prometheus (2012) web based campaign consisted of a number of intradiegetic elements, aligned to the cultural language and expectations of its imagined spectator. In May 2012, the campaign used LinkedIn to target key social media ‘influencers’ inviting them to apply for a vacancy on the Prometheus project. Information taken from the user’s CV and profile were used to generate personalized messages which stated: We’re currently looking for candidates to play a significant role in ‘Project Prometheus’, a highly classified initiative we’ve been developing for decades now. We feel that your thorough exploration of transmedia on Forbes.com, as well as your work in academia, suggest that you might be an excellent candidate for a Research Director or Lead Interpreter position.98

Another email targeted at a different recipient stated, ‘We feel that your work in design and technology, along with your interest in the cerebrum, suggest you might be an excellent candidate for our sciences division’.99 All elements of the campaign used the language of the internet to target the imagined audience which seemed to be the professional corporate male. It launched with a TEDTalk delivered from the future by the Weyland Industries founder, Sir Peter Weyland (played by Guy Pearce). The URL provided at the end of the video led the audience members to the Weyland Industries, Project Prometheus website where they could explore a number of facets that pertained to the film. Visitors could create their own ID card, and opt to play the role of investor or new recruit in the Prometheus initiative100 and engage in various aptitude tests to ascertain whether or not they were fit for space exploration, all of which has been synergistically optimized for Internet Explorer 9. An ‘unboxing’ video produced as an in-film advertisement for ‘David’ the company’s

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latest innovation could also be accessed. Un-boxing is the cultural practice whereby the un-packing of new high-tech consumer products are video recorded and then posted on YouTube. This practice has been dubbed ‘the new geek porn’ and ‘the hi-tech equivalent of a striptease.’101 Un-boxing search trends began to surface in 2006 (according to Google Trends102). A dedicated website unboxing.com hosts its own Unboxing Live! video channel. This phenomenon has now been co-opted as an advertising practice under a commercial rubric, illuminated by the fact that the fictional advert for David was streamed to known destinations of the male, gadget-oriented targeted demographic of Prometheus (who would instantly recognize the use of this YouTube sub-genre) including the Mashable Product pages and to Verizion FiOS TV serving to authenticate its position within a discourse of the real. Various other sites were released to complete the film’s back-story. Elizabeth Shaw’s Project Genesis site enabled access to her research from which her archive could be downloaded, including personal notes and sketches. In contrast to the concept of the ‘Media event’ as discussed by Elsaesser as ‘the drama of television itself: trying to turn information into narrative’,103 the generation of these materials functioned as a narrative into information endeavour. In its production of multiple fact-based pieces of information such as specification sheets, news reports and authentic data such as statistics, investment opportunities and aptitude results, Prometheus represents a reconfiguration of the nature of these materials which have always been produced as part of traditional film marketing campaigns, but are being presented, made accessible and remediated in different ways which reflect the nascent literacies of audience members. After the film’s release, the end credits pointed to http://www. whatis101112.com which posed a number of questions which it stated would be answered on Blu-ray, a method by which to ensure subsequent sales and the longevity of the Prometheus experience. In the same way that Requiem for a Dream aestheticized the dominant computer narrative of the time, in the wake of the dot-com boom and the millennium bug, Prometheus’ use of TEDtalks, unboxing, genetic science and LinkedIn speaks to the current cultural moment and corporate vernacular. It also signifies a move towards what Paul Booth has identified as ‘Demediation’ which he defines as ‘a state where the ubiquity of mediation hides that selfsame mediation’.104 These campaigns are the epitome in their seamless symbiosis of form and content, fiction and reality. Audience members use exactly the same tools and modes of computer-mediated engagements in their real-world

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encounters as they do in their fictional ones, but are seemingly able to seamlessly traverse the hidden ontological spheres of fact and fiction through a conversance of fictional conventions that are implicit within the text. Prometheus also represents another interesting facet, and that is a comingof-age of the mainstream ARG/Transmedia film campaign, where corporate sanitization becomes an implicit theme within the experience. The viral aesthetics which characterized previous campaigns and their ‘underground’ conspiratorial nature, are replaced in Prometheus by a veneer of corporate logics and aesthetic officialdom. These prior examples are arguably predominantly driven by economic determinants and industry imperatives, all act as a supporting precursor to the main event (of film, book, car or computer game). There are a number of artsbased and independent projects worthy of note which foreground the evolution and development of new narrative techniques, and audience experiences which exist beyond these economic imperatives, eschewing commercialism and are stand-alone entities in their own right. One such example is the 2011 project Pandemic 1.0 directed by Lance Weiler, which was a temporally and geo-specific pervasive ‘story-world’ project (see Figure 2.8). It temporally spanned 120 hours as part of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival ‘New Frontier’ storytelling lab, and spatially spanned the festival location at Park City, Utah, as well as virtual online spaces. The premise of the story was that audience members (as numerous participants and characters in the story) constituted from the 40,000 film festival goers had 120 hours to stop the spread of a pandemic. The experience included a short film, a mobile app, various social media streams, a website, physical objects (including bottles of water, golden ‘objects’ and a connected toy teddy bear), on-location ‘actors’ equipped with cameras to document their experiences and a centralized ‘mission control’ unit, as a hub for data gathering and visualization generation. As Weiler stated, such experiences should be about ‘texture’ and ‘putting people in the shoes of the protagonist, and it’s about letting them feel something that they wouldn’t normally feel through a passive film’.105 The Pandemic 1.0 experience was formatted as a five-act structure through which multiple timelines ran. The story-time, discourse-time and experientialtime would speed up or slow down, as would the spread of the disease dependent on the audiences types and levels of interactivity. The twenty different actors were scripted with 100 tweets each, and as Weiler explained, ‘based on game play and interaction we determined how long a character lived or if a character died,

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as things were found, as people were commenting, just different interactions within the experience that were captured; the data points’.106 Weiler explained his intentions to create a new pervasive format where audience members encouraged to embellish the stories, developing deeper physical, emotional and cognitive proximity with story-worlds through the use of technology. Pandemic 1.0 conveys a thematic resonance with current concerns around the rapid spread of information, and the exponential growth of data generation and our access and exposure to it. Pandemic 1.0 signals an entirely new model through which the capabilities of these types of storytelling and cinematic experiences can be explored. These move beyond promotional and awareness building imperatives to vehicles for research and development (Pandemic 1.0 was used as a story R & D for forthcoming film project Hope Is Missing,107 which is due to be filmed in early 2014108). Furthermore, Pandemic 1.0 became the basis of a study concerned with how actual pandemics spread, and how disasters could be managed in the future. Scientists from the Wellcome Trust were involved in order to explore ‘how Pandemic 1.0 could be used and modeled moving forward to be used for public health messaging’, denoting a move towards ‘purposeful storytelling’109 (which characterizes a number of emerging projects which will be discussed in more depth in Chapter 5).

Figure 2.8  Pandemic 1.0, 2011

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2.3 Extended exhibition Recent trends in cinematic expansion include the incorporation of live events into cinematic schedules. A full consideration of ‘Event cinema’ which includes both the simultaneous and subsequent broadcasts of live sports events, theatrical performances, plays, opera and ballet is beyond the purview of this book. Instead the focus is upon the expansion of the fictional dimensions into the cinematic space and what Fabien Riggall has labelled ‘Event-led distribution’.110 Secret Cinema, founded by Riggall in 2007 as part of the Future Cinema company, is an organization which delivers tailored and alternative viewing experiences of a film, and what have been referred to as an ‘anti-multiplex experiences’.111 These events provide a collective and augmented experience around a film. Audience members purchase a ticket before even knowing what the screening is going to be, are required to make preparations before attending the event (for Casablanca (1942) audience members were provided with identification papers and instructions on what to wear) and are then subjected to an ‘experience’ in which the film is literalized in a location prior to the screening to set the scene of the film itself, and throughout the film viewing experience.112 Natalie Haynes explains the essence of the Secret Cinema experience: ‘This is immersive cinema at its best: you go to watch a movie in a setting that makes you feel that you could be in the movie’.113 Within a Secret Cinema event, audience members knowingly and complicity enter an in-fiction space. Contingent upon filmic and cinematic literacies, these experiences depend upon an assumption that familiarity will promote feelings of nostalgia, based on what Raymond Williams identified as residual culture, which he defined as, ‘experiences, meanings and values … [which are] lived and practiced on the basis of the residue – cultural as well as social – of some previous social formation’.114 The re-staging of the film by the Secret Cinema creators, and its re-experience by the audience who are positioned as ‘characters’ are steeped within this cultural residue. For example, in a screening of the Shawshank Redemption (1994) in November 2012, audience members were summoned to a court hearing and instructed to wear long johns to the event. Upon arrival at Bethnal Green Library, audience members were individually sentenced before being transported in buses with blacked-out windows to a disused school where they were stripped of their belongings and entered into the world of a prisoner as inmates.115 Closely aligned to physical immersive theatre experience, such as the promenade theatre of Punch Drunk (2000–) and the on-street installations of

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Blast Theory (1991–), the Secret Cinema ‘in-film’ experience has been described by Ed Potton as, ‘combining film-going with the visceral anarchy of site-specific theatre and the clandestine thrills of an illegal rave’.116 This quasi-cinematic experience could be conceived as a response to Elsaesser’s earlier observation around cinema’s lacking of liveness which is endemic of the televisual: ‘What is it the cinema can set against this, how does it compensate for its rival medium’s recursiveness, this sense of “being there”, in order to have been there’.117 Within the case studies of this chapter there is an indication that emerging cinematic practices are compensating for this perceived liveness through the recreation of the film’s milieu in both virtual and real spaces, which are embedded with a performative dimension for the audience to engage within. This occurs virtually in the online examples of this chapter, such as Cloverfield in which the audience inhabit the film’s mythologies through their explorations of the in-film websites and in Prometheus where the audience members play the role of an employee of The Weyland Corporation. A recent example of an interactive networked performance which extends this notion ever further is The Night Vision Experiment118 (2013). An equally clandestine affair to that of Secret Cinema whereby at a pre-arranged instance, a real-time online performance unfolds, which occurs over social networks, including Twitter and YouTube. Performers and audience members inhabit shared networked spaces and engage in a digital performance, extending notions of interactive theatre in cyberspace and cybertheatre as proposed by Steve Dixon.119 This compensation for liveness within cinematic environs is not new, but redolently evoked in cult cinema practices, for instance as Graeme Turner noted, ‘The audiences for The Rocky Horror Picture Show are now noted for turning up dressed in character, and participating in the screening/performance of the film by singing along, dancing in the aisles, or even climbing on the stage in front of the screens’.120 A study into the 1979 cinema audience revealed that ‘The social experience promised by Rocky Horror’s reputation and satisfaction of one’s curiosity are potent drawing cards for first-time viewers’.121 As John Ellis notes, ‘it is not cinema as an object that is sold, but cinema as an anticipated experience’.122 In traditional scenarios, as Christian Metz states, The space of the diegesis and that of the movie theater (surrounding the spectator) are incommensurable. Neither includes or influences the other, and everything occurs as if in an invisible but airtight partition were keeping them

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Secret Cinema combines these registers. The experiences are marketed via word of mouth and a social media campaign and once participants have viewed the experience, they are instructed to ‘tell no one’ what they have seen. In addition, character profiles are created on Facebook, and actors engage with the audience members via these pages, before, during and after the event. The Secret Cinema experience is proving to be a popular way of experiencing film, espoused by its many followers,124 unmooring assumptions relating to the fading popularity of cinema (in favour of online, on-demand modalities), and one which audience members seem willing to pay a premium for. Standard tickets cost £50, in the case of The Shawsank Redemption, for an additional £30 audience members could stay overnight in one of the ‘cells’ and be subjected to an early-morning workout; £100 tickets enabled audience members to play the governor’s guests and be served a three-course meal.125 This particular experience attracted over 13,500 people.126 Elsaesser states, ‘Its commodity value resides in its temporality, here expressed as the time advantage: we are prepared to pay extra for a film while it is still an “event” ’.127 Says Secret Cinema founder Fabien Riggall, ‘The biggest problem in society is that people aren’t connecting or having communal experiences like they used to […] I believe we’ve hit a cultural shift and found something that really resonates with people. Audiences want to be transported, to be allowed to lose themselves’.128 It transforms the previously configured viewing experience beyond Roland Barthes conception: […] by letting oneself be fascinated twice over, by the image and by its surroundings – as if I had two bodies at the same time: a narcissistic body which gazes, lost, into the engulfing mirror [or the screen], and a perverse body, ready to fetishise not the image but precisely what exceeds it: the texture of the sound, the space, the darkness, the obscure mass of other bodies, the beam of light, entering the theatre and leaving.129

In 2012, a Euston warehouse was converted into a spaceship to screen Prometheus, the first new-release screening that Secret Cinema had undertaken, signalling the film industries’ recognition of the influence and revenue generation opportunities that are presented by this new exhibition model. The Secret Cinema version of

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Prometheus generated more income than the BFI Imax release.130 Prior to the event audience members were invited to attend an architectural dig and to visit the British Museum.131 The 190,000 square-foot venue housed a cockpit and loading bay complete with the action vehicles from the film through which audience members entered through a decontamination chamber. Secret Cinema marks a return to and an enhancement of what Benjamin refers to as ‘an object of simultaneous collective experience, as architecture has always been able to do, as the epic poem could do at one time, and as film is able to do today’132 (My emphasis). In part, the Secret Cinema model can be seen to respond to the current film industry imperative to find new ways of monetizing content in an era of declining cinema ticket sales and an increase in on-demand, online access to films, reminiscent of the 1930s ‘Bank Night’ and ‘Dish Night’ initiatives which were designed to encourage audiences to the cinema in the Depression era. The extension of liveness and eventfulness into the cinematic arena, as Helen Piper states, ‘has become a powerful means of engaging new audiences and encouraging participation’.133 This move towards liveness in the cinematic realm signals a significant aggrandizement of cinematic consumption in an expansion and deepening of what can now be perceived to constitute a ‘cinematic’ experience.

2.4 Conclusion The emergent viewing and experiential practices explored within this chapter are similar in a number of ways. They facilitate the consummation of the desire to engage in the repetitious and ritualistic practices of watching and rewatching films which are then subject to spectatorial revisionism in subsequent viewings. As Elsaesser states, they function to ‘echo, repeat, and retransmit the film experience’134 and engender a deeper, more involved experience with the text themselves. The case studies herein signal an evolution from the esoteric and hermetic ARG to more accessible experiences of broader appeal whereby cinematic extensions are seamlessly interwoven into the language, cultures, frameworks and infrastructures of the social web, using corporate and social media vernaculars within which advanced levels of literacy and narrative comprehension are demonstrated and the contemporary vicissitudes of cinematic experience and consumption are illuminated.

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These examples emphatically express that there is no longer a clear fact–fiction binary, instead an intermediate, liminal imbrication of unfiction persists, the level at which these cinematic extensions redolently invoke Guy Debord’s claim that ‘everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation’.135 These extensions, whether web-based or real-world, have become the expected fodder of new mainstream film releases, pertaining to an industry that is shredding its vestigial paratexts and instead focusing upon their reconfiguration, strategic and permutable release. The discursive construction of the audience member as ‘character’ and the emerging alterity of viewership are also elicited within these experiences. Both pre-cinema and post-cinema engagements elucidated herein, extend and intensify narrative affect, heighten spectatorial absorption and enable vicarious audience engagement. They enable the audience member to play a part, and to enact the escapists desire to be ‘in the movies’ eliciting ‘synchronized collective states of consciousness’.136 Complex social-textual networks are revealed through the resultant interpretive activities which reward the audience for looking deeper in their quest for immersion and spectatorial omnipotence. Audiences seek clarification and certitude in these meaning-making activities and engage in altered understandings of the films which debunk previous assumptions made at their first viewing. These developments signal the beginnings of a ‘digital spectatorship’ theory and an emerging mode of viewing which is characterized by the inculcation into new grammars of three-dimensional comprehension, recognition and understanding of the new screen language, and the generation of assimilated knowledge. As Laura Mulvey has noted, such a mode of viewing overturns ‘hierarchies of privilege’, ‘setting up unexpected links that displace the chain of meaning invested in cause and effect. This kind of interactive spectatorship brings with it pleasures reminiscent of the processes of textual analysis that open up understanding and unexpected emotion while also attacking the text’s original cohesion’.137 These also signal a move towards a ‘digitextuality’, whereby Anna Everett states ‘new digital media technologies make meaning not only by building a new text through translation and absorption of other texts, but also by embedding the entirety of other texts (digital and analogue) seamlessly within the new’.138 The creation of live events throughout history for the purposes of mediation has long been associated with the operating principle of television as a ‘live’ medium.139 Boorstin states that ‘The power to make a reportable event is thus

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the power to make experience’.140 Cinematic experiences as constructed within this chapter emanate time-based, collective, live cinematic experiences within which to share collective epiphanies. This quest for ‘liveness’, to evoke the sense of ‘being there’, the desire to be even at the moment of production further extends emerging variations in cinematic spectatorial experience. For example, the construction of the spectator as a ‘set tracker’,141 the industry given name for fans who locate film sets to photograph and share with other fans, exemplifies new modalities of audience engagement with the creation of these texts (fan creation and crowdsourcing will be discussed further in Chapter 6). Early on in The Hunger Games (2012) campaigns, fans were invited to the set of the film via Facebook. As Elizabeth Evans notes, ‘The moment of broadcast (or release) is already too late; it is the moment of production that is privileged in a way that is not present in film and present only occasionally in broadcast television that involves live studio audiences’.142 The audience’s desire for the live is also captured in Nicola Jean Evans’ article: Perhaps the desire to go behind-the-scenes is symptomatic of the attempt to transform cinema into a live process, to find a sense of something unfolding through time. […] Whether through combining cinema with other media, or through the lengthening attention to cinema’s backstage, the search for something not made but in the making aspires to recapture a relationship to culture in which its unique performances mark us as unique too, for having been a witness.143

The ontological shift in the status of cinema in which deliberate ephemerality144 and time-based and temporal access are organizing principles calls for the development of deft and adept ways to document and archive these new formations, their epistemic operations and affective impact in order to reconceptualize readings of the films and their resultant spectatorial engagements. As Deleuze claimed, ‘When it is said that cinema is dead, it’s especially stupid, because the cinema is at the very beginning of an exploration of audiovisual relations, which are relations of time’.145 This chapter has highlighted that the viewing of a film at a cinema is only one possible version of that film, and we are in an era in which cinema is constantly redefining and extending the parameters of its experience in a multitude of ways. Having examined various collective cinematic experiences, the following chapter moves to consider solitary viewing experiences, designed for the singular spectator. Having now acknowledged the ephemerality and transience of the live cinematic experience which, as Jon Dovey has stated, ‘In the age of

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media abundance, perhaps it is our attention that becomes more ephemeral rather than the media themselves’,146 Chapter 3 turns to explorations into how new technologies and cultural practices are enabling the ‘capture’, the ‘keeping’ and the fetishization of the film/cinema object/experience.

Notes Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 22–23. 2 Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 10. 3 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Digital Cinema: Delivery, Event, Time’, in Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffman (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998b), 214. 4 Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 332. 5 Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and Other Media Paratexts (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 221. 6 Göran Bolin, ‘Audience Activity as a Co-Production of Crossmedia Content’, in Crossmedia Innovations: Texts, Markets, Institutions, ed. Indrek Ibrus and Carlos A. Scolari (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012), 150. 7 Andrea Phillips, A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences Across Multiple Platforms (New York: McGraw Hill, 2012), 29. 8 According to Jakob Nielsen, Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute, 9 October 2006, http://www.nngroup.com/articles/participationinequality/. 9 Refer to Figure 1.1 in Chapter 1. 10 Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 133. Grusin here builds on Jason Sperb’s concept of a ‘cinephilia of anticipation’ in his discussions of the Final Destination narrative formula in Jason Sperb, ‘Déjà Vu for Something That Hasn’t Happened Yet/Time, Repetition and Jamais Vu within a Cinephilia of Anticipation’, in Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Film, Pleasure and Digital Culture Vol. 1, ed. Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb (London: Wallflower, 2009), 140–157. 11 With sincere thanks to Fabrice Lyczba for introducing this phenomena to me and for sharing his fascinating work and primary materials: Fabrice Lyczba ‘ “Putting the Show Over”: Theatrical Prologues and the Boundaries of Reception Space in 1920s American Film Exhibition’ (paper presented at the 1

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16th International SERCIA Conference, University of Bath, 16 September 2011) and ‘ “The Idea May Boomerang”: Realism in the Age of Ballyhoo, or, Playing with the Illusion of Reality in 1920s Film Reception’ (paper presented at the Film Consumption in the Digital Age Conference, University of East Anglia, 11–12 November, 2011). 12 Harold B. Franklin, Motion Picture Theater Management (New York: Doran, 1927), 250. 13 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1992, Original edition, 1961), 9. 14 John W. Alicoate, ‘Practical Showmanship Ideas’, in Film Year Book 1927, ed. John W. Alicoate (New York: The Film Daily, 1928), 489–493. 15 Alicoate, ‘Practical Showmanship Ideas’, 490. 16 Alicoate, ‘Practical Showmanship Ideas’, 491. 17 Quoted in Stephen Bottomore, ‘The Panicking Audience?: Early Cinema and the “Train Effect” ’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19 no. 2, 1999:181. 18 Franklin, Motion Picture Theater Management, 252. 19 Lyczba, ‘The Idea May Boomerang’, 4. 20 The sites original addresses were: http://www.finalexit.net, http://www.angelcam. org, http://www.intercon-x.com, http://www.silentcity.net, none of which have remained online. Further information about this film can be located at: http://www.indicanpictures.com/films/drama/on-line/. 21 Mirada was founded in December 2010 by Guillermo del Toro, Mathew Cullen, Guillermo Navarro, and Javier Jimenez. Currently, approximately 150 people work in the Mirada studio; including production personnel, producers, creatives, artists, designers and programmers. 22 http://departmentofhumanmanagement.org/. 23 http://www.mirada.com/stories/dhm. 24 http://www.tryablixa.com/. 25 Mark Thomas McGee, Beyond Ballyhoo: Motion Picture Promotion and Gimmicks (Jefferson, NC: Mcfarland & Co. 2011), 128–130. 26 A number of pharmaceutical discourses have been noted in instances whereby a fictionalized drug or pharmaceutical company is created as a tool through which to extend the fictional diegesis into the real-world, as well as invoking cultural anxieties into dependence and addiction. These will be discussed more fully in Chapter 7 along with other emergent diegetic tools and tropes. 27 Originally published at http://www.requiemforadream.com/, is now archived at http://archive.hi-res.net/requiem/ (accessed 7 August 2013). 28 Interview with Alexander Jogovich: http://hi-res.net/archives/digital-archeologyrequiem-for-a-dream-interview-with-alexandra-jugovic.html.

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The company hi-res originally created http://www.soulbath.com/main.html which inspired Aronofsky to commission the company to design and create the Requiem for a Dream website using the same aesthetics and principles of decay and disruption. The company have since produced websites in the same vein for feature films including The Fountain (2006), Donnie Darko (2001) and Saw (2004). 29 The original flash-based site was at http://www.otnemem.com, now available to view at: http://www.exclusivemedia.com/films/view/filmid/355/. 30 http://dev.datatragedy.com/. 31 Nicholas Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age (London: Wallflower, 2009), 3. 32 Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age, 9. 33 Fincina Hopgood, ‘Before Big Brother, There Was Blair Witch: The Selling of “Reality” ’, in Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking, ed. Gary D. Rhodes and John Parris Springer (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006), 248. 34 In addition to Hopgood’s work, there is a proliferation of academic research into The Blair Witch Project directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez (1999, USA) including: Jane Roscoe, ‘The Blair Witch Project Mock-Documentary Goes Mainstream’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 43, 2000: 3–8; Jay P. Telotte, ‘The Blair Witch Project: Film and the Internet’, Film Quarterly 54 no. 3, 2001:32–39; Margrit Schreier, ‘ “Please Help Me; All I Want to Know Is: Is It Real or Not?”: How Recipients View the Reality Status of the Blair Witch Project’, Poetics Today 25 no. 2, 2004:305–334 and Peg Aloi, ‘Beyond the Blair Witch: A New Horror Aesthetic?’ in The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to Reality TV and Beyond, ed. Geoff King (Bristol: Intellect, 2005), 187–200. 35 Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Brain Is the Screen: An Interview with Gilles Deleuze’, Trans. Marie Therese Guirgis, in The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000), 366. 36 Sean Stewart, ‘Foreward’, in Pervasive Games Theory and Design: Experiences on the Boundary between Life and Play, ed. Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros and Annika Waern (Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann, 2009), xiv. 37 Markus Montola, ‘Games and Pervasive Games’, in Pervasive Games Theory and Design: Experiences on the Boundary between Life and Play, ed. Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros and Annika Waern (Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann, 2009), 7. 38 Dave Szulborski, Through the Rabbit Hole: A Beginner’s Guide to Playing Alternate Reality Games (Raleigh, NC: LuLu, 2005), 4. 39 Szulborski, Through the Rabbit Hole, 42. 40 Paul Booth, Digital Fandom: New Media Studies (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 187. 41 Booth, Digital Fandom, 187.

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42 Ari Karpel, ‘Inside “The Hunger Games” Social Media Machine’, Fast Company (blog), 2012, http://www.fastcocreate.com/1680467/inside-the-hunger-gamessocial-media-machine#1. 43 Max Nicholson, ‘The Hunger Games Summer Camp Is a Terrible Idea’, IGN, 6 August 2013, http://uk.ign.com/articles/2013/08/07/the-hunger-games-summercamp-is-a-terrible-idea. 44 Not to be confused with the term hyperdiegetic. The ‘hyperdiegesis’ is described by Hills as ‘the creation of a vast and detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered within the text’, in Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 200), 137. 45 Debra Malina, Breaking the Frame: Metalepsis and the Construction of the Subject (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2002), 146. 46 http://www.pasivdevice.org/. 47 Phillips, A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling, 28. 48 Stewart, ‘Foreward’, xiii. 49 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Fantasy Island: Dream Logic as Production Logic’, in Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffman (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), 156. 50 Phillips, A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling, 28. 51 Phillips, A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling, 214. 52 Markus Montola, and Jaakko Stenros, Playground Worlds: Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games (Tampere: Ropecon ry, 2008), 27. 53 Montola and Stenros, Playground Worlds, 28. 54 Seymour Chatman, ‘What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (and Vice Versa)’, in On Narrative, ed. William John Thomas Mitchell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 118. 55 Jane McGonigal, ‘ “This Is Not a Game”: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play’ (paper presented at IDAC 2003 Streaming Worlds Conference, Melbourne, 2003). 56 Boorstin, The Image, 3. 57 Booth, Digital Fandom, 192. 58 http://www.ilovebees.com (accessed 24 August 2013). 59 http://www.42entertainment.com/work/ilovebees. 60 Cincia Colapinto, and Eleonora Benecchi, ‘Movie Industry Goes Viral in the XXst Century. If What Counts Is the Buzz …’, in Crossmedia Innovations: Texts, Markets, Institutions, ed. Indrek Ibrus and A. Carlos Scolari (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012), 168. 61 Case Study Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5w2CNB9clw.

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62 Audi, ‘Audi’s “The Art of the Heist” Campaign Launched with Stolen A3’, 8 June 2005, http://www.audiworld.com/news/05/060805/content.shtml. 63 Figures taken from: http://www.42entertainment.com/work/whysoserious. 64 http://www.gothamcitypizzeria.com/. 65 Will Brooker, Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman (London: I.B Tauris, 2012), 83. 66 Phillips, A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling, 29. 67 Brooker, Hunting the Dark Knight, 84. 68 This ARG was created in order to promote Nine Inch Nails’ forthcoming album, and was seeded using the band’s tour T-shirts upon which the URL iamtryingtobelieve was printed. The constituent elements included hidden flash drives, messages on flyers, leaked MP3s, telephone messages, real cease-anddesist letters and real-world resistance meetings in LA. This campaign, said Jim Stewartson ‘Asked people to go to dark alleys, where they were effectively kidnapped and brought into a dystopian future’, Jim Stewartson, ‘Storytelling Is Not Broken. Transmedia Should Not Try to Fix It’, Transmedia Coalition, 2 May 2013, http://transmediacoalition.com/jstewartson/story/storytelling-is-notbroken. 69 Stewartson, ‘Storytelling Is Not Broken’. 70 http://campfirenyc.com/work/cinemax-hunted?. 71 http://www.byzantiumsecurity.com/. 72 Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age, 132–139. 73 This is discussed by Caetlin Benson-Allott in Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 74 Emmanuelle Wessels, ‘ “Where Were You When the Monster Hit?” Media Convergence, Branded Security Citizenship, and the Trans-Media Phenomenon of Cloverfield’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 17 no. 1, 2011:69–83. 75 http://tagruato.jp/index2.php. 76 http://www.tidowave.com/. 77 http://slusho.jp/. 78 http://www.jamieandteddy.com/, The password is: jllovesth. 79 http://cloverfield.wikia.com/wiki/Cloverfield_ARG_(alternate_reality_game). 80 The Unfiction forum is known as ‘The online forum that is at the heart of the hardcore ARG Community’. Phillips, A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling, 263. 81 Still accessible at the time of writing: http://cloverfieldclues.blogspot.co.uk/. 82 http://adage.com/article/madisonvine-news/fans-viral-fox-s-fringe/130752/. 83 At the time of writing, the site is still accessible: http://tidowave.com/blog/.

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84 Username: alysehanssen’, password is: 11112014349, when entered at: USGX-8810B467–233PX.com a number of classified ‘supplemental’ files were revealed. (which no longer exists, instead the URL redirects to paramount.com). 85 At the time, this site is still online at: http://missingteddyhanssen.blogspot.co.uk/. 86 Tagruato used the Hatsui satellite to try to identify a rogue piece that is thought to have fallen off of the Japanese Government’s ‘ChimpanzIII’ satellite. Although Hatsui’s work has not yet been able to confirm the identity of the fallen piece, Tagruato scientists and engineers are busily trying to track and recover the fragment. According to Hatsui data, it disappeared into the Atlantic Ocean late last week. http://tagruato.jp/headlines.php?story=news_08_01_03. 87 One blog entry claimed that J.J. Abrams stated that the scene with the satellite was included in the film as a nod to those that followed the viral marketing campaign, quoted on http://cloverfield.wikia.com/wiki/Tagruato_satellite. 88 Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). 89 ‘Mise-en-abîme’: the literal translation of which is ‘placed into abyss’ a picture within the picture, The commonplace usage of this phrase is describing the visual experience of standing between two mirrors. 90 The term ‘rabbit hole’ originated from The Beast campaign (Montola and Stenros, Playground Worlds, 27). 91 Bordwell gives examples of cohesion devices being used within the conventions of classic cinema as appointments and deadlines. David Bordwell, ‘Film Futures’, SubStance 31 no. 1, 2002:95. 92 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997, Original edition, 1960), 56. 93 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 56. 94 Gene Youngblood, ‘Cinema and the Code’, in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, ed. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 157. 95 Youngblood, ‘Cinema and the Code’, 158. 96 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968, Original edition, 1935), 250. 97 Mary Anne Doane, ‘The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema’, A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies XIV no. 3, 2003:97. 98 Michael Humphrey, ‘How Weyland Recruited Me for Prometheus, and Why They Chose Linked-In’, Forbes, 29 May 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ michaelhumphrey/2012/05/29/prometheus-what-weyland-knows-about-linkedinand-post-social-value/.

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99 The complete email to Dustin Curtis is published at: http://dcurt.is/exploiting-reality. 100 https://www.weylandindustries.com/. 101 Tim Walker, ‘Unboxing: The New Geek Porn’, The Independent, 14 January 2009. 102 http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=unboxing. 103 Elsaesser, ‘Digital Cinema’, 211. 104 Booth, Digital Fandom, 181. 105 Lance Weiler, ‘Creating a Storyworld Part One’, Seize the Media, 2009, http://seizethemedia.com/creating-a-storyworld-part-one.html. 106 Weiler, ‘Creating a Storyworld’. 107 http://hopeismissing.blogspot.co.uk/. 108 In an interview with the author, 28 August 2013. 109 In an interview with the author, 28 August 2013. 110 Olivia Solon, ‘Future Cinema to Turn Canary Wharf into California’, Wired, 25 August 2011. 111 Cath Clarke, ‘Summer Love-In: London’s Favourite Pop-Up Cinema Hits Town This Weekend with a “Grease” Extravaganza’, Time Out, 6 September 2012. 112 Laurie Gwen Shapiro, ‘ “Secret Cinema” Skulks New York-Ward’, New York Magazine, 18 February 2013. 113 Natalie Haynes, ‘Here’s Looking at Us, Kid’, The Independent, 27 February 2013. 114 Raymond Williams, ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, in The Raymond Williams Reader, ed. John Higgins (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, Original edition, 1973), 70. 115 John Vidar, ‘The Transmedia Secret of Secret Cinema’, Huffington Post (blog), 3 May 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jon-vidar/the-transmediasecret-of-_b_2806238.html. 116 Ed Potton, ‘Film Spy: Why Secret Cinema’s Shawshank Ups the Ante for Immersive Film-Going’, The Times, 3 December 2012. 117 Elsaesser, ‘Digital Cinema’, 211. 118 http://nightvisionexperiment.com/. 119 Steve Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Boston: MIT Press, 2007, 502 and 510). 120 Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice, Third ed. (London: Routledge, 1999), 106. 121 Bruce A. Austin, ‘Portrait of a Cult Film Audience: The Rocky Horror Picture Show’, Journal of Communication 31 no. 2, 1981:52. 122 John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge, 1982), 25–26. 123 Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 10.

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124 Using social media metrics as a gauge as to Secret Cinema’s popularity, at the time of writing their social media profiles had garnered 164,000 Facebook friends and over 40,000 Twitter followers. 125 Nick Curtis, ‘Secret Cinema: How to Get 25,000 People to Pay £50 for a Film Ticket, without Knowing What the Film Is’, London Evening Standard, 7 December 2012. 126 Ian Sandwell, ‘Future Cinema: “There’s a Certain Momentum Now” ’, Screen Daily, 3 December 2012. 127 Elsaesser, ‘Digital Cinema’, 212. 128 In Curtis, ‘Secret Cinema’. 129 Roland Barthes, ‘Leaving the Movie Theater’, in The Rustle of Language, ed. Roland Barthes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 349. 130 Clarke, ‘Summer Love-In’. 131 Curtis, ‘Secret Cinema’. 132 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), 264. 133 Helen Piper, ‘Lost in Participation’, Screen 52 no. 4, 2011:516. 134 Elsaesser, ‘Fantasy Island’, 157. 135 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), 1. 136 Victor Burgin, ‘Possessive, Pensive and Possessed//2006’, in The Cinematic, ed. David Company (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 204. 137 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 28–29. 138 Anna Everett, ‘Digitextuality and Click Theory’, in New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, ed. Anna Everett and John Thornton Caldwell (London: Routledge, 2003), 7. 139 Daniel Dayan, and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge: MIT), 1992. 140 Boorstin, The Image, 10. 141 David Brisbin, ‘Instant Fan-Made Media’, Perspective, December 2009–January 2010:55. 142 In relation to the opportunity for audience members to attend a ‘meet up’ for the filming of a KateModern Carnaby Street episode, in Evans, ‘Carnaby Street, 10am’, 167. 143 Nicola Jean Evans, ‘Undoing the Magic? DVD Extras and the Pleasure behind-the-scenes’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24 no. 4, 2010:598. 144 Referring to the ‘Flash Mob’ craze, which originated in 2003. Judith A. Nicholson, ‘Flash! Mobs in the Age of Mobile Connectivity’, The Fibreculture Journal 6, 2005,

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http://six.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-030-flash-mobs-in-the-age-of-mobileconnectivity/. 145 Deleuze, ‘The Brain Is the Screen’, 372. 146 Jon Dovey, ‘Time Slice: Web Drama and the Attention Economy’, in Ephemeral Media: Transistory Screen Culture from Television to YouTube, ed. Paul Grainge (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 141.

3

Mobile Cinema

3.1 Introduction Having previously explored the live, the transient, the impermanent and the experiential manifestations of emerging cinema, this chapter moves towards considerations of the tangibility, hapticality and preservation of new cinematic forms. Through the exploration of the use of mobile phone technology and second screen adjuncts which are ‘designed to give the film fan the illusion of possession, making a bridge between the irretrievable spectacle and the individual’s imagination’,1 this chapter invokes the ambivalence that can be seen to exist between the evanescent nature of the viewing experience and the capturing of their creation which will be proposed as being inherent characteristics of the mobile form. As Laura Mulvey opined, ‘The technological drive towards photography and film had always been animated by the aspiration to preserve the fleeting instability of reality and the passing of time in a fixed time image’.2 The chapter investigates via a number of specific illustrative examples and case studies the manifold instances of personalized experiences of cinema which are captured and delivered via personal and portable devices. The case studies exemplify a myriad of forms of mobile and portable cinema which collectively acknowledge the polysemic inferences of the term ‘mobile’, implicating the specific technology, but importantly also signifying the mobility of the audience through spatial and temporal environs. The chapter will firstly introduce examples of films made on mobile phones, films made for mobile phone viewing, smartphone and touch screen tablet experiences, second screens and locative cinema, before presenting in-depth case studies into a recently released film which invites audience members to bring their mobile phones into the auditorium (APP, 2013) and into a platform that tells story through synchronization of mobile devices (RIDES, 2011–).

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This concentration upon emerging technological modalities invokes parallels with early cinema in which Stephen Heath notes, ‘In the first moments of the history of cinema, it is the technology which provides the immediate interest: what is promoted and sold is the experience of the machine, the apparatus’.3

3.2 Mobile filmmaking The emergence of the mobile phone subgenre of filmmaking has been legitimized through the proliferation of mobile phone–centric film festivals and competitions throughout the world.4 Notable examples of the form include Night Fishing (Paranmanjang) (Dir: Park Chan-wook, 2011, Japan) which was shot entirely on an iPhone. The director attached a 35 mm lens to the iPhone’s camera in order to achieve the filmic look. Olive (Dir: Hooman Khalili and Pat Gilles, 2013, USA) was shot using the Nokia N8 smartphone. In this case the filmmakers hacked the phone to disable the automatic focus and zoom functions. The phone was then mounted on various rigs including a remotecontrolled helicopter. Neither Night Fishing nor Olive carry the legacy of their medium within the text; the results are cinematic in their aesthetic quality in an attempt to render imperceptible the tools of production. Both films eschew the characteristics and mobile vernacular5 traditionally associated with portable recording such as unstable imagery, shaky camera moves, distorted audio, and sickness-invoking motion. Figures 3.1 and 3.2 show

Figure 3.1  The iPhone mounted onset of Paranmanjang, 2011, Image courtesy of Moho Film

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Figure 3.2  Images courtesy of ‘OLIVE’, 2013. Photos by Golnaz Shahmirzadi

that despite the mobile phones’ portability, in these cases the use of the medium does not necessarily allow the director or camera operator to get closer to the action. The ancillary equipment attached to the phones, which are essentially deployed as data storage devices, prohibit any intimacy between the director and their subjects which would usually be facilitated by the mobile phone form. In contrast to these examples is SOTCHI 255 (Dir: Jean-Claude Taki, 2010) which was shot using different mobile phones in order to draw out their respective and distinctive textural aesthetics such as varying image quality and contrasting screen resolutions in order to imbue different tonalities into the fabric of the film. Rage (2009, Dir: Sally Potter, UK) was the first ever feature film to be designed for mobile phone viewing, and one which embedded the mobile phone symbiotically into the processes of production, execution, aesthetics, distribution and consumption. The use of the mobile phone was an integral facet of the production process; although the film itself was shot using a conventional video camera held by the director, test images were taken using a mobile phone. The resultant narrative diegesis clearly implicates the mobile phone in its creation, revealing that each of the protagonists is addressing the fictional camera operator Michelangelo who is filming each of their private exchanges using his mobile phone. It transpires that Michelangelo is latterly posting these films to his website, without the informed consent of his subjects. Yet to help the audience understand and appreciate the implications of the characters’ revealing on-screen disclosures, the film makes a thematic reference to the emergent notions of public and private discourses played out on line by the characters.

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It also invokes Anne Friedberg’s observation of the ‘increased centrality of the mobilized and virtual gaze as a fundamental feature of everyday life’.6 The film, a take on the New York fashion industry, signals another play on form and content, in which thematic concerns are expressed compositionally; the actors are shot against green-screen and the resultant aesthetics imply a photographic fashion shoot. The actors are framed in head and shoulder or facial close-up shots invoking a first-person mobile phone aesthetic whilst also ensuring optimum visual clarity for its intended mode of viewing on a small, mobile phone screen (Figure 3.3). An intimacy between actor and director (and subsequently between character and audience) is achieved by the hyphenate writer-director also working as the camera operator (Figure 3.4). The one-toone working environment then translates to the one-to-one viewing experience. Hand-held and uncut aesthetics also invoke both liveness and authenticity. The digitality of the film is further imbued by the vibrant palette of colours that are used for the monotone backgrounds which were sampled from an aspect of the on-screen actor, for example from an item of clothing or their eyes, rendering emotion as both a visible and tangible asset. The use of these highly saturated digitally composited backgrounds which expand the film’s tonal spectrum, somehow break with the regime of verisimilitude created by the hand-held aesthetics, revealing a highly crafted and directed endeavour. These examples where technology and technique make indelible marks on the form are what Christian Metz has referred to as ‘discursive imprints’ which he notes extend ‘into the very text of the film’.7 Rage was released simultaneously as a theatrical release and also as a downloadable film via Babelgum (for free) to be watched on a mobile phone, in the one-to-one modality for which it was intended. The premiere of the film included a live Q and A which linked a number of the actors via synchronous video conferencing to the physical location of the British Film Institute (BFI), and thus completed the loop of the film’s continuous interchange between emerging technological practices and their fusion right from conception all the way to reception and at all stages in-between. The launch of the iPad in April 2010 opened up further possibilities and affordances for cinematic-style storytelling with its larger portable screen surface. The simplified composition necessitated by Rage and the small-screen size of the mobile phone was no longer an inhibiting factor for filmmakers working with portable devices.

Mobile Cinema





Figure 3.3  Film stills from Rage, 2009, © Adventure Pictures Ltd

Figure 3.4  Sally Potter on set of Rage, 2009, © Adventure Pictures Ltd

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3.3 Mobile film viewing The widespread use of tablets initiated by the iPad’s release has led to the emergence of films being created specifically for the iOS platform, making the tablet the locus of the entire experience for stand-alone pieces of cinema in their own right (and not subordinate promotional additions supporting a more substantial narrative main-event). Unique opportunities exist within this medium in which the delivery mechanism and distribution method are one in the same. This duality has been exploited by a number of filmmakers who would otherwise have been precluded from releasing their films to the public by traditionally exclusive and prohibitive distribution methods. The Silver Goat (2012) was the first feature film to be created exclusively for the iPad, the first to be released as an app in the UK and several other countries, and the first in the world to have an iPad-only premiere melding the viewing experience with the delivery mechanism. The premiere took place on a London Route Master Bus which traversed many of the film’s locations throughout the city whilst the audience members watched the film on their individual iPads (Figure 3.6).8 The Silver Goat is a film told in perpetual motion, with many of the two-shot conversations taking place within uncut sequences which serve to retain a transitory continuum whilst the characters move seamlessly throughout geographic space, walking or travelling the streets of London. This thematic transience also acknowledges the mode in which it will be viewed, on a portable device where the audience member is most likely to be on the move (Figure 3.5). Furthermore, the inclusion of numerous internal

Figure 3.5  The Silver Goat App, 2012 with photos by Martin Hampton

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Figure 3.6  The Silver Goat premiere 2012, Photo by Sam Pearce

monologues which reveal the interiority of the main characters also enhances the personalization of the viewing experience envisaged as a solo head-phonewearing endeavour. More recently Haunting Melissa (2013) was a film released for iOS devices by Hooked Digital Media. It tells the story of a recently bereaved girl, trying to uncover the truth behind her mother’s death in the absence of her father. Told through first-person means, the story is presented deploying a number of techniques using mediated forms of communication that are inherent to the tablet form. We are party to webcam conversations between Melissa and her friends, video diaries (that Melissa is encouraged to make by her psychologist), instant messaging (IM) sessions, filmed action by the characters, CCTV footage and voicemail messages all of which invoke the now-familiar found footage conventions of horror films. Subjected to Melissa’s one-to-one monologues via the medium of the video diary and her effusive first-person commentary as she navigates and negotiates the implied haunted spaces of her home and surrounding locale, we experience what Monika Fludernik describes as ‘the mimetically motivated evocation of human consciousness’,9 an alternate way of experiencing the story which does ‘not only rely on the teleology of plot’.10 By revealing Melissa’s interiority within these private exchanges, a seemingly intimate and personalized viewing experience is facilitated. The film thus exemplifies the same endemic aesthetic as The Silver Goat did in its use of internal monologue, invoking the singular headphone– wearing spectator. During the IM sessions between Melissa and her friends we see the computer screen on which the exchanges are taking place, watching the messages manifest in real-time. The voice mail messages are audio-only instances whereby we listen

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to various messages (including those from her father), which are occasionally occluded by a sonic spectral presence, a combination of white-noise interference and a whispering female voice. This is also the audible trigger that indicates that the next piece of content is ready to view on the viewer’s iPad, the app seemingly ‘haunts’ the viewer through these intermittent ‘push’ notifications,11 which are a native feature of app-based communication devices. The disembodied haunting voice emits the name ‘Melissa’ from the iPad at random times throughout the experience at night or day without warning (in the same way that a new email message alert would sound). Being on the receiving end of these sonic metaphors indicative of a haunting is an unsettling experience and invokes the uncanny within the audience. Haunting pervades through all of the representational technologies deployed within the narrative. In addition to the camera, the IM message feed is similarly infiltrated by a spectral presence. In Chapter 10, the character of Brandon chats with Melissa via the feed, but as his messages become increasingly aggressive, coupled with the fact that the message highlights are coloured black portend that all is not as it seems. The structuring principle of Haunting Melissa is one of chapterized fragmentation in which episodes are released at varying temporal moments across a number of weeks. From the audience member’s point of view content is released sporadically, although a predetermined schedule has been established by the filmmakers. The app’s interface presents the episodic content with intermittent sub-episodic fragments in-between. Once downloaded and viewed, content can be re-watched and also bookmarked (Figure 3.7).

Figure 3.7 The Haunting Melissa home screen interface. © Hooked Digital Media 2013

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The app experience includes what Director Neal Edelstein has branded ‘dynamic story elements’, whereby subtle shifts in content occur during a secondary viewing of specific scenes. These include the appearance (and subsequent disappearance) of spectral reflections and apparitions within the videos. These mediated hauntings mark a suffusion of the story into the iPad. This is mirrored at the level of film plot; Melissa also experiences the appearances and disappearances of spectral presences that she has captured on video. In Chapter 6 of the film, Melissa talks to her therapist, Dr. Carroway, to explain that the videos are different each time she watches them ‘sometimes things are there, sometimes things are not there’. This is echoed in the user experience of re-watching some of the chapters, whereby the ‘dynamic story elements’ manipulate and change the content; again we experience a suggestive haunting of the technological apparatus (Figure 3.8). These techniques subtly implicate the unsettling presence of mobile technologies and anxieties around their use. Haunting Melissa can be viewed as the latest in a lineage of cultural artefacts which explore the haunting of technology. As Susan Schupli observes: Thomas Watson’s early experiments with the telephone included using the apparatus to try and contact voices from the dead. Bell’s demonstration of the first telephone, were met with skepticism and fear from an audience dislocated from their points of origin. These early metaphors of haunted technology and ghosts in the machine continue to inform contemporary notions of telepresence and disembodiment.12

The deployment of iOS app technology which can be updated at any time, and allows for the interpolation of additional content imbues the film viewing experience with a protean quality and signifies the conflict between the material possession (of the iPad and its constituent apps) and its arcane and evanescent nature, which can be changed at any time outside of the audience members’ control. Edelstein defines this capability to make real-time edits and changes as ‘the power of the application technology. It’s something that could never be done in a movie or a TV show, or any other form of delivered media’.13 Both content and form align to invoke temporality and insecurity around the veracity of media, redolent of prior debates of authenticity around the reliable indexicality of photographs and films. Impermanence is inextricably linked and embedded into these new forms. The level of control that the creators are able to assert upon the experience is countered by the audience members’ unexpected engagements.

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Figure 3.8  Haunting Melissa, © Hooked Digital Media 2013

Edelstein noted how one audience member had freeze-framed over a hundred instances and then uploaded them to the social media forum via Flickr. He stated: I took the body of the film and I cut it down every scene into 10 seconds, and I took all that footage and I destroyed it, and I ended up with some really fantastic weird footage that I cut into these cameras which are seemingly turning on and off, so you’d see glimpses of images, of things that are coming in the future.14

This particular audience member’s desire to capture and share these oracular moments resonates with Mary Anne Doane’s assertion (although she is applying this to close-up moments in narrative feature film) that exemplify ‘a desire to stop the film, to grab hold of something that can be taken away, to transfer the relentless temporality of the narrative’s unfolding to a more manageable temporality of contemplation’.15 In the creation of these frozen instants, the audience member here engages with what Mulvey calls ‘The “aesthetics of delay” ’ which make ‘visible its materiality and its aesthetic attributes, but also engages an element of play and of repetition compulsion’.16 Through their freeze framing, capture, annotation and discussion evidenced within surrounding social media outlets associated with the Haunting Melissa experience the audience’s advanced engagement in their own version of textual analysis is demonstrated. The producers have since responded to these audience practices by embedding a ‘screen capture’ button into the interface within a subsequent version update of the app.

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An exemplar of the advancement of cinematic storytelling techniques within the mobile form in its production and delivery, and an indication of audience sophistication and increasing literacy in its reception, Haunting Melissa is also textually underpinned by an implicit discourse of technological anxiety. Next in the lineage of iPad-native experiences comes The Craftsman by Portal Entertainment which is due for release in October 2013 (subsequent to the time of writing this book). Originating from the avant-grade transmedia movement and marketed as ‘the world’s first thriller for the iPad’, and targeted at the forty plus male commuting demographic, the story will be delivered across film, web, email and mobile through the app across a circumscribed five-day time period, and positions the individual viewer as the central character of the story. The audience and story co-exist in parallel temporalities; as the app is opened the predetermined five-day timeline is triggered. The temporal indexicality with which this experience is imbued is heightened by the generic conventions predicated by the form of the thriller in which time is of the essence, and constantly in short reserve. This durational aesthetic is underscored by the delivery mechanism and the engagement is designed around very small consumption patterns in which content is segmented into eight to ten minutes. Providing an experience that can be approached with lassititude or ebullience depending on the disposition of the audience member, with opportunities for viewers with more time to spare the opportunity to delve deeper and to engage with more of the story. The app experience builds on the audiences familiarity with the genre conventions of the canonical thriller form, and their cultural proximity to the central character, a digitally literate individual conversant in all aspects of computer mediated technology. The film’s Executive Producer Julian McCrea’s vision is ‘to let digital technology tell the language of thrillers in a new way’.17 On screen telephone numbers embedded into props such as business cards and papers proffer engagement, tempting the viewer to call them, which in doing so triggers an event later in the timeline. The filmed sequences are densely referenced, themes of voyeurism and scopophilia pervade throughout through the presence of security cameras and the use of various Hitchcockian signifiers such as rear windows and clandestine photography. A diary feature which can be accessed at any point in the experience by swiping the screen enables the assimilation and the parsing of the disparate narrative elements, acting as a mnemonic tip-sheet (Figure 3.9). Since the viewer is implicated as the nexus of the story there is a potential for cognitive

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Figure 3.9  The Craftsman, Portal Entertainment, 2013

disorientation caused by subjunctures within the narrative (manifested as a suspicion that something is going on elsewhere that the viewer may have missed). The Craftsman operates within the milieu and classical structure of a thriller imbued with mysteries of a missing person, which McCrea states is the story of ‘an everyman hero (in this case the viewer of the experience) ending up in extraordinary circumstances and must use his intellect to expose the truth and clear his name’.18 The combination of the temporal modality of The Craftsman and its first-person experience upon which it is predicated whereby the timeline runs concurrently with real-time, and within which the viewer will intermittently engage in varying levels with the content. Fragmentation and real-time temporality are the organizing principles behind The Craftsman, which signals a ‘modularised mode’ of storytelling (as does Haunting Melissa), a fragmented, episodic experience which is inherent of the form.19 Modular narratives, and database narratives according to Allan Cameron ‘foreground the relationship between the temporality of the story and the order of its telling’.20 They ‘address the rise of the database form, while also gesturing towards broader shifts in the conceptualization of time’21 through their foregrounding of ‘temporal configuration’.22 Tablet apps are also being created for other cultural forms where cinema is not the dominant media but where the product incorporates cinematic and filmic elements. MirrorWorld, the iPad app created by Mirada (a company introduced in Chapter 2) launched in April 2013 and is based on Cornelia Funke’s books Reckless and Fearless. Funke has written over twenty fantasy books aimed at young adults and the publication of her latest book was designed to coincide with the release of the MirrorWorld app. Mirada aimed to create ‘a living storybook’ which would far exceed the aesthetic and experiential capabilities of an illustrated eBook. MirrorWorld contains fifteen short stories, which all have

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Figure 3.10  MirrorWorld in production, Copyright © 2013 Mirada LLC. All rights reserved.

audio narration and enhanced features such as access to recipes, storyscapes, interactive video pieces, 3D environments, animated illustrations and 3D models of the fantastical creatures. A blend of old and new methods were employed to create this innovative constellation of additional content which includes over 110 minutes of live action with actors performing short scenes, moving illustrations, handmade sculpture and handmade custom fabric art. The content is also accompanied by its own atmospheric music score created by Icelandic film composer Atli Örvarsson which plays throughout. The meticulously fashioned app emanates audio-visual ebullience, the creation and experience of which is unencumbered by the traditional printed page. Funke expressed a profound reverence for the iPad form, over that of film adaptation. She stated: I’ve been through seven movie adaptations now, none of them reflected in any way the images I had in my own head. […] And having them shrink the work of two years to two hours, can be really painful, so it was a unique experience, it surpassed all my expectations creatively, it took it to a level that I had never expected, I’m an illustrator myself so images for me are extremely important.23

The premise of the MirrorWorld story is an exploration of what lays behind the mirror. The opening text states ‘There a certain mirrors that offer you an opportunity’ and this particular iteration will provide ‘a passage to another realm’. The opening scene then activates the device’s webcam in order to supplant the viewer’s reflection onto the screen within the frame of a mirror. The surface of the vitreous screen/mirror can then be manipulated by the touch of the viewer’s finger tips or via movement of the head which cause the surfaces of the screen to ripple like water as the underlying depths of the story are revealed,

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Figure 3.11 The MirrorWorld app interface, Copyright © 2013 Mirada LLC. All rights reserved.

momentarily evoking the porous boundary of the interface between reader and story, phantasy and reality. MirrorWorld’s predisposition and predilection to the format of the book is expressed through an affinity to the formal conventions of a printed book, such as chapters, page turns and textured paper. The stories can be navigated by a contents page or through the exploration of the 3D environment of the Ogre Tavern which serves as the homepage to the experience, and can be returned to at any time. There are a number of enchanted artefacts within the tavern environment and these act as interactive diegetic portals to other forms of content and the constituent aspects of the story. When clicked, the artefacts allow the viewer to ‘see the spectacle’ or ‘read the story’, taking the viewer to another part of the experience. Unique to MirrorWorld compared to other interactive eBooks is the embedded hapticality in the use of the touch-screen form, invoking a closeness and intimacy in which the content can literally be manipulated by the viewer’s finger tips and physical movements. Hapticality as defined by Laura Marks is in opposition to: Optical visuality [which]depends on a separation between the viewing subject and the object. Haptic looking tends to move over the surface of its object rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture. It is more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze.24

MirrorWorld represents an evolution of a textually haptic language, through various techniques. Textual hapticity is a term I used to denote a kinaesthetic

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perception of the on-screen representations of materials. Within MirrorWorld, this textual hapticity is imbued in the perceptible grain and colouration of the parchment upon which much of the text is read, and also through the surface of the mirror and the reflection in water. A pseudo-haptic engagement is invoked in these inherently illusory instances since the textures are obviously indiscernible through the swipes of the user on the hardened-shell of the screen. Said Funke they had programmed the structure of the paper, with the writing, to make it feel real […] it’s very interesting that you can work in a very ‘bookish’ way although you have such a modern media. And it’s very unique for Mirada that they do work a lot by hand, so many of the drawings were done on paper and the sculptures were from clay.25

MirrorWorld not only induces this mode of textual hapticality as implicated by Marks, it simultaneously evokes both graze and gaze through the physically responsive modalities which it facilitates through a corporeal engagement with the screen, which serves to bring the contiguity between the story world and the reader ever closer. By holding the iPad and physically moving it around the audience’s own 360-degree environment reveals aspects of MirrorWorld’s three-dimensional space giving the viewer an enhanced impression that they are physically inhabiting the space of the Ogre Tavern and the other 3D environments. The iPad transforms into a lenticular device which provides a diegetic portal into another dimension. This effect is achieved through the gyroscopic-routing feature (Figure 3.12). Combining these features, the work invokes both a figurative and literal ‘look behind the mirror’ positioning the iPad as the portal into the depths of the story. At the time of writing, MirrorWorld had already unsurprisingly started to garner a number of accolades.26 It brings live action cinema into the realm of publishing in hitherto unseen ways. An iridescent work of art, a compelling narrative experience, MirrorWorld also represents a poetic rendition for what is possible and what can be imagined with this new form of storytelling. The context of Mirada provided the unfettered access to the range of specialisms and technologies needed to advance storytelling in this way. As stated on the MirrorWorld app credit page, ‘We built our studio as story engine’. In the coalescence and unification of the many media forms it deploys, MirrorWorld evinces palimpsetic vicissitudes, conveying an explicit expression of the evolution of media, from the hand-made parchment and cloth to the high-end compositing and computational renderings.

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Figure 3.12  MirrorWorld’s gyroscopic-routing feature, Copyright © 2013 Mirada LLC. All rights reserved.

Although designed to be watched on the move, all of the mobile cinema examples so far considered can be experienced in stasis meaning that the engagement with the text or the story progression has not been dependent on the viewer’s geographic location. The following examples require physical transience through space in order to access and experience the various elements of the story and to achieve a unified narrative experience. A number of terms have been used in the past to categorize this emergent form including locative media or location-based media. Instances where the mobile device is used as a lenticular apparatus through which to access alternate dimensions of specific geographic spaces include Augmented Reality Cinema,27 and the recently released Cinemacity,28 a web and mobile application launched by French Art TV. Cinemacity geographically locates film excerpts throughout Paris, which can be accessed via the audience members’ camera device by pointing it at the exact points out which they were

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filmed. Audience members are able to engage in literal perambulations through film sets, via cinewalks which provide access to alternate cinematic vistas in an experience that could be conceptualized as the cinematification of the city. Silent History created by Eli Horowitz, Kevin Moffett, Matthew Derby and Russell Quinn is a work written specifically for the iPad and iPhone and has won various accolades.29 Although not complicit with cinematic modes of storytelling, Silent History is worth considering here because of its geo-spatial organizing principle. The work can be described as a serialized and exploratory eBook, with a chapterized organizational structure of traditional linear narrative content in the form of first-person testimonials and a heterotopic spatialized structure whereby geo-specific elements (field reports) can be accessed. These are an intrinsic and essential facet of the viewing experience and can only be accessed at the specific geographic location at which they were recorded. The field reports can be recorded and submitted by audience members from any location in the world. The story premise is based upon a generation of children unable to communicate through speech, or to understand language. It includes 120 different stories, testimonials told from the perspectives of those affected by the ‘silent phenomenon’ including parents, teachers and doctors. Currently these testimonials (equivalent in length to a 500-page book) are all available to access and read via the app, but when first released, the testimonials were published in a fragmented, temporal sequential order between 1 October 2012 and 19 April 2013. This example gives rise to both the geo-spatial and geo-temporal possibilities and opportunities of storytelling. To experience Silent History requires audience location specificity, where content is experienced virtually via the app. This notion of geo-spatial cinema can also involve the experience of story through physical dimensions in addition to the virtual as is the case of the next example. Murder in Passing30 written and directed by John Greyson and produced by Sharon Switzer is a protracted spatialized narrative authored and delivered around (and aimed towards) the habitual routines of inner-city subway commuters in Toronto. Playing out between the months of January and March in 2013, the fiction was infused within multiple elements of the commuting experience facilitating an itinerant mode of viewing attuned to its context. Branded by the creators both as a ‘Transmedia Whodunit’,31 and a ‘a public serial narrative’,32 the title is a play on words and polysemic in its inferences: ‘Passing’ denotes the transitory mode of viewing in which the subway commuters experience the story and is also the name of the fictional city where the story is set (based on the city of Toronto). In addition, since this fiction contends with transgender

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themes and characters, ‘passing’ also implies the phrase used to connote whether a transgender person convincingly ‘passes’ as the gender to which they have been re-assigned, for example, passing as male, passing as female. The textual borders of this classic murder mystery extended across forty episodes over a two-month time period, the scenes of which were transmitted across 300 subway screens (normally those given over for advertising on the platforms) which spread across over sixty stations. Daily clues were also planted within the classified advertising sections of the Metro, the commuter newspaper, in addition to a Twitter feed elicited by the fictional detective which was updated daily. The thirty-second episodic fragments which were broadcast on each day of the working week on the subway screens formed a temporally organized linear storyline, additional thirty-second online operatic ‘fugues’ were also published each day via the Murder in Passing website. The silent episodes would repeatedly play on the subway screens in monochrome in a film noir style with subtitles to communicate the inaudible dialogue. These vignettes were interpolated at ten minute intervals with the other advertisements that natively inhabited the screens. Clues were also embedded within the characters’ repeated use of ASL (American Sign Language). The story of Murder in Passing is premised on the murder of a transgender male cycle courier and the subsequent investigation into his death. Themes of trans-phobia (in addition to the murder victim, the character of the investigating detective is a transgender woman) and the dangers of travelling (the victim is murdered by an SUV, which have been known to be used as murder weapons in the USA and Canada) are explored both implicitly and explicitly within the story within which the audience are actively encouraged to solve the mystery. The Murder in Passing website included a competition with prizes offered to those who could identify the murderer before the detective. The commuters were also encouraged to engage with social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter during the experience. The accompanying blog revealed how commuters were collectively working together to decode the various pieces of content and the clues that were embedded within. In Murder in Passing form underpins the narrative in that it presents us with a recursive loop in which the repetitious environment of the commuting landscape is used as both the fabric and the thematic basis of the story. Suffused with the particularities of the commuting experience, which is predicated upon modularized and individualized activities in which commuters engage in order to minimize any unwanted personal contact, such as focusing upon a newspaper, a book or a screen, Murder in Passing is also imbued with social

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comment. Self-reflexive hypodiegetic moments are embedded within the episodic fragments including moments in which the detective is seen watching the news reports of the events on the subway screens. Murder in Passing makes an implicit comment on time-based behaviours and the contemporary conception of time which is broken down and managed in fragmentary moments. Murder in Passing (like Silent History) embeds motion, movement and travel as an integral facet of the experience, in which spatial dislocation is unified through the narrative experiences. Without exception, all mobile cinema examples are characterized by a disjunctured experience of engagement in which narrative delivery is episodic, fragmented and transitory with many thematically exploring this allegoric relationship within the fabric of the story. States Victor Burgin ‘The decomposition of narrative films, once subversive, is now normal’.33 The practice of disjuncture and fragmentation are the defining conventions of emergent cinematic forms. These conventions will be explored more fully within Chapter 7. This chapter now turns to considerations of mobile devices as an adjunct for audiences to experience multiple and simultaneous layers of content via the emerging ‘second screen’ modality of viewing.

3.4 Second screens ‘Second screen’ is the relatively new term used to identify instances whereby mobile phones, smartphones, tablets or computers are used in synchronization and in subordination with a dominant ‘first screen’ experience. This could include text messages, tweets or posts targeted at a specific hashtag that has been published by a television programme, to view additional scenes on the web, to engage in live chats, both synchronously and asynchronously. Hitherto, this has predominantly been a practice used by television. The context within which this term will be applied in this chapter will be to cinematic second screen experiences, firstly to access factual-based content (behind-the-scenes) and secondly to experience fiction-based narrative enhancements and extensions.

3.4.1 Factual The second screen apps are to be considered as the latest in the lineage of audience exposure to the omnidiegetic behind-the-scenes processes of production, a

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practice which started as early as the birth of cinema itself. Despite the assertion from Winifried Nöth and Nina Bishara that ‘For decades, films used to conceal the traces of their production, for example the details of the film studio and the staff behind-the-scenes, as much as possible with the purpose of creating a perfect real-life illusion’,34 the antecedents of these practices as evidenced in early cinema belie this claim. The behind-the-scenes phenomena whereby ‘ “how is it done?” outweighs “what does the film mean?” ’35 first manifested in print form and film reels, which then moved to television broadcasts, later migrating to video special features, before finding a more established home within DVD bonus features, which are recently being supplanted by Blu-ray discs. The second screen modality is the latest in this succession of technologies to present the behind-the-scenes inner-workings. Initializing this trend in 1908 was the Making Motion Pictures: A Day in the Vitagraph Studio which presented the entire drama production cycle from script to screen. In 1910, the trade journal columnist who wrote under the pseudonym Lux Graphicus proclaimed: we all want to know how the pictures were made. We like to see the work done. We like to see the producers directing the actors and actresses acting. On the ordinary stage, there is no greater privilege coveted than that of a seat in the wings while the performance is in progress. We all like to be privileged spectators of anything. We are all curious.36

In the same year a magazine dedicated to the documentation of film production, the Motion Picture Story Magazine (MPSM) accordingly ‘created a publicity vehicle that unleashed fan interest and activities in ways that they could not have dreamed of – and that they became wary of. MPSM would change the way some members of the movie audience learned about the movies and made meaning from their movie-going experiences’.37 These exposures soon translated into newsreel footage, some of the first known revealed Erich von Stroheim’s crew making the trek to Death Valley (a Californian desert) to film the final sequence of the 1923 film Greed.38 Reported in the newspapers, the director stated ‘the suffering of the men was intense. The air was stifling, and the sun beat down mercifully. At one time I feared for the lives of the actors; I thought they were really dying’.39 This typified the defining characteristic of this type content invoking what Timothy Corrigan refers to as ‘the commercial drama of a movie’s source’.40 These examples the dual nature of an audience experience of a film; the feature itself and the story behind its making. As Donald F. Larsson states

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our experience of any form of art, in any medium, entails to at least some degree of dual awareness: an experiential awareness that seeks to engage the work on its own formal level (whether as a narrative or as another form), and a contextual awareness that understands the work as an artefact, a made object produced by human beings within a particular time and place.41

In latter years engagement with other content extraneous to the diegesis was supplanted into video systems. The 1984 Criterion Collection edition of Citizen Kane is generally recognized as the first Special Edition release to home video (via LaserDisc, a format which supported multiple audio tracks). This particular disc provided additional features including interviews, commentaries, photographs and documentaries. More recently when video was superseded by the DVD in the mid-1990s, the behind-the-scenes form really became established as both a cultural form and a form of legitimate academic enquiry within off-screen and paratextual studies.42 In many instances, these phenomena have been discussed under economic rubrics. Many critics and scholars have promulgated the commercial logics at play in their production and reception which have been seen to be driven by economic determinants and industrial imperatives. As Elsaesser stated they are an instrumental form in ‘…  taking reflexivity from the realm of illusionism and trickery into that of product promotion and self advertising’.43 John T. Caldwell defined DVD as a cultural technology ‘theorized within the logic of a fairly traditional Hollywood studio distribution window’44 which ‘uses reflexive critical interactions with users to bolster consumer ties and brand loyalty’.45 States Jo T. Smith, ‘The possibilities of “add-ons” are endless, and these extratexts overlap with a variety of older media forms to repurpose and expand the potential revenue from the primary product’.46 Barbara Klinger observes that …the industry that creates these commercial epiphenomena is not primarily concerned with producing coherent interpretations of a film. Rather, the goal of promotion is to produce multiple avenues of access to the text that will make the film resonate as extensively as possible in the social sphere in order to maximize its audience.47

In addition, as the practice of producing ‘bonus’ material has matured and gained in sophistication, such features are increasingly discussed within the realm of educational imperatives. Writing almost twenty years after making the statement above, Klinger acknowledged the DVD extra ‘As a kind of film school in a box, DVD represents a mainstreaming of the educational imperative’.48 Similarly, Jonathan Gray comments that the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

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extra features‘ … teach a significant amount of production literacy, familiarizing audiences with the vocabulary of pickups, foley work, mime passes, second units, matte painting, and key frames’,49 Alison Trope has gone as far to question whether DVD extras can be considered ‘as a form of popular education’.50 With DVD sales having peaked in 2004, trends for both sales value and volume have since been decreasing.51 Their temporal existence, as Smith states exemplifies ‘…  the general hinge condition of the DVD (neither cinema, television nor database but an amalgam of all three) suggests a kind of interruption or time lag in new media’s drive towards dematerialization’.52 There are currently two emerging manifestations, of which the second screen is one, but there have been notable instances whereby production companies have released materials traditionally associated with the ‘behind-the-scenes’ rubric via websites and social media channels prior the associated film’s release. For example, preceding to the release of the 2006 Superman Returns, Warner Brothers published the director’s video diaries online, revealing the fundamental secrets behind Superman’s ability to fly through the deployment of the flying rigs.53 Les Misérables (2012) released an official behind-the-scenes video showing the construction of the Paris set on the Pinewood sound stage, via Digital Spy five days prior to the film’s release.54 Similarly Paramount released a six-minute making-of documentary of Hugo (2011) via YouTube during its Academy Award campaign.55 These initiatives of prior and simultaneous release of behind-thescenes materials are emerging practices which mark a recent convergence of pre and post media. Key secrets which used to be guarded from view, and held in reserve for ‘second shift’56 exclusivity are now revealed as part of the pre-release marketing campaigns. This strategy can in part be recognized as a response to fan-based access and appropriation of production sets and their subsequent online revelations to which studios are not always able to exert control over. As David Brisbin notes of The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) film set, even before our negative was processed in Rome, the Art Department in Vancouver watched a version of the scene on YouTube. Someone had edited a montage of still photos, shot through hidden windows, between extras and from nooks and crannies of the piazza, into a rather effective little movie scene. Some of the stills were watermarked from different online sources and many had bits of grip equipment in frame, but those stolen angles weren’t bad, the sampled music track was emotional. In basic filmmaking terms, it worked.57

More recently, Film4 released A Field in England’s (2013) master-class materials online simultaneously with the film’s release,58 which was symptomatic of the

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fact that DVD and Blu-ray are no longer going to be the future mainstays of paratextual excess and access, instead there is an emerging trend of all content relating to a film being delivered as a simultaneous shift (further examples of this emerging industry imperative will be discussed in Chapter 6). The DVD has now been re-appropriated to the symbiotic Blu-ray and app-based experiences, signalling a reinvigoration of these interests which accommodate the zestful enthusiasm of film aficionados and cinephiles. With its greater storage capacity and networking capabilities viewers are able to access voluminous levels of content at a deeper level on Blu-ray discs and to connect to external sources of information and streams of data on the web. In many cases these can be accessed during the viewing of the main feature film, through on-screen alerts such as hot spots which transpire at temporal moments, allowing the viewer to jump out of the narrative into an associated paratextual element. The second screen strategy increasingly also involves the launch of a free app to accompany the film’s release on Blu-ray. At the time of writing a small number of these are available in the Apple App Store, all for free which deploy audio synchronization59 in order to simultaneously deliver content to the second screen in a way that directly correlates with the content in the main screen. Up until recently, this technology has mainly been used in broadcasting environments and in commercial contexts. For example, the Grey’s Anatomy Sync App launches interactive content at specific moments during the televised episodes. These include audience opinion polls, quizzes, character biographies, behind-the-scenes footage, production details and image galleries. The app has a social layer enabling live synchronous chat between fans. The accumulation of fan cultural capital is made possible by the built in ‘badge-earning’ capabilities which are awarded when audience members virtually check-in to in-world locations. The commercial imperative of the use of the second screen in this particular context manifests through the Lexus advertisements which intercut the show and are rendered interactive by the app. Current free second screen examples available for iOS devices and Blu-ray enabled film releases include Prometheus (2012), Sherlock Holmes: A game of shadows (2011), The Kings Speech (2010), The Amazing Spiderman (2012), The Smurfs (2011) and Total Recall (2012). Prometheus has been chosen from this selection for further consideration on account of the depth of access into the layers of the process that the app facilitates through its foregrounding of the deconstruction of various spectacular sequences.

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The Prometheus app enables two alternate ways in which to experience additional content; viewers can ‘Enter the archives’ to access what appears to be the entire corpus of materials relating to the film’s production. Alternatively, the materials can be accessed in synchronicity and interpolated within the film itself, via the Blu-ray player and the wireless network (a manual sync can also be activated) in order to trigger the content at the relevant temporal moments within the film’s diegesis – on-screen action correlates to behind-the-scenes materials. The media is delivered within a corporatized interface that reflects and enshrines the Weyland Industries brand identity. This viewing mode, in which the audience can constantly switch between the registers of fictionality and its construction invokes a metafictional experiences and awareness, which as Patricia Waugh states is ‘A fiction that both creates an illusion and lays bare that illusion’.60 The multiple types and effusive amount of additional content include the storyboards (here known as Ridleygrams), conceptual art, excerpts from the making-of documentary, deleted scenes and alternate takes, costume designs, vehicle designs, pre-visualizations, motion galleries and the ‘Peter Weyland files’ (discussed in Chapter 2) amongst others. The second screen alerts the viewer when the different items became accessible at temporal moments within the film’s timeline, via a countdown clock to coincide with the on-screen action. The static art works flick through in synchronization with the scene to which it originates. At the point of which we are first introduced the character of David (the A.I. robot) in the film, the ‘un-boxing’ advertisement previously discussed in Chapter 2 is triggered on the second screen. Similarly, when the characters are first introduced to the holographic representation of an aged Peter Weyland, the main feature pauses to allow the TEDTalk to play. These were both key elements of the pre-theatrical release campaign for the film and illuminate instances whereby, as Elsaesser states, ‘the production process can take on a textual form’.61 The app’s preferences can be set to automatically freeze the main screen feature when a second screen video clip is available to view which disrupts the narrative flow and leads to a subjugated viewing experience which creates moments of what Raymond Bellour denoted as Punctum, ‘a kind of wound’ opened up by the automaton leads to the film’s mechanism, to the ‘inside’, which, like the inside of the beautiful doll, needs to be disguised to maintain its credibility. Film subjected to repetition and return, when viewed

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on new technologies, suffers from the violence caused by extracting a fragment from the whole that, as in a body, ‘wounds’ its integrity. But in another metaphor, this process ‘unlocks’ the film fragment and opens it up to new kinds of relations and revelations.62

In addition, at certain moments the viewer is able to ‘swipe’ the second screen content onto the main television screen, momentarily supplanting the main film, literally subordinating it to secondary importance. The behind-the-scenes, making-of aspects of the film demonstrate the various techniques that were used, and the labour of the film set. For example, in one clip which corresponds with the crew’s discovery of the alien DNA ‘pods’, we are shown an excerpt of the documentary which details how a ceramicist individually hand-crafted the pots, engraved them with a language and fired them to give a metallic effect. Moreover, the omniscient nature of the Prometheus second screen experience leads to heightened questioning around the presence and identity of the director, in the case of Prometheus, the authorial presence of Ridley Scott ensures an everpresent and enduring directorial imprint as David Bordwell noted: ‘Directors’ statements of intent guide comprehension of the film … More broadly, the author becomes the real world parallel to the narrational presence’63 and according to Gray such commentaries seek to ‘… append aura, author, and authenticity to the text’.64 By selecting the director’s commentary Catherine Grant comments that these turn ‘the “original” (theatrical) experience of watching the film as fiction into one in which the film’s existing visual track is employed as graphic illustration of a teleological story of its own production’.65 More recently, these authorial commentaries have permeated the exclusive cinema arena. Looper (2012) released an in-theatre audio commentary track online during the theatrical release phase of the film, encouraging viewers to download it onto their mp3 players to listen to in the cinema during the film screening This was done to encourage repeat viewing (and an increase in box office revenue). At the beginning of the film, the director states: ‘Please do not do this on your first viewing of the movie, that’s maybe a little bit of a ploy to get your extra theater-going dollars, but regardless please, it will spoil it entirely, see it clean at least once first’.66 The capacity of the Blu-ray alongside the second screen facilitates the inclusion of far more content demonstrating the cumulative nature of film production which amasses so much material whilst enabling and engendering the polyvocality of a film’s production through the inclusion of numerous and

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varied production personnel. As Paul Arthur states ‘[…] the form has been proliferating, and mutating, at a speed that dwarfs that of the production of “original” features’.67 The Prometheus app is also the nexus for social media discussions around the film facilitating connectivity between Facebook, Twitter, Instant Chat and GetGlue, as well as providing access to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) to access cast and crew profiles. These provide opportunities for audiences to demonstrate what Klinger has referred to as their ‘cinematic acumen’.68 There are generic apps which enable this type of activity such as Social Commentary which enables audiences members to add and read comments in synchronicity with the timeline of a film, independently of the authorized discourses, which other audience members can watch and contribute to whilst watching the film. These instances usurp the position of the professional expert with that of the amateur-expert hyphenate, and provide the habitus for the ‘cinema fetishist’ who Metz defined as ‘the person who is enchanted at what the machine is capable of ’.69 Furthermore, these apps and their related practices signal a move towards ‘social film’, whereby the film becomes the starting point of the subsequent activity that occurs online after a film’s release, a concept that will be discussed more fully in Chapter 4. A schismatic divides critics around the perception of these materials which on the one hand are seen as being prosaic applications, subordinate to a commercial rubric, providing audiences with a pseudo-interactive opportunity which facilitates little more than an engagement with an advertisement or product, as Jim Stewartson opined that ‘Even the category “second screen” implies that these apps have an inferiority complex’70 to on the other, those who perceive these materials to in many cases ameliorate and supersede the primary viewing experience, and to be responsive to educational imperatives. Just as experiments took place with the inception of DVD into its interactive storytelling potential in the mid-1990s,71 so too are experimentations into the potential of the second screen as a storytelling device starting to emerge. Some key commercial examples of interactive narrative DVDs in the 1990s included Tender Loving Care (1997) and I’m Your Man (1998),72 latter examples in themid 2000s include Late Fragment (2007) and Switching (2003) where more nuanced and intuitive opportunities for interaction were offered embedded into the fabric of the story. In the case of Late Fragment, there were looped moments where the camera angle would switch between the three characters allowing the user to choose whose pathway to follow. Switching tells the story

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of a troubled relationship between the central characters, through a constant series of loops, which the viewer navigates between using the ‘enter’ button on the remote control ‘uniquely determining your own film experience’.73 Despite these examples which were few and far between, the rigidity of the DVD technical architecture stymied any significant developments that evolve new narratives and dramaturgies. The advancement of iOS technologies far surpasses these limitations, thus presenting a more propitious opportunity to advance and complexify audience engagements. Untrammeled by the physicality and permanence of DVD/Blu-ray, app data can be updated and changed at any time allowing for mercurial, dynamic, story experiences that can be constantly evolved, updated and changed. The push notifications, updates and changes perpetuate an ‘upgrade culture’ where ‘novelty itself has intrinsic value’74 and where narrative itself can be upgraded. Exploitation of the second screen mode as a narrative enhancement to the main event will now be discussed in the examples of the recently released APP and RIDES which represent the early and the most recent experiments of the form of dual screen simultaneous cinema.

3.4.2 Fiction APP 75 (2013), a horror film created in the Netherlands and distributed in twenty countries including France, Germany and China combines a feature film with a synchronizable smartphone app. Audiences are invited to download the accompanying app prior to entering the cinema and then encouraged to access the app in the auditorium itself, an environment in which spectators are more accustomed to being asked to turn off their mobile phones. Instead the opening screen states, ‘We kindly ask you to switch on your cellular phone’ and ‘Open the APP’. In addition to synchronized content, audience members are also able to access a number of items of behind-the-scenes content via the app. APP’s use of the second screen during the viewing of the main feature film as an enhanced delivery mechanism augments the storyline which is centred on the lead character of Anna. A smartphone app known as ‘Iris’ has mysteriously infiltrated her phone (the same ‘Iris’ app which the audience members have downloaded).The central preoccupation of the narrative is the precipitation of Anna’s demise and those around her seemingly caused by the app. The second screen reveals different pieces of content in synchronization with the viewing experience of the main feature film. These momentary, brief (silent) vignettes

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include point of view video from Anna’s camera phone, alternate cinematic angles of certain scenes, CCTV footage, text-based content (for example a news item reporting the fatality in the pre-title opening sequence) and personal text messages between the on-screen characters. The vibration of the audience members’ phone acts as the indicative trigger alerting the audience that the second screen is about to become active. This is reminiscent of an earlier novelty cinema experiment in the 1950s in which the underside of the audiences seats were fitted with a motorized device that would make the seats vibrate at specific moments in the (horror) film in order to provoke a dramatic reaction in the audience.76 The simulation of the app on the audience members’ phone disrupts the film viewing experience, but in a way that the viewer is enabled to take on both streams of information. This is in contrast to the other second screen apps which have been discussed previously, which interrupt the flow of the film and its narrative unity and congruence, by literally pausing the main screen in order for the viewer to watch the second screen flow unimpeded. APP’s director explains the production process behind this:

Figure 3.13  APP, 2013, Photo and Copyright by Raymond van der Bas

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Confronted by a picture-in-picture, side-by-side storyline, you need to determine when you’re going to produce your second screen clues or story elements without your audience being distracted or being driven away from the regular plot[…] and so we had to re-cut some scenes so people wouldn’t miss the important things […] it’s all dependent on timing, because your eye can only focus on one thing and not on both things exactly at the same time.77

The ‘Iris’ app literally terrorizes the film’s characters (and by implication – the audience), infecting their everyday lives, through surveillance. Iris both captures and transmits Anna’s private moments which are then spread like a virus to other computer systems, other people’s phones and to public screens, with humiliating, violent and in some cases fatal results. In one scene a looped image of Anna undressing and entering the shower is transmitted to all screens in an electrical store, thus invoking surveillance technologies, which has a destabilizing effect on both the characters and the audience, implying not just a social anxiety towards new technologies, but presenting them as a violent, transgressive and dangerous force. A much more explicit presentation is enacted compared to the oblique and suggestive references noted in Haunting Melissa. The transmission of the additional content on the second screen transforms the phone into a key expositional tool, in which synchronous diegetic portals (as discussed in Chapter 2) can be accessed. These moments tend to occur around instances of fraught action on the main screen and invoke a dramatic irony in which audience members gain knowledge that the on-screen characters are precluded from. Moreover, app users also have the upper hand over other members of the viewing audience who do not have access to the second screen app. A significant example of this is demonstrated in the instant message feed between the doctor and the character of Tim, Anna’s disaffected ex-boyfriend, revealing a conspiratorial relationship between the two and key clues as to where Iris originated from and how Anna’s brother is a key to unlocking the app’s purpose. These synchronous diegetic portals function in both anileptic and proleptic modes. For example, text messages between the characters portend latter on-screen action implicating the app’s prescience. In an early sequence, Anna receives a picture of a gun via the app as well as hearing telephone calls made to emergency services. The gun acts as a predictive visualization and the recorded phone calls as predictive sonifications both of which I would identify as proleptic diegetic portals. These elements reveal and premediate the future tragedy of the college professor’s suicide. Furthermore, this particularly disturbing scene of the professor’s demise implicates mobile

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phone technologies as the root cause. The event is prompted by Iris’ broadcast of the professor’s illicit affair with a male student which had previously been transmitted to the lecture theatre screens and the other students mobile phones. During this scene the professor calls everyone to use their phones to record the event, thus making an explicit reference to the constant filming, logging, capturing, surveilling and sharing upon which contemporary social practices are predicated. It also makes an implicit suggestion of both the mediation and desensitization of traumatic events in the media in contemporary society. Further levels of dramatic irony are experienced in the climactic scene, in which a charge-bar appears on the app indicating that (our) the (character’s) phone is ostensibly powering up to dangerous levels. As an audience member we are aware that this signifies something is going to happen to the phone and tension inevitably builds as the digits click down closer to zero at which point the phone explodes with fatal consequences. As a non-app user, the tension would not have been built in the same way. It is instances such as these that a new storytelling technique is being evolved, and a new dramaturgy is being developed (further discussions on emerging grammars will be discussed in Chapter 7).The director confirms that the second screen enables ‘a completely different dynamic on how you perceive the film. The question of the film is who is behind the app, and the audience gets a first clue of that, the first confirmation of that on the second screen’.78 Audience members without the app would have an abstruse and recondite experience in contrast. A social comment on the quotidian nature of the mobile phone and the protagonists’ intransigence to surrender the device despite the havoc and disruption that it causes, APP relays the consequences of our new reliance on the ubiquitous smartphone device and its invasion of our lives and subversion of our privacy. It is suggestive of mobile technologies’ transgressing the border between public and private spaces and inculcating us into acts of privacy violation. Interestingly, APP uses the same audio watermarking technology previously described. The original application of this technology, which still remains its predominant use, is to identify illegally filmed copies of films. The audio signal carries with it the date and the location of the cinema to identify where and when the copy had been acquired.79 This choice of surveillance technology adds a further literal dimension to APP in which audience behaviours can be watched, tracked and reprimanded. Rendering the subordination of the audience in its use of the app, it is also a case of ‘The text making strange its own devices’.80 APP presents the deleterious effect of new technologies through its

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literal demonization of the technology where audience members are subjected to constant and repeated violent and transgressive invocations. APP unifies theme, form, device and apparatus. It presents a complex interplay and interlocking between form, content and delivery engaging explicitly with anti-technology rhetoric. A cautionary tale concerning the spreadable, social media age where content proliferates in an uncontrolled way and the audience is seemingly usurped by their own technologies. RIDES created by Fourth Wall Studios, currently in public beta81 phase has been in development for the past five years. The company has produced a number of stand-alone episodic and serialized interactive experiences designed for single-viewer mode across second and third screens via the RIDES.tv online channel. The breadth of content which spans the genres of drama, horror, mystery, sci-fi and comedy has been designed to demonstrate and showcase the RIDES platform with a view to monetizing its use and to encourage deployment by other companies and creators, with a view to achieving massification in the longer term. Fourth Wall Studios, a hybrid software, production and design company, was established by the organization known as 42 Entertainment, the creators behind many of the instances of extended cinema discussed in Chapter 2 including The Beast, I Love Bees, Year Zero and The Dark Knight, Why So Serious? campaigns. Jim Stewartson explained that the aim of Fourth Wall Studios is to build original content that was going to be accessible to a much broader array of audiences that would reconcile the inherent inaccessibility of ARGs. Massengagement has always been a problem with these abstruse experiences which tend to be, according to Stewartson, ‘big open-ended 6-month things where you had to solve enigma puzzles in Swahili’.82 In addition Stewartson commented that the problem with ARGs is that they do not traditionally work as a stand-alone entity (as discussed in Chapter 2) nor have they been commercially successful without the backing of a huge brand. RIDES is so called because its experiences are likened to the expectations and hermetic parameters of a amusement park ride whereby the audience member can see exactly what the entertainment proposition is before making an informed decision whether or not to engage. It’s a clearly defined, circumvented experience that ‘normal people could do’. RIDES presents a platform that simultaneously utilizes all of the audience members’ digital communication devices (computer, phone and tablet) within a single unified storytelling experience. This new modality responds to multitasking behaviours and expectations endemic in a contemporary audience that

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have evolved around their use in daily life whereby multiple, synchronous data inputs are managed. The RIDES experience embeds these into the fictional experiences it creates. Audience members log into the ‘RIDES.tv Sync App’ via which they can experience a layered content experience, led by the content on the main ‘first’ screen. Contemporaneous in-world text messages, phone-calls and emails imbricate throughout the experience. (See Figure 3.15 which shows a production document depicting a timeline which maps the various multi-stream interactions from one of the RIDES experiences.) This is achieved through the RIDES proprietary backend which facilitates a live connection between all of the audience members’ devices in order to update them in real-time. Audio recognition synchronization is also enabled through a third party system. In contrast to APP, the ‘rides’ utilize both video and audio, enabling the viewer to access and eavesdrop on phone calls, adding a further opportunity for the invocation of dramatic irony. Bonus scene notifications which unlock additional content can be revealed and navigated to on the graphical timeline which is displayed at the foot of the main screen, both hypermediating and premediating the audience experience, providing a prescient indicator of forthcoming dual-stream (and duplicitous) storytelling moments. For example, in an episode of Redrum, a truecrime murder mystery, the plot-line is centred upon a married couple, and the husband’s extramarital relations. This particular ‘ride’ involves a moment where an on-screen text message is sent to the wife (Lena) and is simultaneously received by the viewer of the sync app. The message reveals photographs of Lena’s husband (Carl) in a compromising situation with the other woman (Courtney). The shock and dismay of her revealing these moments is implicated to the audience in their simultaneous discovery. At another moment, the app simulates a mobile phone ring simultaneously with the on-screen character’s phone (Gus). The opposite side of the conversation (with Carl) can then be heard through the telephone, this then switches between characters during a scene change. In addition, at different moments, an opinion poll is taken on (computer) screen, which allows the audience member to express who they feel is responsible for the murder. Stewartson has referred to these moments as ‘multiplatform touch points’ which ‘create dynamic interactions’.83 An alternate reading of these instances is that they, as in other instances thus far described, can be thought of as synchronous diegetic portals in which the phone acts as a diegetic tool in order to reveal the real truth of the on-screen action. In this case it reveals the illicit affair between Carl and Courtney. Moreover, it represents a further example of the narratavization of new technologies and the reflection and refraction of the anxieties surrounding their use. In this particular case it implicates the veracious

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Figure 3.14  Printed with permission of RIDES.tv

quality of the new technologies and the practice of ‘social surveillance’84 in which through our voyeuristic engagement with the second screen, we as the viewer are complicit. (The concept of social surveillance will be discussed more fully in Chapter 4.) In a moment within an episode of Dirty Work, the Emmy-nominated serialized comedy, the audience can listen in on the character Pete’s inner thoughts via the telephone. Within several sequences of RVC the comedy parody of shopping channel QVC, the second screen enables a number of alternative vignettes to be viewed in which characters imagine themselves in alternative circumstances as visual versions of the inner monologue. These techniques of expressing character interiority have been a repeated feature of numerous mobile cinema examples, which implicitly acknowledges the single-viewer mode of viewing. In 6–14, RIDE.tv's horror offering, themes of replay, repetition and looping (which are all characteristics of digital media) are played out in which the same character repeatedly re-lives the same moment in time leading to his death. The main protagonists receive a number of telephone calls that are also simultaneously played through the mobile app. Stewartson describes RIDES as ‘the novelization of film’ on account that it can accommodate multiple and different points of view, as well as deeper insights into exposition, context and subtext and can therefore achieve a level of depth not normally attainable in single-screen media. Stewartson claims that RIDES provides ‘a time-based way of doing that, in real-time with the story[…] it’s like creating 3D for your brain’.85 This claim is reminiscent of the considerations of the latitudinal depth expressed around the elucidation of the Cloverfield diegetic portal instances considered in Chapter 2 and signifies the emergence of a digitextuality86 in emerging cinematic practices.

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3.5 Conclusion Characteristic of any technological transformation and its resultant social practices is the inherent exploration and meaning-making behind its implications within the narrative forms themselves. This is illustrative of MarieLaure Ryan’s observations of how ‘the intrinsic properties of the medium shape the form of narrative and affect the narrative experience’.87 Both responsive and symptomatic of emerging audience behaviours and transitory life styles, all of the examples that have been subject to consideration within this chapter are inextricably linked to the anxieties that new technologies evoke. These modern day cautionary tales about technology have all to some extent either implicitly or explicitly inferred a mistrust for technological advancement and its implications, suggestive of our coming to terms with the acceleration and velocity of information to which we are all a subject. Within an era of dematerialization and the imminent obsolescence of tangible media forms which are being usurped by the capacity, capability and networkability of mobile media implies that the types of mobile cinema

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experiences considered herein and the groundswell of emerging projects in beta mean they may soon enjoy newfound prominence within the cinematic ecology. However, they also represent the challenges to be surmounted by content producers who will be expected to satisfy the voracious capacity and capabilities of these new mediums which in turn creates tensions in competing for the audience’s splintering attention and ever-fleeting engagement patterns. Content creators will need to be responsive to audience expectation to move towards ‘simultaneous shift’ initiatives, whereby all extraneous content is made available one point in time. The mediation of process and intramedial aesthetics are at the forefront of many emerging cinematic experiences, in some cases becoming the prevalent mode of engagement by audiences decentralizing the main feature to one experience among many that audiences can engage with. The rights to APP have already been bought by a Hollywood production company, with a view to producing a remake in the next two years. As soon as the trailer was released online, the telephone started to ring for the Dutch production company behind the film, indicating an industry eager to embrace, incorporate and mainstream these new technologies and techniques. Forthcoming is the five-day smartphone thriller app for Peter James’ Dead Mans Tracks which is currently in development with Portal Entertainment. A Haunting Melissa 2.0 sequel is already planned and Cornelia Funke has recently established a new company Breathing Books as an enterprise through which to extend her interactive e-book oeuvre. The emergence of touch-screen technologies in the realm of cinema have proven to be an efficacious force, signalling an acceptance of the tablet as an alternatively configured cinematic apparatus. Furthermore, these projects suggest that as audience literacy adapts to medium coalescence, this initial period of enculturation in which we are currently a part is moving into one of acculturation. The examples considered herein represent the pioneering instances which are solidifying the status of these mobile cinematic variants as both a legitimate cultural form and a legitimate object of academic study which should encourage an expansion of scholarship into this area. This chapter has included consideration of the social elements of emerging mobile cinema entertainment forms as a peripheral addition, primarily to demonstrate acumen and cultural capital. The following chapter will move towards considerations of the sociality of emerging cinema at an advanced level where it becomes a centralized and intrinsic facet of emerging cinematic experiences.

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Notes Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 161. 2 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second,18. 3 Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (London: MacMillan, 1981), 221. 4 Examples include: Mobile Film Festival: Germany, Festival Pocket Film: France, Mobifest: Toronto, Ciné Pocket: Brussels, The Original iPhone film festival: USA, iPhone film festival (IFF): LA, USA, indieFoneFilmFest: USA, International Mobil Film Festival: San Diego, USA. 5 A term based upon Jon Dovey’s ‘vernacular video’, in ‘Time Slice: Web Drama and the Attention Economy’, in Ephemeral Media: Transistory Screen Culture from Television to YouTube, ed. Paul Grainge (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 146–147. Dovey states that ‘the grammar of this vernacular is characterized by affect, intimacy, desire and and display’ and that it is ‘a new visual grammar of consumption driven by the self-constituting practices of its creators’. 6 Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 4. 7 Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier (London: Indiana University Press, 1982), 76. 8 Stephen Johns, ‘The Silver Goat Makes World History as First Film to Have iPad Premiere’, Metro, 10 May 2012. 9 Monika Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996), 30. 10 Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 30. 11 These are iOS automated alerts that indicate an event, such as new content or software updates for the app. These can manifest as a sound, an-onscreen message or a ‘badge’ (a red circle containing a numeric value that is appended to an onscreen app icon). 12 Phony CD Rom (2001, Susan Schupli). 13 In an interview with the author, 2 August 2013. 14 In an interview with the author, 2 August 2013. 15 Mary Anne Doane, ‘The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema’, A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies XIV no. 3, 2003:97. 16 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 192. 17 Julian McCrea in an interview with the author, 9 August 2013. 18 Julian McCrea in an interview with the author, 9 August 2013. 19 Within cinematic narratives, Cameron places instances of these ‘tales about time’ into four groups; anachronic, forking paths, episodic and split screen, Allan Cameron, Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 6. 1

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20 Cameron, Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema, 1. 21 Cameron, Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema, 2. 22 Cameron, Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema, 3. 23 In an interview with the author, 6 September 2013. 24 Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 162. 25 In an interview with the author, 6 September 2013. 26 Including the Silver Cannes Lions Award for ‘Best Visual Design/Aesthetic’ in Mobile Lions Category. 27 The conception of Augmented Cinema is presented in this video, but it was never actually realized: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6c1STmvNJc. 28 http://cinemacity.arte.tv/en/. 29 Including the winner of the Experimental & Innovation category at the 2013 Webby Awards. 30 http://murderinpassing.com/media/. 31 http://www.youtube.com/user/MurderInPassing?feature=watch. 32 Erin Hatfield, ‘Queen West Filmmaker, John Greyson, Launches 40 Episode Series on TTC Screens’, Inside Toronto, 9 January 2013, http://www.insidetoronto.com/ news-story/1490356-queen-west-filmmaker-john-greyson-launches-40-episodeseries-on-ttc-screens/. 33 Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 8. 34 Winifried Nöth, and Nina Bishara, Self-Reference in the Media (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007), 20. 35 Roger Odin, Spectator, Film and the Mobile Phone. In Ian Christie (Ed.), Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 166. 36 Kathryn H. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 126. 37 J. Stuart Blackton,Vitagraph studio head 1910 and MPSM ed. Eugene V.Brewster quoted in Fuller, At the Picture Show,133. 38 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRbRjg1jiOw. 39 Beryl Denton, ‘Thru Death Valley with von Stroheim: How the Director of Greed and His Workers Braved Death for the Sake of Realism’, Motion Picture Magazine, January 1925:20–21, 92. 40 Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 118. 41 Donald F. Larsson, ‘Every Picture Tells a Story: Agency and Narration in Film’ (paper presented at Modern Language Association Annual Conference (Washington, DC, 28December 2000).

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42 Genette defined paratexts as: ‘liminal devices: that mediate the relations between the text and the reader’. Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), xi. 43 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Discipline through Diegesis: The Rube Film between “Attractions” and “Narrative Integration” ’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 212. 44 John T. Caldwell, ‘Prefiguring DVD Bonus Tracks: Making-ofs and Behind-theScenes as Historic Television Programming Strategies Prototypes’, in Film and Television after DVD, ed. James Bennett and Tom Brown (London: Routledge, 2008), 160. 45 Caldwell, ‘Prefiguring DVD Bonus Tracks’, 150. 46 Jo T. Smith, ‘DVD Technologies and the Art of Control’, in Film and Television after DVD, ed. James Bennett and Tom Brown (London: Routledge, 288), 139. 47 Barbara Klinger, ‘Digressions at the Cinema: Reception and Mass Culture’, Cinema Journal 28 no.4, 1989:10. 48 Barbara Klinger, ‘The DVD Cinephile: Viewing Heritages and Home Film Cultures’, in Film and Television after DVD, ed. James Bennett and Tom Brown (London: Routledge, 2008), 26. 49 Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and Other Media Paratexts (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 98. 50 Alison Trope, ‘Footstool Film School: Home Entertainment as Home Education’, in Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 353–373. 51 ‘In 2012, 179 million videos in all categories were sold, down 14 per cent on 2011’. […] the total market value was £1,543 million, down 12 per cent from £1,749 million in 2011. Source, BFI 2013 Statistical Year Book, 2013:133. 52 Smith, ‘DVD Technologies and the Art of Control’, 146. 53 Nicola Jean Evans, ‘Undoing the Magic? DVD Extras and the Pleasure behindthe-scenes’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24 no. 4, 2010:588. This provides a full investigation into the Superman Franchise and the genre of the making of featurette between 1980 and 2006. 54 Simon Reynolds, ‘ “Les Misérables”: Behind-the-scenes on the Pinewood Set’, Digital Spy, 19 December 2012, http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/movies/news/a446136/ les-miserables-behind-the-scenes-on-the-pinewood-set.html. 55 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=CcCuvzOukt4. 56 John T. Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 163. 57 David Brisbin, ‘Instant Fan-Made Media’, Perspective, December 2009–January 2010, 57. 58 http://www.afieldinengland.com/masterclass/.

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59 There are a number of commercial-based audio-watermarking systems currently available on the market which include Nielsen’s Media-Sync Platform which launched in 2010, which uses audio watermarks already inserted into nearly every TV programme in the United States as part of Nielsen’s industry standard TV audience ratings service. (http://www.disneyabctv.com/web/NewsRelease/ DispDNR.aspx?id=020111_02). In addition, SyncNow by Civolution is an Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) system that powers Shazam and Soundhound. For independent filmmakers, Gracenote has recently released an open audio finger printing Software Development Kit (SDK) for iOS and Android called ‘Entourage’, which enables syncing of additional content television programmes through ACR technology. See Josh Constine, ‘Gracenote’s New TV Sync API Could Spawn Indie Second-Screen Apps’, TechCrunch, 19 June 2013, http://techcrunch. com/2013/06/19/second-screen-apps/. The audio creates a fingerprint of the signal and looks it up in Gracenote’s global video database, returning metadata and images that can be used to fuel second screen applications. Audio finger-printing works differently to the watermarking system described above, which involves the laying of an additional audio track which carries the sync track across the programme, which can be audible in some cases. Audio finger printing recognizes any part of the actual soundtrack itself; the original content doesn’t need to be modified and therefore permission isn’t needed for the development of accompanying apps. This could lead to fans and audience members creating their own content to distribute and sync with their favourite programmes, possibly the next technological evolution in fan-based textual production. 60 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Routledge, 1984), 6. 61 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Fantasy Island: Dream Logic as Production Logic’, in Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffman (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), 143. 62 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 179. 63 David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Routledge, 1985), 211. 64 Gray, Show Sold Separately,83. 65 Catherine Grant, ‘Auteur Machines? Auteurism and the DVD’, in Film and Television after DVD, ed. James Bennett and Tom Brown (London: Routledge, 2008), 111. 66 The track can be downloaded via Sound Cloud: https://soundcloud.com/rcjohnso/ looper-theatrical-commentary. 67 Paul Arthur, ‘(In)Dispensable Cinema: Confessions of a “Making-of ” Addict’, Film Comment 40 no. 4, 2004:39. 68 Klinger, ‘The DVD Cinephile’, 26.

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69 Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, 74. 70 Jim Stewartson, ‘Yes, “Transmedia” Is an Empty Buzzword…until It Isn’t’, Transmedia Coalition, 8 May 2013, http://transmediacoalition.com/jstewartson/ story/yes-transmedia-is-an-empty-buzzword-until-it-isnt. 71 I explored many of these in my thesis Sarah Atkinson, Telling Interactive Stories: A Practice-Based Investigation into New Media Interactive Storytelling (London: School of Arts, Brunel University, 2009). 72 See Chapter 8, Interlude: I’m Your Man: Anatomy of an Interactive Movie in MarieLaure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 271–282. 73 Switching DVD inlay. 74 Jon Dovey, and Helen Kennedy, Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media (Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill, 2006). 75 http://www.appdefilm.nl/. 76 This was called Percepto and was created for a specific feature 1959 film The Tingler, which had been written specifically to incorporate the shaking seats into the story of the film, in Mark Thomas McGee, Beyond Ballyhoo: Motion Picture Promotion and Gimmicks (Jefferson, NC: Mcfarland & Co, 2011), 115. 77 In an interview with the author, 12 August 2013. 78 In an interview with the author, 12 August 2013. 79 Which according to Bordwell will ‘… betray the theater where the video originated’, David Bordwell, Pandora’s Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies (Madison, WI: The Irvington Way Institute Press, 2012), 61. 80 Dana Polan, ‘A Brechtian Cinema? Towards a Politics of Self-Reflexive Film’, in Movies and Methods: An Anthology, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 662. 81 http://rides.tv/. 82 In interview with the author, 5 August 2013. 83 http://rides.tv/about-rides/. 84 Alice E. Marwick, ‘The Public Domain: Social Surveillance in Everyday Life’, Surveillance & Society 9 no. 4, 2012:382. 85 In interview with the author, 5 August 2013. 86 Anna Everett, ‘Digitextuality and Click Theory’, in New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, ed. Anna Everett and John Thornton Caldwell (London: Routledge, 2003), 7. 87 Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).

4

Socially Layered Cinema

4.1 Introduction This chapter turns to considerations of the sociality of emerging cinema, focusing upon instances where social engagement becomes a centripetal and intrinsic facet of the audience experience. At the recent Tribeca film festival, Tiffany Shlain proclaimed, ‘Film is the appetizer … The discussion you have is the main course’.1 This reflects a shift in perception within the film industry and is indicative of emerging cinema’s deeper penetration into reality. Social practices around film have always been evident; audiences extend their experience of a film and its narrative world post-viewing by engaging in various elements of the ‘heterotopias’;2 by purchasing merchandise, attending theme park attractions and the like, but more significantly by engaging in conversations centred on the film experience. The significance and value of this recent shift in the types and depths of sociality are afforded by new technologies and social practices whereby audiences are now carrying over post-cinematic conversations into online environments, for sustained periods and at greater depths. It is precisely these practices which are transforming the conversation and sociality of the film experience into the main narrative event and signalling the type of inversion as promulgated by Shlain. These dialogic exchanges are becoming a valued source for filmmakers, storytellers, promoters and advertisers who are encouraging and harnessing these social interactions as part of both marketing and storytelling imperatives. This chapter primarily attends to the narrative value that these exchanges carry. Their consideration within an industrial framework as a form of fan labour will be more fully considered in Chapter 6. This chapter provides a conceptual mapping of the recent shifts in emerging cinematic forms, by establishing how media consumption patterns are

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functioning within fictional online spaces. The previous chapter’s commentary upon fragmented consumption patterns will be extended within this chapter in its consideration of how advertising challenges cinematic and televisual fictional modalities. In addition to the conversational narrative instrumentality that is engendered by the interruptional advertising aesthetic intrinsic to television modalities, this chapter explores how the impacts of the conversational are becoming increasingly prevalent in cinematic cultures. The chapter has undertaken two case studies in order to explore these phenomena from two different angles: a commercial advert in the form of The Inside Experience (2011)and a recent avant-garde experiment, Cloud Chamber (2013). Primary research has been undertaken through the interviews and questioning of a number of participants of The Inside Experience, as well as those involved in its creation. Since at the time of writing Cloud Chamber has only just been released, an audience analysis was not possible, instead the author has carried out interviews with the creator. Through these case studies, this chapter argues that advertising modalities and televisual viewing behaviours significantly impact, extend and enhance immersive online cinematic experiences. Firstly, a mapping of the conversational modality within cinema and television will be presented. Initiating the trend of conversational digressions into online environments were the communities that sprung up around the films Memento (2000) and Primer3 (2004). Viewers deployed blogging tools primarily for the purposes of decoding and guiding audience comprehension of the films which were dizzying and vertiginous in their structural and narrative complexities. Memento, already subject to much prior academic consideration, exemplifies its ‘puzzle film’ moniker.4 In Primer, the complex science fiction film which involved time travel by the two main protagonists, Abe and Aaron, who built a time machine to trade on the stockmarket, inspired one blogger to write an on-line book The Primer Universe.It also instigated the generation of a number of diagrams by the film’s fans that mapped the complex multiple story-times, multiple character timelines (the characters of Abe and Aaron multiply as a result of their time-travel exploits), discourse-times and hypodiegetic time-based structures. In both cases, multiple re-viewings of the films were supported beyond an enervating first exposure, in order to interpret the temporally anachronistic and mercurial films. Viewing pleasures are also derived from the experience of these forums by other ‘nondecoding’ visitors, who simply read through the interpretations and meaningmaking of others, as opposed to actively contributing to the discussions.

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There is an emerging imperative for online sociality to take place before a film’s release, as was extrapolated in Chapter 2. This chapter contends that there is a move towards embedding this type of ‘Hypersociability’5 into the main narrative event itself, which is leading to a reconfiguration of social media milieus as cinematic storytelling environments. This is manifesting itself in a number of ways and forms. The examples in this chapter are defined as transmedia on account of their deployment and blending of a number of media including text, video, film, image and audience interaction, but they are not aligned to the traditional transmedia franchise modality as exemplified in examples such the television series Heroes (2006–2010). These have a clear delineation between their constituent media elements: of on-air, online and on-mobile. The two case studies of The Inside Experience and Cloud Chamber considered herein are extricated from these demarcations and are created specifically for their online delivery channel ab initio. Instances such as The Inside Experience have been subject to numerous appellations including ‘connected entertainment’ or ‘advertainment’ (in industry parlance) within which the contrapuntal tensions between advertising and art are explicitly played out. Previous innovations in the short form, such as the music video, have been considered to successfully resolve the advert as art aporia, validating its artistic status through influencing the aesthetics, production values and artistry of the feature film form, by being at the forefront of experimentations into new technologies and techniques. For example, it has been the medium of the music video that has recently been the first to artistically experiment with the creative possibilities of HTML5. The renowned The Wilderness Downtown6 (2010), produced for the Arcade Fire single We Used to Wait and more recently 3 dreams of black,7 both directed by Chris Milk, are highly acclaimed examples of the contemporary music video advancing digital production practices and modalities. In these cases, the examples are not only adverts for the music, they also function as commercial showcases for the technologies that they employ (in a similar way to those instances of the unveiling of technologies that were described in Chapter 1). The Wilderness Downtown uses Google Street View to integrate images of the audience members’ childhood home into the video (through their inputting of their address at the start) and is programmed for optimized viewing within the newly released Google Chrome web browser. The aesthetics of social media and the semantic web become the focus of this particular narrative, which is about place, location and temporality, defining aesthetics of the new digital narrative regime.

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The recognition of music videos (alongside other commercial short form artefacts such as product-based advertisements) as valid cultural forms has divided opinion. Whilst Jeff Ayeroff claims of the music video, ‘There is no higher form of contemporary “commercial art” ’,8 the schism in opinion is exemplified by Gilles Deleuze: ‘When advertisers explain that advertisements are the poetry of the modern world, they shamelessly forget that no real art tries to create or exhibit a product in order to correspond to the public’s expectations  […] What complicates everything is that the same form serves the creative and the commercial’.9 Specific considerations of the impact of advertising upon the feature film from their earliest cinematic iterations which have been provided by Leon Gurevitch10 also highlight the complex influential interrelations between cinema and discourses of promotion. As well as pushing creative boundaries, music videos have long since been considered as directorial calling cards through which to launch the feature film careers of a number of prolific film directors such as Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham. As Pat Brereton notes, ‘The creative voices in this “new movement” in film production often come from advertising and other on-line/ interactive media content formats’.11 This chapter contends that the forms considered herein may be the emerging vehicles that are used by the film industry to meet similar ends: to challenge the advertisement as art dichotomy, whilst being pioneering in their efforts to evolve new cinematic environs as compelling forces of expression and affect, through establishing new storytelling grammars and dramaturgies and through the creation of new tools and methods for advanced levels of audience engagement. The next section turns to considerations of social television in order to highlight the engulfment of its modes of operation into the realms of the cinematic.

4.2 Social television ‘Social television’ is predicated upon a commercial rubric operating within the attention economy. Based on marketing strategies which have been distinguished by Cincia Colapinto and Eleonora Benecchi as ‘Buzz marketing and WoM’, they argue that these ‘are almost interchangeable terms since they both refer to network-enhanced word of mouth, but if one wanted to find a difference, it would be that buzz (and viral) has tended to be used by those

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dealing with online ad media networks, while WoM by those who harness traditional social networks’.12 As Jonathan Beller attests, ‘the newest source of value production under capitalism today’ is ‘value producing human attention’.13 Extended television communities that align to a particular product, brand or franchise such as True Blood (2008-) and Game of Thrones (2011-) exemplify this shift to ‘social’ television. Television has already been recognized for its potential to exploit social media strategies, which is supported by various audience research studies.14 The ZeeBox iPad app is endemic of emerging multistreamed modes of viewing which involve simultaneous access to various sources of information. By selecting the programme currently being watched by the viewer on the television via the app, all data streams relevant to that particular broadcast are harvested from various sources and aggregated in realtime within the app’s interface. It provides up-to-the-second audience metrics on the popularity of the programme and the amount of social media activity that is emanating around it, including specific celebrity activity and profiles, as well as access to the Twitter streams denoted to the particular programme through the use of the appropriate hashtag. Access to other networked streams of information sourced via sites such as Wikipedia and IMDb are also included. Opportunities to engage with fictional characters and to engage in parasocial relations are also presented around televisual properties. Columbia tristar Interactive (CTI) describes Dawson’s Desktop, an online extension to Dawson’s Creek as a ‘programming platform that extends the themes, plots, and characters of “Dawson’s Creek” to the online arena and offers ‘derivative and original content between episodes and over hiatus periods’,15 which Jennifer Gillan stated is ‘effacing its role in delivering audiences to advertisers and emphasizing instead its function as an alternate platform for delivering series content to viewers’.16 Gillan also states that: The web platform is significant as it offered a revealing window not only into the characters, their inner lives and off-screen activities, but also into the production process itself. Pike and Schneider recruited writer’s assistant ArikaMittman […] Taking on Dawson’s persona, she drafted his emails, journal entries, IMs and even documents for his trash bin.17

More recently, the E4 drama Skins (2007–2013), now in its seventh series, is based around a group of young people in their final two years of sixth form, and as such the lead characters are re-cast every two years. Additional content can be accessed via the website, such as character profiles, and ‘un-seen’ Skins which

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are mini-episodes that interweave and imbricate with the main episode. The use of external sites includes Twitter, within which the main characters all have their own fictionalized accounts. Skins has also used Myspace since its launch, for all character profiles and also to release previews of the forthcoming series before they are aired. The programme-makers also created a Skins messenger bot, which pushes out synchronous messages and additional content via Windows Live Messenger,18 which informs users of detail around the music, styling and behind-the-scenes gossip during the episode, and signals additional exclusive video clips to watch during the advert breaks in the same vein as the second screen apps that were considered in the previous chapter. (Extensive research into Skins has previously been undertaken19). The types of engagements encouraged by Dawson’s Desktop and Skins have been considered within Gillan’s ‘Must-Click TV programming model’ as ‘one that is structured to encourage viewers to make emotional investments that will ideally lead to economic investments’.20 This resonates with what Henry Jenkins referred to as ‘affective economics’ which he states is a ‘new configuration of market theory which seeks to understand the emotional underpinnings of consumer decision making as a driving force behind viewing and purchasing decisions’.21 This stimulation of emotional engagement is deemed to be a contingent factor in securing brand loyalty, and is a salient feature of the some of the extended cinema forms to be discussed herein. There has been a tendency to align the aesthetics and modalities of the televisual with new online models and audience behaviours as opposed to filmic and cinematic forms. Indeed, Dovey states that ‘television’s appeal to liveness is being transmuted in the “user-generated” diegetic worlds afforded by webcams, mobile phone footage and home movies. We can also see the traditional segmented forms of television narrative transmuted by the new rhythms of online attention flow’.22 However, there are now detectable shifts within emerging cinematic modalities which suggest that televisual advertising rubrics are the driving forces behind the direction of their development. By porting cinematic experiences into purely online environments, where the dominant ‘main-feature’ modality is eradicated, this chapter attends to the transubstantiation of the aesthetics of the cinematic into online socially layered experiences. The next section will go on to consider examples of storytelling with online environs as progenitors to the socially layered cinematic forms of the two case studies.

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4.3 Socially networked storytelling The social media drama genre is widely considered to have been initiated by lonelygirl15, a web drama which launched in July 2006 via YouTube. Kathrin Peters and Andrea Seier states that YouTube ‘naturally offers potential for media-based self-referentiality. At the moment, YouTube is probably the most prominent example of media practice that allows the individual to record the minutest details of his or her life and to distribute them’.23 Purporting to be real, the authenticity of lonelygirl15 was invoked by a user-generated narrative instrumentality, which involved Daniel, the fictional friend of the central character Bree posting her personal videos on the YouTube channel. By February the following year, the channel was the most subscribed to on YouTube at the time with over 80,000 subscriptions. The (alleged) fan site lonelygirl15.com created by the fictional character Bukanator became the central locus for fans to discuss the videos. In September 2006, the creators made the formal announcement via this forum that the site was not real, although speculation was already rife as to its reality status amongst the viewing communities. This was reiterated on 13 September 2006, in the Los Angeles Times. The surrounding rhetoric of lonelygirl15 also resonates with discourses of advertising, and the perception of its status as such was critiqued by audiences.24 The influence of the project and its themes permeated other media spheres, for example an episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent was based on exactly the same premise,25 further instantiating the persistent ‘missing person’ trope of online, transmedia and Alternate Reality Game (ARG) fictions (the recurrence of this theme will be discussed in more depth in Chapter 7). Says Dovey, ‘the temporalities of the attention economy are producing new cultural forms […] Web drama is one of the sites where televisual narrative form meets new practices of social networking’.26 (Dovey explores KateModern and examples drawn from the point at which he was writing; 2006–2007). An emergence of the social storytelling oeuvre, using blogging tools also evolved at a similar time. Author Alison Norrington developed her fictional work Staying Single in 2009, which was told in the first-person voice of the main protagonist Sophie via daily blog entries, as well as through various different social networking sites including Bebo, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and Second Life. A column for the Woman’s Woman magazine, authored by the character of Sophie, was also posted. The story evolved in real-time, as Norrington explains,

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it was ‘a daily life story so I was able to integrate links with what was happening at the time in the news’.27 More recently, the Lizzie Bennet Diaries (2012), an American adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, is told in three-minute video episodes via YouTube. These examples as well as others such as Hope is Missing (2007) and KateModern (2007) (the sister series of lonelygirl15) all deploy the social media du jour with which to tell their real-time stories. @summerbreak (2013) is the latest of many in the linage of social storytelling, a fiction utilizing all five current social media channels (Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook). Its predominant use of Tumblr reflects the current sea change in social media use amongst the younger demographic whereby Facebook is seemingly waning in popularity.28 @summerbreak is also the latest in a lineage of current aesthetic crossover between the cinematic and the televisual, a ‘digital entertainment property’ of the ‘semi-reality show’ genre. In the UK semi-reality shows include The Only Way is Essex (UK, ITV2, 2010–2011) and Made in Chelsea (UK, Channel 4, 2011) amongst others. This genre places ‘real’ people into contrived situations, orchestrating semi-scripted scenarios deploying visual techniques that are traditionally associated with drama, therefore leading to ambiguity around their reality status. @summerbreak follows this modus operandi representing a social media-televisual hybrid. The ‘show’ involves nine teenage-cast-members who were selected by the show’s producers send their social content to the moderators who spend twenty-hours a day monitoring the posts. In the first episode we see two friends (Trevis and Ray) taking ‘selfies’, a social media colloquial-neogilism which refers to the photographing of oneself, in this case the characters engage in efforts to capture an airplane flying past them in the background using Snapchat (a relatively new social media tool which enables the sending of an image which is momentarily displayed on the recipient’s screen before disappearing). This engagement in mediated action resonates with Susan Sontag’s observation: To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one’s life, and therefore to go on with one’s life oblivious, or claiming to be oblivious, to the camera’s nonstop attention. But to live is also to pose. To act is to share in the community of actions recorded as images.29

The second scene of @summerbreak which reveals a young couple (Zaq and Clara) talking about texting, crystallizes the essence of the project; an inherently reflexive and literal set of stories told through social media about the use of social

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media, parlayed in the salon-speak of the ‘social media vernacular’.30 The premise of @summerbreak is to ‘Experience a life-changing summer with a group of LA kids – telling their stories, their way’. Their way happens to be by using an array of AT&T devices with which to communicate and express themselves. AT&T is one of the companies behind the project, and the sole sponsor and is indicative of the ‘advertainment’ idiom which it inhabits. In an attempt to distance itself from traditional corporate logics of advertising which involve video web-based paradigms characterized by ‘expandable hubs’ and ‘overlay ad’ aesthetics.31 Teddy Lynn, director of content at BBDO, New York, the ad agency that helped put the programme together along with the Chernin Group and AT&T, explains the marketing strategy of @summerbreak: ‘You will see logos at the end of episodes the way you’ll see a production company logo, and you will see “pro-mercials” or promotional video vignettes placed strategically in areas where @summerbreak viewers might congregate for added content, like Tumblr’. David Christopher, chief marketing officer of AT&T, asserts this anti-advertising rhetoric: ‘This has to be authentic. This has to be very real and it has to be very subtle’.32 ‘I want it to feel almost user-generated’, said Billy Parks, a production executive for Chernin Group,33 in an era where user-generated and self-published content has proliferated across multiple broadcasting outlets from online social networking sites to a myriad of web-based channels to formal televised news broadcasts. These strategies are symptomatic of video-based social media increasingly being deployed as marketing strategies of corporate brands and television and cinematic ‘properties’.34 This approach initiates the use of a commodified narrative tool, which embeds the commodity being advertised into the fabric of the fiction itself, advancing beyond the function of a ‘product placement’ paradigm. Product placement operates by ensuring that the extraneous item is strategically and clearly placed in shot for a specific amount of time (as was the recent high-profile case of James Bond Skyfall in 2012 in which bottled beer, a wrist watch and a car appeared on screen, clearly indicating the source of the film’s sponsorship). Within @summerbreak the product becomes an instrumental narrative device which is integral to the story and is a facilitating agent in character communication. This inversion of advertising techniques signals an emerging predilection for advertisers to attempt to more meaningfully engage with their target audiences. The mediation of social media use has been captured in the feature films such as LOL (2006), the mumblecore film by Joe Swanberg which conveys the inability of its twenty-something characters to communicate without the assistance of mediated communication modes (which were via email and text

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messaging – the dominant forms of social media at the time before being labelled as such). Mediation of online communications was also enacted in the film On_ Line (2002) in which the first scenes were shot over internet (cited in Chapter 2 in relation to its extended website component). More recently, Catfish (2010) and subsequently Catfish: The TV Show broadcast on MTV from 2012 explores the potential pretence and deception endemic within social media communications (predominantly on Facebook), where identities are faked and users duped. The ‘Fraping’35 neogilism refers to the transgressive practice of hijacking someone’s online identity generally for malicious ends. Reminiscent of Roy Ascott’s notion of the ‘syncretic self ’ which he defines ‘lies in our ability to be many selves, telematically in many places at the same time, our self-creation leading to many personas and serial identities’,36 also invokes Sherry Turkle’s assertion that within the context of the internet, people have the opportunity to ‘play with their identity and try out new ones’ which ‘makes possible the creation of an identity so fluid and multiple that it strains the limits of the notion one can be many’.37 The mediation of social communication makes ‘reality’ increasingly difficult to extrapolate, provoking questions of manipulation and authenticity. Martin Lister et al. attest that ‘in some ways cyberculture does not so much ignore “lived experience” as argue that we are more and more “living” in networks, a union of the immediate and the mediated’.38 The complex layering of mediation is invoked within the filmic examples of LOL, On_Line and Catfish and also in @summerbreak whereby interpersonal communication itself is mediated, then the representation of that mediated communication is further mediated and manipulated. Concerns with social media use are seemingly a sine qua non of these emerging examples, whereby the reflexive digressions into technology use and social media habits become salient features of social media storytelling. The interrogation of our use of technologies through the characteristics of the media forms that they deploy is central to the first case study of this chapter which will now be considered. The case study of The Inside Experience will also explore the impacts of the televisual and advertising modalities upon narrative forms, comprehensions and audience engagements.

4.4 The Inside Experience case study The Inside Experience,39 ostensibly a cinematic experience, although primarily an advertising campaign, and one which was experienced entirely through the

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Facebook platform, was branded by its creators, Intel and Toshiba, as a ‘social film’. The Inside Experience (henceforth to be referred to as The Inside) initiated this self-proclaimed genre in 2011, which has since been superseded by two further ‘social films’: The Beauty Inside (2012) and The Power Inside (2013). Through an in-depth analysis of The Inside deploying both textual and audience methods, this section reveals insights into the multiple and often unexpected ways that audience members can engage, translate, shape and influence a transmedia storytelling experience invoking the importance of the presence and influence of the audience that underpins this book. As Paul Atkinson attests, ‘Attention to visual culture also implies a serious attention to the ethnoaesthetics of the producers and consumers of visual materials. We need not only to “read” the visual, but also understand ethnographically how it is read by members of the social world or culture in question’.40 The issues of ephemerality and temporal-specificity as expressed in Chapter 2 have been overcome within this instance through the ability to undertake real-time observation, and by gaining access to all of the materials created and distributed by the production and also through access to the participating audience communities. Ongoing audience study beyond the eleven-day parameter of the experience was also enabled by the salient characteristic of social-textual networks which Annette N.  Markham has termed the ‘Chrono Malleable’,41 which is the inherently temporal characteristic of virtual technologies which allow for the retrospective analysis of both synchronous and asynchronous engagements with the audience/ informants. The ephemerality of this particular experience was compounded by the fact the production team removed all items shortly upon completion, as a result of copyright contractual obligations rendering its ‘hyper-ephemerality’.42 The inaugural ‘Inside’ experience took place over the course of eleven days in the Summer of 2011 between Monday 25 July and Thursday 4 August. It was essentially an extended advertising campaign, and one which didn’t repudiate its status as a marketing form. Identified as a film and cinematic experience on account of its adoption of cinematic style and thriller genre conventions, further affirmed by the authorial presence of a recognized industry director and renowned Hollywood brand D.J.Caruso (known for his film Disturbia, 2007), it combined elements of computer game, puzzle, role-playing and an ARG element at the conclusion of the experience. The frameworks for engagement and narrational agency came in the form of established social networking tools which played to the social media demotic of the target audience of eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds,43 who could be considered as ‘Digital Natives’ (according

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to John G. Palfrey and Urs Gassers definition44)‘… born after 1980, when social digital technologies, such as Usenet and bulletin board systems, came online. They all have access to networked digital technologies. And they all have the skills to use those technologies’.45 Using YouTube, Twitter but predominantly the Facebook platform (now in its eighth year of existence in and reportedly used by nearly 500 million people)The Inside acknowledged user familiarity with the grammar, language and tools of Facebook and advanced levels of social media literacy amongst the audience. The social media narrative instrumentality which is characterized by brevity in its form of short video excerpts, fragments of images, status updates and Facebook comments is indicative of what Geert Lovink has termed ‘WWW-ADHD’ which manifests itself in the way we scatter our attention in cyberspace. Attentive watching and listening have given way to diffuse multitasking. When we sit down at the computer, we all get ADHD. During video clips, which last an average of just two and half minutes, we jump up and down, sing along, play air guitar. We behave like hyper- active children receiving too little attention, and if we don’t like something, we scream at the drop of a hat, or immediately turn to something else, conclude psychologists who study online behaviour (My emphasis).46

This observation is characteristic of the accelerated levels of audience comprehension which has impacted upon all screen media, inclusive of the cinematic realm.47 Furthermore, alongside its fragmented delivery, The Inside maintained a realtime temporal verisimilitude. All social interactions reputedly happened ‘live’ within the eleven-day temporal framework (the cinematic renditions of the events were obviously pre-recorded). The real-time emphasis was a challenge for the makers who could not work in a conventional scripted modality, said Billie Goldman of Intel: It was too real-time for it to be scripted […] we knew what we wanted to talk about episode to episode and we had one gentlemen, Charlie [a writer], and he was playing Christina Perraso online, and he was locked in a room for eleven days and just responding constantly, so when he slept was when Christina slept.

This account is redolent of the pioneering experience detailed in Chapter 2, where the writers of The Beast were also responding in real-time to the activity of the Cloudmakers forum. The real-time experience of The Inside also offered the greatest excitement for the audience, said one member,‘besides watching the

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videos, you have her posting pictures, […] it’s not like a film experience, every second you’re just keeping up with everything that’s happening, online, and it was like a week and a half, it was intense, I don’t think I really slept at all’.48 The diegetic premise of The Inside was based on a recognizable archetype; the main protagonist (Christina Perasso) finds herself trapped in a room in an unknown location with an (Intel) laptop computer (which in this case was the commodified narrative tool) as her only means of communication with the outside world, and an unreliable Wi-Fi connection that her unidentified captor is controlling. It was the audience members’ role to assist in her emancipation. The audience was first called to action on an extratextual level to audition for a part in the forthcoming experience, through a direct address from the (omnidiegetic) director. By reading a set piece of dialogue to camera and then posting it onto YouTube, the clip would be voted upon by the audience, the winner of which would then be featured within the film experience communicating with Christina. The second intradiegetic call to action came in the form of a video entry posted by Christina asking for help. This is posted on both YouTube and on her own personal Facebook page and constituted one of the multiple diegetic portals into the experience through which users could enter without first accessing any of the surrounding extratextual and contextual information. Viewers were able to concurrently access the paratextual elements of The Inside including the corporate sponsor information, the disclaimers, behindthe-scenes photographs and comments from crewmembers throughout the experience of the narrative via the film’s own website and The Inside Experience Facebook page. Within these contexts The Inside’s construction as a fiction was made explicit, Christina’s name is clearly linked to the name of the actress who plays her (Emmy Rossum). The website reveals the project’s textual reflexivity and hypermediation.49 In addition to Christina’s Facebook page, viewers can access that of her boyfriend, her mother and three friends, all of whom are clearly identified as ‘Fictional Characters’ within their profiles. Christina and the character of her father also have Twitter accounts. Christina would regularly post messages, photographs and videos of herself on her Facebook pages to which viewers would respond and add comments, and engage in dialogue and debate with other users. These items related to clues that might help viewers discover Christina’s location and to find the identity of her captor. Throughout the experience, in addition to the direct camera addresses posted by Christina there are eight official videos that are released at different points as stand-alone webisodes.

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The Inside is cinematic in its approach – all of the traditional narrative conventions associated with the thriller genre were used alongside high production values in the use of camera, sound, grading and effects. These webisodes are metafictional in nature as Christina is seen engaging in the online activities, reflecting the pervading real world practices of social networking, reminding the audience of the proximity between the actual representation of events and their mediation. It also serves as an inflection upon spectatorial identification whereby the audience members are similarly engaging with these activities as an intrinsic facet of the narrative experience. This resonates with Lovink’s assertion that ‘YouTube’s slogan, “Broadcast Yourself ”, is put into action by less than 1 per cent of its users. In this Long Tail age, we know that it’s mainly about “Broadcasting to Yourself ”. The Internet is used mainly as a mirror’.50 The mirror analogy is also used by Turkle, who states of new technologies: They provoke us to think about who we are. They challenge our ideas about what it is to be human, to think and feel. They present us with more than a challenge. They present us with an affront, because they hold up a new mirror in which mind is reflected as machine.51

The Inside plays out themes of isolation and loneliness through Christina’s solitary incarceration. This again reflects another of Turkle's observations: Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings of emptiness, of disconnection, of the unreality of self. And here the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but need never feel vulnerable to another person.52

Audience members could follow the clues laid out for them within the different elements of The Inside, seamlessly shifting from one social media provider to another, leaving a trail of their activities within their Facebook feeds for others to follow (and occasionally for others to misinterpret the reality status of these exchanges). This strategy upon which social media marketing initiatives such as WoM and Buzz are predicated is here seamlessly integrated into the fabric of the narrative experience. Through the enactment of narrational agency audience members of the Inside, via their immersion in the narrative, were unconsciously spreading the message as if bees in the pollination cycle. Drawn to interact with different content, such as a bee to a flower, created a narrative nectar through the experience which then became the honey for others to consume. This raises an intrinsic issue of the use of social media in narrative experiences, where audience members may not be fully aware that their behaviour can be recorded,

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mapped and traced by advertisers via what is essentially a data collection device. These social media platforms have the ability to power generative fictions by embedding user data such as text, images and video into the fabric of a fictional experience (as previously described in the example of The Wilderness Downtown which embeds the user’s childhood home into the fragmented video vignettes). There have been a number of Facebook storytelling examples where data from a user’s account is mined in real-time in order to generate a unique experience for that particular user. The most prevalent example was the Take this Lollipop campaign ‘dubbed the world’s fastest-growing Facebook app’53 of 2011. The app generated a cinematic rendering of a horror film in which the user plays a central role. Their images, address and data are embedded into the on-screen world of a psychopath who stalks them and approaches their home in the climactic scene. This particular experience acts as a chilling presage against online data sharing through social media veneers such as Facebook raising further issues of privacy and the public/private self in networked spaces (which has recently been explored by numerous studies).54 These new fragmented advertising stratagems which capitalize on the economics of attention, which are what José Van Dijck has referred to as ‘online commercialized sociality’,55 were blended with more traditional forms in the case of The Inside. These included a high-profile YouTube mast head which was purchased to ensure the ‘viral lift’ needed.56 As Forbes defines, ‘ “Native advertising” has emerged as the convergence between original brand video content and dramatically new approaches to distribution that ensure an ad matches the look and feel of a website and does not interrupt the viewing experience in the manner of a television commercial’.57 This combination of strategies appears to have achieved a significant degree of success; of the eleven audience members from a group of participants from The Inside community, nine of them stated that they heard about the experience through the official advertisements on YouTube/Facebook, only one had accessed the experience through a Facebook post and another through the Mashable blog. This particular community who were prolific in their activities around the experience signified the active 1 per cent through which other viewers could observe, denoting the varying levels of engagement of other audience members. The 1 per cent of users become the narrators of the experience. Goldman reflected upon the evidence of the different layers of engagement that were present throughout the experience: What we really figured out is … the different layers, and levels that people really want to participate at, there are those that just want to view, and just

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watch and there are those that really engage and start to make comments about the experience, and then there are those that actually act along with us and those really deep ones that want to do codes and figure things out and share information, and so that’s how we’re structuring the third social film with that layering effect.58

In the subsequent experiences, the producers have chosen to demarcate the dialogic areas which in The Inside were all aggregated and discussed within one forum. Within The Beauty Inside, the creators initiated a dedicated Producer's page on Facebook which audience members were sign-posted to in order to engage directly with the makers on an omnidiegetic level. Where traditionally, economic and artistic rubrics have been at odds and the interruptional presence of corporate identities has been antithetical with immersion, this particular audience were not concerned with The Inside’s ontology as an advertisement. One of the audience members commented that it was ‘such a good idea, and so engaging and so different, from anything. We didn’t care that we were seeing an Intel and Toshiba logo’.59 This signalled the user community’s acquiescence of the experience as a valid fictional engagement, but also raises concerns around the consequences and impacts of a strategy of innovation driven by brand awareness, which is explicitly targeted at the underthirty five age group. This defining shift in cinematic experiences which are focused on a particular demographic of young, digitally fluent and networked individuals is the antithesis of equality and inclusion. The textual and audience investigation into The Inside has yielded over 3,700 pages of data which constituted over 30,000 wall posts on the fictional character Christina Perasso’s wall throughout the eleven-day experience. Subject to an initial analysis, which was published in a recent book chapter in which I drew out the emerging themes and grammars,60 revealed a sophisticated and multi-layered audience response which was demonstrated by advanced levels of narrative comprehension. The richness and the complexity of The Inside story experience were revealed through its retrospective analysis of the realtime audience engagements which took place on Facebook. The access to the immediate responses, thoughts and feelings generated by audience members experiencing a fictional event is largely unprecedented. One particular audience study was based on access to similar data undertaken by Margrit Schreier61 who investigated viewer responses in internet chat rooms to The Blair Witch Project as a basis to evaluate viewer perception of reality. It was discovered that some viewers ‘while eventually coming to realise the film’s fictionality, are nevertheless temporarily confused as to its ontology’.62

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My primary research also involved retrospective engagement with a specific and exclusive Facebook group (one of a number) who had formed as a result of the overwhelming amount of posts being made to Christina Perasso’s wall. Attempting to work through this volume and high levels of extraneous content also made the research task exceptionally challenging and the interpretation of computer mediated communication (CMC) is not without its complexities. As Angela Cora Gracia et al. note when interpreting CMC it is important that there are no assumptions made about the use of language including spelling and grammar as ‘text based interaction pose interpretive puzzles for the ethnographer in terms of their relationship to participant’s representation of self ’.63 The Christina Perasso Case Group Clues and the We’re trying to save Christina Perasso group were two of the prominent instances, where fellow users united in the spirit of the story to save Christina. Eleven members of the latter group were retrospectively interviewed about their experiences, seven of whom were male and four of whom female. The females’ ages ranged between sixteen and eighteen, and the males were aged between seventeen and twenty three, with the exception of one male in his forties. Two originated from Canada, eight from the USA and one was based in Denmark. This study is limited to an Anglo-American perspective in both the audience demographic that it attracted and in the resultant reception analysis. Research in the area of cultural difference of social networking sites and related empirical analysis is in its infancy.64 Upon examination of the viewer interactions on the Facebook wall using a grounded theory approach in order to identify recurrent and prevalent themes, the dialectical encounters between audience members revealed a number of key modes or ‘levels’ of communication demonstrating a sophisticated and multilayered audience engagement. These included intradiegetic encounters (such as direct communication with Christina – audience members communicated with Christina in the first-person responding directly to her plight); extradiegetic engagements (discussing and clarifying textual details, including solving the puzzles and hunting for clues); extratextual conversations (episodic information and confirmation of rules of engagement, community discussions, the question of ‘is this real?’ pervades throughout) and omnidiegetic activities (such as the creation of maps, diagrams and timelines). In many cases audience members would seamlessly step from one ‘level’ of communication to another in conversational streams, making ‘metaleptic’ leaps between the ontological boundaries of fact, fiction, inside and outside of

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the diegesis, traversing the multi-layered diegetic and paratextual levels whilst maintaining a propensity towards a persistent and willing suspension of disbelief. Moreover, the language that the audience members engaged in invoked the implicit ARG and role playing parlance, such as ‘out-of-character’(which frequently appeared throughout the Facebook discourse) demonstrating a tacit agreement between participants, and intuiting the arcane domain of the ARG despite The Inside audience members who were questioned having limited prior experience. Only one of the eleven audience members questioned from the We’re trying to save Christina Perasso group had heard of or played anything similar to the experience (They identified The Dark Knight, Why So Serious? campaign). Said another member of the group, ‘someone in our private group suggested playing our own characters. By that they meant socializing with the other characters and acting like a friend’ (M6)65, thus intuitively invoking one of the core ARG principles: ‘Do not role play or pretend to be a made-up character while playing an ARG. Alternate reality games are intended to be enjoyed as yourself ’.66 When talking about their engagement with the experience, many comments pertained to the sociality of the experience, and were concordant in its positive impact including ‘I spent countless hours and days with the “Inside Family”. I have made many friends from around the world, some whom I’ve become very close to and shared some secrets, secrets I haven’t even told my local friends’ (M1); ‘What I loved about it was meeting the amazing people I did’ (M2); ‘The bonding was great. I loved being in the group that was basically ahead in solving all of the clues’ (F2); ‘helped connect people’ (M3); ‘I mostly ended up making a lot of friends, and acting as the group’s cheerleader’ (M4); ‘I loved about the Inside Experience was the level of cooperation it required which resulted in several continued friendships including falling in love with another participant!’(M5). In relation to ARG, Dave Szulborski writes, ‘[…] can become a source of personal revelation and transformation, while simultaneously enabling their participants to forge strong and lasting social connections with an active, self motivated online community’,67 contradicting previous conceptions, such as Avital Ronnell’s, that ‘Virtual reality, artificial reality, dataspace, or cyberspace are inscriptions of a desire whose principal symptom can be seen as the absence of community’.68 Others discussed the immersive nature of the experience: ‘It also felt good that it felt so real and that it gave some of us something thrilling to do’ (F4); ‘I liked the fact that the characters weren’t all just 2D and that we could find out

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more about them. Like information that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with [the storyline]’ (M6). All those questioned were consonant in their belief that the experience concluded in a narrative impasse. Indicative comments included ‘I didn’t like was the lack of closure’ (M1); ‘I disliked the ending’ (M2); ‘I absolutely HATED how it ended’ (F1); ‘anti-climatic’ (F2); ‘Main complaint was that in the end she kind of freed herself which made our interaction seem all the less needed’ (M5). This perception of being subjected to a mediated quasi-interaction was also extended to the limited opportunity of engagement offered by the initial ‘casting call’, which resulted in only one audience member being selected for inclusion. Some audience members forgave this perceived narrative aporia of the unsatisfactory ending: ‘I really loved the fact that it was truly up to us to get her out of there. Even if it might have been a linear story with no alternative endings (like as promised), I thought it didn’t really matter anyway’ (M6). The Inside actually concluded with a live experience whereby audience members who attended Union Square station, LA (the destination and time was revealed through the various clues within the experience) witnessed staged police activity and then became part of a police interrogation exercise (the videos of which were then uploaded to YouTube). The palpable experience was met with ebullience by the fans who were able to play a part and to feature in one of the interrogation videos, which is expressed within a detailed account posted by one of the We’re trying to save Christina Perasso group members who was able to attend the event and be questioned by the police. This sense of liveness and ‘being there’ as explored in Chapter 2 is here considered further within the rhetoric of social media, and within considerations of the accumulation of cultural capital. As Glen Creeber and Martin Royston state, ‘it is recorded via mobile devices precisely in order to be shared online as a marker of one’s cultural taste, and one’s consumer status (“I was there”)’.69 Matt Hills, referring to a U2 fan-community, observed that ‘Fans are presenting themselves as bearers of high levels of fan cultural capital (broadly speaking, fan status that would be recognised as such by fellow fans)’ and through ‘Posting this type of content reflects on the user’s online identity and bears future imagined audience’s approval in mind’.70 This open display of cultural capital is intrinsic to the Facebook self-publishing culture and The Inside facilitates an extension of these practices. In addition to the cachet achieved by those fans who featured in the interrogation videos, the importance of these displays are reflected in the diegetic emphasis upon the

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urgent need to generate friends within The Inside in order to escape, as the film’s tagline states, ‘Her only way out will be to bring you in’. The cultural importance placed upon the affirmation of securing ‘friends’ is the central conceit of the Facebook culture. The parasocial relationships between the audience and the key cast member are redolent of the changing nature of personal relationships which are played out within contemporary virtual spaces. Research has established that the parasocialability of media messages can vary in part based on the successful approximation of reality.71 Interesting parallels can be drawn between the audience interactions and expectations of The Inside to a radio progenitor of The Lonesome Gal (1951), a short radio serialization which deployed the inherent immediacy and intimacy of the radio form. The popular show which was broadcast in ninety different cities used a first-person confessional modality, in which the central and the only character spoke as if she were addressing the individual (male) listener. The actress reportedly disguised her identity and wore a mask in public in order to sustain the premise that she was a ‘real’ person. She reportedly received thousands of letters propositioning marriage72 from the male listenership which constituted the audience. Interestingly, The Lonesome Gal was predominantly used as an advertising vehicle in which the products of the programme’s sponsors Bond Street Tobacco and Red Top Beer were frequently embedded into her monologues. All episodes were individually focused on a town or brand to which it was aligned. The links between diegetic and advertising modalities are not so keenly distinguished in contemporary online environs. The Inside deploys the accumulation of affirmation as a strategy to meet both ends. This is exemplified in a specific instance where the captor writes that in order for Christina to earn food, she must amass a large number of ‘likes’ from her friends which are achieved by pressing the thumbs up icon that appears next to different elements in Facebook. This activity functions on two levels: firstly, on a diegetic level, this device of virtual affirmation provides narrational agency to the audience members who draws more people’s attention to Christina’s plight and by doing so are provided with a sense of advancing the diegesis; secondly, it raises awareness of the experience to other viewers who will see the ‘like’ in their friends status stream which will encourage them to engage, thus meeting marketing ends where more ‘eyeballs’ are drawn to the sites of the project. As Van Dijck asserts, ‘the massive adoption of the Like button has turned personal data sharing by third parties into an accepted practice in the online universe; hence, the Like button epitomizes the profound modification of a social norm’.73 He goes onto

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state that ‘friendship is not only the result of spontaneous, human-based (inter) actions, but also the result of programmed sociality – relationships suggested by PYMK74 buttons and friends-of-friends algorithms’.75 The notion of ‘Friends’ in social media spaces is an emergent area of study.76 Surveillance and voyeurism are thematically and literally invoked within The Inside. A CCTV website ‘your friends are my friends’ is one of the diegetic portals into The Inside world which is implied to be the creation of Christina’s captor. Surveillance is implicitly invoked through the use of the social media space in which it resides. As Marwick has noted: Social surveillance is the ongoing eavesdropping, investigation, gossip and inquiry that constitutes information gathering by people about their peers, made salient by the social digitization normalized by social media. It encompasses using social media sites to broadcast information, survey content created by others, and regulating one‘s own content based on perceptions of the audience (My emphasis).77

The practice of social surveillance is an inherent feature of the socially layered cinematic experience of which all audience members through their engagement are complicit. Nathan Jurgenson and George Ritzer refer to this type of power as the omniopticon, in which the many watch the many.78 Göran Bolin states, ‘[…] having one’s “data double” – that is, one’s digital presence on the web – surveilled might feel less intrusive compared with the telephone company eavesdropping on our telephone conversations or the postman opening our mail’.79 Robert S. Tokunaga talks of the ‘democratization of the gaze’ in ‘an age where the many watch the many’.80 These practices are increasingly normalized within social media culture, and the quotidian nature of these activities are made explicit throughout The Inside, in which we observe Christina’s plight through CCTV and surveillance modalities. As noted, the emergent communities that sprang up around The Inside exhibited characteristics normally assigned to the esoteric long-established fan communities whereby, according to Jenkins, fans work ‘toward the construction of a metatext that is larger, richer, more complex and interesting (than the original series)’.81 The user generation of paratextual materials to support the gathering and sharing of information between participants within The Inside included a detailed visual mapping of the clues, as well as a timeline chronologically sequencing the story and plot events which was specifically produced for

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Figure 4.1  The Power Inside, the third in the Social Film series © Intel/Toshiba

audience members entering the narrative at a later stage. The We’re trying to save Christina Perasso group also created a set of rules of engagement, as well as a number of summary documents. This invokes John Fiske’s observation that ‘Fans create a fan culture with its own systems of production and distribution that forms what I shall call a “shadow cultural economy” ’.82 The observations of The Inside parallel and resonate with the findings of another study undertaken by Janna Jones (2013) in research into the memories of sites of cinema and film experiences within the same social demographic, a group of students who were born in the early 1990s. Jones identified these as the first generation to have been able to access film content both in public and private arenas. The research revealed that ‘solitary watching was a normalized activity’.83 Jones stated that ‘The movie industry clearly catered for children of the 1990s, both in their homes and at the theatre, and as a result their generation learned to fluidly navigate both kinds of cinema space’.84 As discussed in Chapter 2, the ARG genre has tended to be perceived as arcane and impalpable, but The Inside represented something more accessible and of far broader appeal. The equivalent of an established fan community that evolves around a persistent brand took this group of people only eleven days to formulate, thus exemplifying the accelerated velocity at which online communities can now be formed. This affirms Paul Booth’s observation (in relation to ARGs) that these can be conceived as ‘a means through which we can see how communities form and populate the Web Commons’.85 Most notably in her observations Jones concluded that the VHS generation, of which The Inside community are apart, ‘view sociability as the most meaningful part of their movie experiences’.86

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The Inside garnered over 50 million views worldwide, accumulated 53,000 Facebook likes, 4,000 Twitter followers and received 23 awards (including Effie and Webby), and an increase of double digits in brand familiarity, which was one of the key aims as Goldman explained: our goal had been to reach that 18–34 year old audience, and deliver an unexpected experience, that exceeded their expectations, and Toshiba has a branding perception issue with that audience in that audience thinks that ‘Toshiba’s for my Dad’, the average age of a buyer of a Toshiba lap top is like 50-years old, so they have a real problem. On the other hand Intel 2 has a real problem in that the 18–34 year-old audience, our brand awareness is 7.87

Galvanized by its commercial success and industry cache, The Inside was catalytic in its effect in spawning the progeny of ‘social film’, following up with The Beauty Inside88 (2012) and The Power Inside89 (2013) (Figure 4.1) at the time of writing, the latter of which had just been released. Considered the acme of this new ‘advertainment’ genre, which characteristically eschew commercial interruptions, The Beauty Inside became the sixth most watched advertising of 2012, attracting 70 million views worldwide, over 94,000 Facebook likes and 8,000 Twitter followers over its eight and a half week experience. It was translated into eight languages. Said Scott Donaton: It’s really social at its core and most importantly, these are the only brands that could have produced this work. The brands not only inspired the storyline, but the storyline itself was powered all the way through by them […] So it wasn’t a matter of ‘Hey, how are we doing integrations and where are the logos appearing?’ It was truly a matter of this was a story that would’ve stalled if it wasn’t for the role of the laptop and the video diaries in Alex’s life.90

The use of the commodified narrative tool persists within the advertising instrumentality of The Beauty Inside. Furthermore, the ability to simultaneously enact multiple identities is built into the diegesis of the experience where the character of Alex can be played by anyone, inflecting the disposable identity culture of digitally networked spaces. This increases opportunities for audience engagement which were perceptibly lacking in the first experience, and advances the ‘social film’ continuum which is characterized, imbued and influenced by themes of the digital human condition. The following case study explores socially layered cinema from an avantgarde perspective. Untrammelled by an explicit advertising rhetoric, Cloud Chamber centralizes the advancement of storytelling and the creation of new fictional experiences within digitally networked spaces.

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4.5 Cloud Chamber The raison d’etre of ARG strategies has traditionally been that of a facilitating vehicle for advertising, and it has been the subordinate expressive form as exemplified in most of the examples thus far explored within this book (with notable exceptions). The online mystery Cloud Chamber (2013) repudiates this status and initiates the ARG form as the main narrative and commercial event, presenting an innovative triangulation of cinema, art and ARG, via gameplay mechanics, a closed social network and filmed materials. Branded as a ‘premium online mystery’, at the time of writing it had only just entered the marketplace.91 A transmedia story about a young astrophysicist who betrays her father and risks insanity in order to save mankind, Cloud Chamber rethinks drama for the fictional consumer in a digitally networked era. Produced by Vibeke Windeløv (Breaking The Waves, 1996), the project originates and is underpinned by the context of the Danish film movement. As Christian Fonnesbech, the project’s director, states, Cloud Chamber aims to address some of the problems we think that ARG and transmedia has had. One of the main problems is the real-time unfolding, which we want to get away from because it doesn’t scale and it doesn’t last and it’s not satisfying spending three years of your life making something and then it’s gone after a few months.92

Cloud Chamber currently involves one hermetic web-based destination in which a compendium of materials are aggregated within multiple landscapes or ‘crowdscapes’ as they are appellated within this particular experience; bearing semblance to a virtual world environment. The navigatory principle is one in which the viewer must virtually traverse the crowdscapes in order to access, scrutinize and discuss the contents of the media files with other viewers, thus enabling heuristic encounters and discoveries (Figures 4.2 and 4.3). There are ten levels within Cloud Chamber which are chronologically advanced, through gaining the necessary ‘trust level’ points which are awarded for interactional exchanges with other viewers. The integral structuring principle is one of fragmentation, a systemic space which promotes itinerant viewing patterns whereby content is dispersed amongst various found footage data sources including images, police records, videos, video journals, emails and authentic documentary clips sources from the European Space Agency. States Fonnesbech:

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We are really trying to make an entertainment form and a storytelling form where you can go in for two minutes no matter where you are or you can spend the entire night in there if that’s what you want to do. Or you can just dip in…. because that’s the kind of lifestyle we’re living now. We are always on, we are always connected.93

The narrative structuring of Cloud Chamber supports this fragmented viewing modality by invoking the televisual. The narratives have been structured on the premise that this first iteration is part of a series, which ends on a cliff hanger, in preparation for future ‘seasons’. The story is centred on the fictional Petersen Institute, a prolific physics and space research organization, focusing upon the activities of a number of its employees: Kathleen (the daughter of the head of the institute, Gustav Peterson), Max working on intergalactic space data collection and a renowned night-club DJ and Thomas, the documentary producer who films much of the exposition. The initial story relays how these unlikely three characters first come together as the mysteries behind the death of Kathleen’s mother Ingrid unfold; the intrigue around the involvement of Kathleen’s father Gustav deepens and the presence and source of a mysterious audio signal pervades. Narrative comprehension is complicated by the multiple subplots and subtexts in which the latent background mythologies can be explored. An emphasis on the conspiratorial is a key narrative stratagem deployed in complex fictions and Cloud Chamber is

Figure 4.2  The data landscape in Cloud Chamber, Cloud Chamber/Investigate North, 2013

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no exception (Lost was the forerunner, a predecessor to Cloverfield which was discussed in Chapter 2) where the producers have created a world so vast and complex that collaborative audience interaction is needed to make sense of it all. The Cloud Chamber is the latest in the lineage of intelligent science fiction (Fonnesbech cites The Blair Witch Project, Welles’ The War of the Worlds, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lost and Primer as key influences) and one that seeks to create a realistic mythology. The extent of the complex narrative layering was considered by the scriptwriters to be over the top; Fonnesbech explains, ‘they’re used to a medium where it’s only what you see’. Fonnesbech claims that this medium is different, and that there has to be excessive background story, because people can keep looking, he states, ‘you’re building a cathedral here, and you can just keep detailing it’. The story is based on ‘good’ science and limited apocryphal assumptions, using the real world as the canvas on which to base the mythology. The core themes resonate within a number of dimensions: the underpinning premise (the advent of modern space research was founded upon radio telescopes, which deploy the same technologies as electronic music); the poesy of the visual environment which invokes space travel; the soundscape; the texture of the experience and the various interwoven plots and subplots of the syuzhet. The Cloud Chamber environment is imbued with an oneiric quality in the former levels and in the latter sections an elegiac quality is transmitted through the symbolic destruction of the constituent elements of the environment and the impending dereliction of the database. A technological aphasia ensues as sound, vision and environment degenerates, reminiscent of the earlier observations of Requiem for a Dream in Chapter 2, which operated within a similar logic of decay. Cloud Chamber’s tag line ‘data visualization meets social media’ invokes the data-driven milieu in which the experience is situated. The organizing labyrinthine schema is visualized through the landscape which the audience members navigate, following pre-defined pathways between the media files by engaging in literal perambulations of various impossible vistas. The narrative structuring, through the literalization of the database, could be read as a necropolis in which the vestiges of both the various story elements and analogue culture reside. The remnants of a past story is narrated through fragments of dated documentaries, but it is a story which is thematically, textually and texturally imbued with futurity. As a viewer, we do not (yet) know what happened to the people within, we only know what they have left behind. The spatilaized crowdscape presents hierarchies of content; those found on higher

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levels are deemed to be more ‘important’ than those residing below, invoking a pre-determined narrative structure (albeit loosely), directorial intent and an authorial presence. In addition, this spatialization is extended as a defining feature of the narrative levels; the first crowdscape starts on land, and latter crowdscapes transgress into outer space invoking a deliberate ‘cosmic zoom’.94 The dispersal logic is adumbrated in the interface design in which the inherently disordered narrative structure and agglomeration of data through which the audience need to work is spatialized within the three-dimensional landscape, and access to media points are enabled through the traversal from point-to-point of bifurcating pathways. The visual environment is married with the sound environment through an undulating sonic landscape, which the viewer can manipulate, clicking at predefined ‘spots’ scoring points as landscape is traversed. Fonnesbech is incisive in his approach to the sonic form with solicitude which captures the project’s reverence to electronic music. He aimed to: integrate music in the story and every pore of the story, the music activates the signal, the music is necessary inside the database, Max unlocks the signal by using music, and the signal actually creates noise in the media files, and then that noise become ambient and emotional. The idea ultimately is that the signal reacts to the emotion in the media files.

The Cloud Chamber is denoted as ‘a headphone experience’ in order to ensure the audiences’ sonic envelopment and absorption into the symphonically coordinated soundscape. Said Fonnesbech: the genesis of the whole project is as much about sound as it is about character. […] It was our intention from very early on for me to use sound and music to make the entire experience as immersive as a movie or more, because I think that’s what’s missing in a lot of internet projects is this sense of space that you’re entering, a mood and a unique place which comes from the sound.95

The music engenders a shared social space in which the soundscapes sustain a mood and texture as a tool for the unification of the audience’s imaginary within a shared sensorium. The sonic atmospheres of each of the levels are differentiated and the modulation of the audio is deployed to create emotional affect, as Fonnesbech states: the general movement is towards disintegration and chaos, so both the landscape you fly through disintegrates and becomes more and more abstract at the same time the sound track darkens and becomes more disharmonic. Aiming to create

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an escalating sense of chaos, danger, emotional disturbance, the films become more noisy the further you get in, because the signal infiltrates the films, the noise from database landscapes infiltrate the films or the other way round. And this is very much a conscious design […] the progression is into the heart of darkness. Both mentally, character wise, aesthetically, sonically.

The inexorable signal that permeates the documentary footage is represented by the analogue signifier of a rolling screen (as opposed to the pixellation break down and freeze framing which would usually denote the effects of such interference to a digital source). The use of an analogue signifier represents a skeumorph, indicative of a temporally and technologically displaced sign system which although in this case is correlative with the storyline and carries with it a thematic resonance, the use of analogue semiotics still persists in many expressive digital forms (such as the sound of a shutter that emits from a smartphone when a picture is taken, the sonic emulation of a page turn of a paper-based book when clicking from page-to-page on an e-reader). In order to access the epistemic dimensions of Cloud Chamber, the audience members must drill deeper and deeper through the constituent levels of the fractally layered narrative. Cloud Chamber does not strive for the temporal verisimilitude of a real-time experience endemic of previous ARG/Transmedia projects. Rather a deepening of the narrative experience is facilitated whereby the viewers reconstitute the fabula through the anachronistic navigation of found footage, making individual and community discoveries which evoke a new form of digital archaeology that marks our current cultural moment. The affective impacts of the Cloud Chamber redolently invokes what Raymond Williams called a ‘structure of feeling’,96 which he was applying to the impact of drama upon the medium of television and its subsequent transformation: This was a drama of the box in the same fundamental sense as the naturalist drama had been the drama of the framed stage. The technical possibilities that were commonly used corresponded to this structure of feeling: the enclosed internal atmosphere; the local interpersonal conflict; the close-up on private feeling. Indeed these emphases could be seen as internal properties of the medium itself, when in fact they were a selection of some of its properties according to the dominant structure of feeling.97

The Cloud Chamber establishes an emerging ‘structure of feeling’ specific to the form, using data as the substrate upon which to build the narrative. This could be likened to Steven Shaviro’s concept of an ‘affective map’, which he explains

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Figure 4.3  The data landscape in Cloud Chamber, Cloud Chamber/Investigate North, 2013

‘do not just passively trace or represent, but actively construct and perform.’98 This reflects Fonnesbech’s aim to inaugurate ‘a drive towards emotion” which he perceives to be ‘lacking in both transmedia and online projects’.99 Fonnesbech goes on to state, ‘it’s not that people don’t want the emotion, it’s more that our tools for engaging audiences in emotion are so undeveloped in this medium’. The audience members are enabled to cohere the narrative through their interactions. Progression through constituent materials of each of the levels, and advancement through the levels themselves are predicated upon sense-making and reciprocal communication between audience members. Each media asset has its own mini-Facebook-like forum, in which users collaborate and corroborate in questions that the producers have posed. Through writing comments, commenting on the posts of others and through evaluation of the perceived relevance of one another’s comments porting the affirmational ‘thumbs up’ rubric of social media (which in this case is expanded to include a ‘dislike’ option enabling the audience to engage in critical and challenging discourse), audience members accumulate knowledge and gain trust ‘points’ by identifying a posts relevancy (points are awarded for consonant agreement). These points enable the purchase of ‘modifiers’, such as evaluation boosts, a rhythmic enhancer in which points are acquired for ‘cleaning up’ the database and light speed which enables the accelerated traversal of the landscape. Community and sociality are inbuilt as

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a form of narrative instrumentality; frequent and deeper interactions transduce narrative advancement and access to greater depths. A ‘Dramatic Community’100 is initiated in which ‘part of the pleasure is following the 1 per cent, and watching their discoveries’. This notion of dramatic communities extends Jenkins’ identification of knowledge cultures101 beyond the navigatory principles (of searching and interpreting encyclopaedic information) to a community which plays an intrinsic theatrical and performative function within the fiction. Fonnesbech likens the Cloud Chamber site to the physical equivalent of a building in which a crime was committed, and the users as detectives are flooding through the building, all looking for clues, and you would be able to hear discussions going on in different parts of the building, and you would be able to go to that part of the building…102

Various gaps and holes have been deliberately authored into the experience in order to engender online discussion which in turn becomes a decisive and expository element within the unfolding narratives. The social networking system clusters like-minded people through responses to these gaps. At the point of writing, the Cloud Chamber was poised to enter its marketing phase, which signals significant challenges to the project’s creators – the first being how to identify, name and categorize the experience in which its uniqueness evades appellation. Secondly, the creators are attempting to resolve how to monetize the experience, since the ARG campaigns to which the Cloud Chamber is aligned have all been campaigns in themselves (it is the main event of the film, the computer game or the car that are the actual revenue generators) and as such are normally ‘free’ to experience. The producers must carefully negotiate and manage viewer expectations: the higher the price point - the higher the set of expectations. Currently, the first three parts of the experience are free, access to the following seven parts can be purchased for Twelve Euros. As Michael Gubbins notes, ‘it is difficult to base a business model based on the highest level of participation […] Identifying and mobilizing this minority is an emerging skill’.103 The next generation ‘ARG as main attraction’ has been subject to limited testing and thus beleaguers the associated marketing strategies. This is endemic of the post-transmedia space in which we are now situated, where texts transcend media forms and thus evade coherent appellation, where new grammars are evolving and are yet to be established. Nonetheless this pioneering project which is testing and pushing these boundaries invariably takes us a step closer towards

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cultural recognition of these forms and their crystallization as a new mode of cinematic expression and experience.

4.6 Conclusion Both The Inside and Cloud Chamber represent compelling conceptions of new cinematic spaces in which the liminal ‘social layer’ is the fertile ground on which to cultivate, foreground and encourage audience interaction. All examples of socially layered cinema and narrative experiences expounded herein signal a further move towards segmented storytelling which was identified as an emergent strategy in the previous chapter, and illuminates the intersections between narrative and advertising which are a central concern of this chapter. The case studies highlight the multitude of ways in which advertising works and reworks narrative forms and experiences in the current socio-technical ecosystem. These impacts can occur explicitly which is reflected in Christy Dena’s observations of economic imperatives within transmedia fictions: ‘The promotional function of these commissions impose certain constraints on the design process […] An illustration of these influences in action is the need to integrate proprietary technologies within a fictional world’.104 The mobile phones of @summerbreak, and the laptop computer of The Inside Experience and more implicitly through the less obvious means of social media data collection modalities are sequestered into the fabric of fictional spaces. The conversational and sociality of these experiences are also symptomatic of the influence of the televisual and advertising, in which chat, talk and comments are systematically encouraged throughout the experiences. The fragmented nature of advertising interruptions is replaced by conversational ones. These exchanges become the connective tissue which binds the narratives together and in which audience members become narrators, performers and characters. Moreover, each of these examples carries with it a concomitant verisimilitude of the form. The very nature and presence of social media within these projects invokes a seemingly naturally occurring realism, rendering imperceptible the line between reality and fiction. All examples cited within this chapter resonate themes and concerns of the current human digital condition; in Cloud Chamber the pervasion of data landscapes is reflexive of an age characterized by ubiquitous data visualizations,

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infographics and digital archaeology. In @summerbreak, social comment upon the vapidity and banalization of the uses of mediated communication forms reflects societal concern of an emergence of an anti-social generation. The Inside inflects and mirrors (social) surveillance, voyeurism and digital self-hood. All indicative of the socially mediated human condition, each project make the implicit suggestion that a ‘good’ citizen is one who engages and collaborates through social media, acquiring likes, points and deeper-level access for doing so. The social activity that binds these stories together and the multiple pathways that the audience members create between its constituent elements prove to be compelling and fascinating objects of study. As highly literate audience members engage as co-creators in this social media layering, the interweaving of transmedia narratives becomes ever-more complex. Furthermore, these emerging transmedia projects are permeating the boundaries of the inveterate transmedia franchise model and are exploring and expanding the notion of both televisual and cinematic storytelling. The scope of this chapter cannot adequately analyse these in respect of the exclusion and inclusion of audiences, but urges other researchers to do so. The next chapter furthers these explorations, by attending to the ethical dimensions of emerging cinema and makes a further departure from economic imperatives towards developments into ‘purposeful’ storytelling and cinema.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8

As quoted at Tribeca 2013: Steve Pond, ‘On “Interactive Day”, It’s the Who-NeedsFilm? Festival’, 21 April 2013, http://www.thewrap.com/node/86891. Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 10. http://theprimeruniverse.blogspot.co.uk/. Warren Buckland, Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), an in-depth case study of Memento as a puzzle film is provided by Claire Molloy, Memento (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 112. http://thewildernessdowntown.com/. http://www.ro.me/tech/. As quoted in Steve Reiss, and Neil Feineman, Thirty Frames Per Second: The Visionary Art of the Music Video (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000), 7.

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Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Brain Is the Screen: An Interview with Gilles Deleuze’, in The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000), 370. 10 In Leon Gurevitch, ‘Problematic Dichotomies: Narrative and Spectacle in Advertising and Media Scholarship’, Popular Narrative Media 2 no. 2, 2009:143–158 and ‘The Cinemas of Transactions: The Exchangeable Currency of the Digital Attraction’, Television & New Media 5 no. 11, 2010:367–385. 11 Pat Brereton, Smart Cinema, DVD Add-Ons and New Audience Pleasures (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan,2012), 220. 12 Cincia Colapinto, and Eleonora Benecchi, ‘Movie Industry Goes Viral in the XXst Century. If What Counts Is the Buzz … ’, in Crossmedia Innovations: Texts, Markets, Institutions, ed. Indrek Ibrus and A. Carlos Scolari (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012), 164. 13 Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006), 4. 14 Including ‘The Televidente 2.0, Cocktail Analysis 2011’ report revealed that one in two viewers were using social media technologies whilst watching television, 47 per cent via computer, and 29 per cent via tablet, although it is expected that this will have increased since the report’s publication. High numbers were using these for social communication; 86 per cent for emails, 67 per cent for social networks and 48 per cent for instant messaging. http://tcanalysis.com/blog/posts/televidente20–2011-tablets-television-conectada-y-redes-sociales-enriquecen-el-escenario-deconsumo-de-television. 15 Business Wire, ‘Columbia TriStar Interactive Opens a Window into the Private World of “Dawson Leery” with the Launch of Dawson’s Desktop’, Business Wire, 6 October 1998, http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Columbia+TriStar+Interactive+Op ens+A+Window+Into+The+Private+World+of…-a053063143. 16 Jennifer Gillan, Television and New Media: Must-Click TV. (New York: Routledge, 2011), 41. 17 Gillan, Television and New Media, 41. 18 Steve Forde, ‘Skins on Windows Live Messenger’, Platform 4: The Latest from Channel 4 (blog), 27 February 2009, http://web.archive.org/web/20100119062940/ http://blogs.channel4.com/platform4/2009/02/27/skins-on-windows-livemessenger/ reported notable success in its use having sent out 2.5 million messages and acquiring a 20,000 strong user group. 19 See María del Mar Grandío, ‘Transmedia Audiences and Television Fiction: A Comparative Approach between Skins (UK) and El Barco (Spain)’, Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies 9 no. 2 2012:558–574 and Emanuela Zaccone, ‘TVseries and Social Network Marketing: The Audiovisual Text as a Wider Experience’, in Previously on: Interdisciplinary Studies on TV Series in the 9

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Third Golden Age of Television, ed. Miguel Pérez-Gómez (Seville: Frame, 2011), 387–403 who explores the take up of social media and transmedia strategies within televisual properties such as Glee, MadMen, Lost, My Generation and True Blood. 20 Gillan, Television and New Media, 4. 21 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 43. 22 Jon Dovey, ‘Time Slice: Web Drama and the Attention Economy’, in Ephemeral Media: Transistory Screen Culture from Television to YouTube, ed. Paul Grainge (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 144. 23 Kathrin Peters, and Andrea Seier, ‘Home Dance: Mediacy and Aesthetics of the Self on YouTube’, in The YouTube Reader, ed. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: The National Library of Sweden, 2009), 187. 24 Virginia Heffernan, and Tom Zeller, ‘ “Lonely Girl” (and Friends) Just Wanted Movie Deal’, The New York Times, 12 September 2006. 25 The episode entitled ‘Weeping Willow’ recounted the story of the kidnapping of a popular video blogger thought by many of the on-screen characters to be a hoax, Season 6, Episode 10 (28 November 2006) Dir: Tom DiCillio. USA, NBC. 26 Dovey, ‘Time Slice’, 144. 27 In an interview with the author, 12 July 2013. 28 Mary Madden, Amanda Lenhart, Sandra Cortesi, Urs Gasser, Maeve Duggan, and Aaron Smith, Teens, Social Media, and Privacy (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2013). This research revealed a number of key findings; Teenage use of Twitter use has significantly increased: 24 per cent now use Twitter, an increase from 16 per cent in 2011. Focus group discussions revealed a waning enthusiasm for Facebook amongst the teenagers that were surveyed, predominantly as a result of an increased adult presence, people sharing excessively, and stressful ‘drama’. However, they continue in it use since it plays an important part in their socializing. 29 Sontag here refers to the mediation of the Abu Graib images, in ‘Regarding the Torture of Others’, New York Times Magazine, 23 May 2004: 24–29, 42. 30 Jon Dovey coined the term ‘vernacular video’, in ‘Time Slice’, 146–147, stating that ‘the grammar of this vernacular is characterized by affect, intimacy, desire and display’. It is ‘a new visual grammar of consumption driven by the self-constituting practices of its creators’. I previously extended this concept in Chapter 3 to the notion of the ‘mobile vernacular’. 31 Dovey, ‘Time Slice’, 149. 32 Brian Steinberg, ‘AT&T Makes Quiet Push for “@Summer”Lovin’, Variety, 20 June 2013, http://variety.com/2013/biz/news/att-makes-quiet-push-for-summerlovin-1200500188/. 33 Benjamin Fritz, ‘A Reality TV Show, Minus the TV: “Summer Break” Follows Nine Teenagers, but Only through Social Media Like Twitter, Instagram’, The Wall Street

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Journal, 11 June 2013, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014241278873249040045 78537762775119412.html. This year, Twitter launched its own in-platform video playing feature ‘Amplify’ that enables clips to be streamed ‘in-tweet’, signalling a significant paradigmatic shift; where Twitter is currently being used by broadcasters to drive viewers to television-content, it can in future be utilized to deliver television content itself. As Glenn Brown, director of Promoted Content and Sponsorships at Twitter, states: ‘Users receive spectacular, timely content that rounds out their TV experience or reminds them to tune in. Powered by Promoted Tweets, broadcasters reach new audiences and open up new business lines. Brand advertisers get, for the first time, an integrated cross-platform tool for reaching the social conversation wherever it happens’. As quoted in Nick Summers, ‘Twitter Amplify Launches with More Than a Dozen New Partners to Create “Social TV” via In-Tweet Clips’, The Next Web, 23 May 2013, http://thenextweb. com/twitter/2013/05/23/twitter-amplify-launches-with-more-than-a-dozen-newpartners-to-create-social-tv-via-in-tweet-clips/?&_suid=13754493971790871448 3696967363. Ruth E. Page, Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction (New York: Routledge, 2012). Roy Ascott, ‘Keynote Address’ (paper presented at the Sensual Technologies Symposium, ICA, London, 27 June 2008). Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 1995), 12. Martin Lister, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant, and Kieran Kielly, New Media: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 254. There is no website for this particular experience, the producers have taken this down, and replaced it with their latest social film incarnation, The Power Inside, http://www.insidefilms.com/en/. Paul Atkinson, ‘Qualitative Research: Unity and Diversity’, Qualitative Social Research 6 no. 3, 2005, http://www.qualitativeresearch.net/index.php/fqs/article/ view/4/9. Annette N. Markham, ‘Internet Research’, in Qualitative Research, ed. David Silverman (London: Sage, 2011), 118. Elizabeth Jane Evans, ‘ “Carnaby Street, 10am”: KateModern and the Ephemeral Dynamics of Online Drama’, in Ephemeral Media: Transistory Screen Culture from Television to YouTube, ed. Paul Grainge (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 156–171. In an interview with the author, 25 April 2013. John G. Palfrey, and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

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45 Palfrey and Gasser, Born Digital, 1. 46 Geert Lovink, ‘The Art of Watching Databases: Introduction to the Video Vortex Reader’, in Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, ed. Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), 11. 47 The Cinemetrics research project of Barry Salt has confirmed the notable increase in the cutting rate of films, in ‘Comments on Attention and Hollywood Films’, http://www.cinemetrics.lv/salt_on_cutting.php. 48 Corey Jay Lenhart, in an interview with the author, 13 July 2013. 49 Jay David Bolter, and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 50 Lovink, ‘The Art of Watching Databases’, 10. 51 Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 280. 52 Turkle, The Second Self, 279–280. 53 Todd Wasserman, ‘Sequel to Last Halloween’s Creepy “Take This Lollipop” Is in the Works’, 9 August 2012, Mashable, http://mashable.com/2012/08/09/take-thislollipop-sequel/. 54 Including danah boyd, ‘Networked Privacy’, in Personal Democracy Forum (New York, 2011) and Nathan Jurgenson, and P.J. Rey. ‘The Fan Dance: How Privacy Thrives in an Age of Hyper-Publicity’, in Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives, ed. Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2013). 55 José Van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 67. 56 In an interview with the author, 25 April 2013. 57 Forbes Media. ‘Going Native: How Marketers Are Reinventing the Online Video Advertising Experience’, in Forbes Insights, ed. Forbes Media (New York: Forbes Media, 2012), 2. 58 In an interview with the author, 25 April 2013. 59 In an interview with the author, 13 July 2013. 60 See my previous chapter to this which explores the generic conventions and emerging grammar of social film storytelling in Sarah Atkinson, ‘The View from the Fourth Wall Window: Crossmedia Fictions’, in Crossmedia Innovations: Texts, Markets, Institutions, ed. Indrek Ibrus and Carlos A. Scolari (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012), 77–91. These emerging grammars were identified as being in direct opposition to the values of classical cinematic codes which were identified as direct audience address, textual reflexivity and audience interaction. 61 Margrit Schreier, ‘ “Please Help Me; All I Want to Know Is: Is It Real or Not?”: How Recipients View the Reality Status of the Blair Witch Project’, Poetics Today 25 no. 2, 2004:305–334.

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62 Schreier, ‘Please Help Me’, 331. 63 Angela Cora Garcia, AleccaI Standlee, Jennifer Bechkoff, and Yan Cui, ‘Ethnographic Approaches to the Internet and Computer-Mediated Communication’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 38 no. 1, 2009:61. 64 Liu Chen,Cultural Differences in Movie Promotions on Social Network Sites: Evidence from China and the United States (Coral Gables, FL: Public Relations, University of Miami, 2013). 65 All contributions have been anonymised and coded according to gender, F- Female, M- Male. 66 Dave Szulborski, Through the Rabbit Hole: A Beginner’s Guide to Playing Alternate Reality Games (Raleigh, NC: LuLu), 39. 67 Dave Szulborski, This Is Not a Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming (Raleigh, NC: LuLu, 2005), 295. 68 Avital Ronell, ‘A Disappearance of Community’,in Reading Digital Culture, ed. David Trend (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 287. 69 Glen Creeber, and Martin Royston, Digital Cultures: Understanding New Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009), 119. 70 Matt Hills, ‘Participatory Culture: Mobility, Interactivity and Identity’, in Digital Cultures: Understanding New Media, ed. Glen Creeber and Martin Royston (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009), 120. 71 See Philip J. Auter, ‘TV That Talks Back: An Experimental Validation of a Parasocial Interaction Scale’, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 36 no. 2, 1992:173–181 for a review of research into parasocial interaction and its measurement deploying the uses and gratifications approach. This particular article details an empirical study into a 1950s television episode of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, an example where the fourth wall is broken, and direct audience address is invoked. An investigation into parasocial relationships within new media contexts has yet been carried out. 72 Donald Horton, and Richard Wohl, ‘Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance’, Psychiatry19 no. 3, 1956:215–229. 73 Van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity, 49.The UK comedy film Chalet Girl (Dir: Phil Traill, UK, 2011) adopted the use of the Like button within associated interactive trailers promoting ski companies. Jamie Schwartz, VP theatrical marketing at Momentum Pictures, said: ‘This is the first time the “Like” button functionality has ever been integrated with a movie. We don’t want people to just watch the film’s trailer; we want them to get involved, to share it with their mates, and to identify themselves with the cool brands it features’, in Brand Republic. ‘Rom-Com Chalet Girl Movie Gets Social Push’, Brand Republic News, 18 February 2011, http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/1055707/.

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74 PYMK: People you may know. 75 Van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity, 51. 76 For an in-depth study into the practice of online social-network friending and how this connects to the notion of real-world friendship see danah boyd, ‘Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing Community into Being on Social Network Sites’, First Monday 11, no. 12, 2006, http://firstmonday.org/article/view/1418/1336. 77 Alice E. Marwick, ‘The Public Domain: Social Surveillance in Everyday Life’, Surveillance & Society 9, no. 4, 2012:382. 78 Nathan Jurgenson, ‘Ondi Timoner (2009) We Live in Public’, Surveillance & Society 8, no. 3, 2011:377. 79 Göran Bolin, ‘Audience Activity as a Co-Production of Crossmedia Content’, in Crossmedia Innovations: Texts, Markets, Institutions, ed. Indrek Ibrus and A. Carlos Scolari (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012), 157. 80 Robert S. Tokunaga, ‘Social Networking Site or Social Surveillance Site? Understanding the Use of Interpersonal Electronic Surveillance in Romantic Relationships’, Computers in Human Behavior 27 no. 2, 2011:705–713. 81 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), 278. 82 John Fiske, ‘The Cultural Economy of Fandom’, in Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa. A Lewis (London: Routledge, 1992), 30–49. 83 Janna Jones, ‘The VHS Generation and Their Movie Experiences’, in Watching Films: New Perspectives on Movie-Going, Exhibition and Reception, ed. Karina Aveyard and Albert Moran (Bristol: Intellect, 2013), 389. 84 Jones, ‘The VHS Generation and Their Movie Experiences’, 389. 85 Paul Booth, Digital Fandom: New Media Studies. (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 192. 86 Jones, ‘The VHS Generation and Their Movie Experiences’, 390. 87 Billie Goldman (Partner Marketing Intel Corporation) in an interview with the author, 25 April 2013. 88 http://www.thebeautyinsidefilm.com/. 89 http://www.thepowerinside.com/en/. 90 Scott Donaton, President of the Cannes Lions Jury and also CEO and president of Ensemble, in ‘Cannes Lions/Branded Content and Entertainment Winners: Intel, Toshiba and Agency Pereira & O’Dell San Francisco Win Their Second Grand Prix for the Beauty Inside Campaign’, Contagious, 22 June 2013, http://www.contagiousmagazine.com/2013/06/cannes_lions_38.php. 91 It was released via http://cloudchambermystery.com/ on 4 October 2013. 92 In an interview with the author on 16 July 2013. 93 In an interview with the author on 16 July 2013.

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94 In an interview with the author on 15 August 2013. 95 In an interview with the author on 15 August 2013. 96 Raymond Williams, Television Technology and Cultural Form (London: Routledge, 2003, Original edition, 1974), 52. 97 Williams, Television Technology and Cultural Form, 52–53. 98 Steven Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect (Winchester: O-Books, 2010), 6. 99 In an interview with the author on 15 August 2013. 100 In an interview with the author on 15 August 2013. 101 Jenkins, Convergence Culture. 102 In an interview with the author on 15 August 2013. 103 Michael Gubbins, ‘Digital Revolution: Active Audiences and Fragmented Consumption’, in Digital Disruption: Cinema Moves On-line, ed. Dina Iordanova and Stuart Cunningham (St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies,2012), 72. 104 Christy Dena, Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments (doctoral thesis Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney, 2009), 46.

5

The Ethics of Emerging Cinema

5.1 Introduction This chapter attends to the ethical dimensions of an emerging cinema; firstly to explore the myriad ethical issues that new cinematic forms can raise and secondly to investigate emerging cinematic paradigms as tools for social change. This foregrounds a contrapuntal duality; at one side a model of cinema is conceived which strives to fabricate a false reality within its fictional constructs and at the other side a cinema endeavours to bring true realities to the audience as fictional constructs.1 Both strategies raise a multitude of ethical questions and issues, without, yet an established ethical framework for analysis, as Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska attest: ‘It could even be argued that ethical issues concerning media and technology are so complex and all-encompassing that attempting to devise a singular ethical framework that would cover them all would be a task doomed to fail at its very inception’.2 The work of this chapter does not attempt to tackle such a task, rather it seeks to centralize ethical dimensions as the ground upon which to explore the effects and impacts of evolving audience media literacies and the development of narrative and dramatic techniques within emerging cinema. When considering the ethical issues that new cinematic forms can raise, there has been a notable pattern within a lineage of fictional media forms which manifests during the advent of a new ‘host’ medium or a new medium-specific grammar which has been perceived to be so close to reality in its representation that it has resulted in its frequent, yet unintentional misappropriation as hoaxes and frauds. The chapter contends that the content creator’s perceived deception is symptomatic of the unexpected ways that individual and collective audience constituents can respond and can be indicative of their undeveloped media

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literacy. In the second instance, the chapter turns to considerations of a cinema of purposeful storytelling, an emergent area of cinematic practice (which is blending with gaming, social media and transmedia practices) which strives for social change. Jane McGonigal argues that in the case of ‘immersive gaming’ of which emerging cinema could be considered a part, we have one of ‘the first applications poised to harness the increasingly widespread penetration and convergence of network technologies for collective social and political action’,3 and one, I will argue, with a predilection for polyvacilty and multiple perspectivism. The chapter seeks to illuminate the influence and interrelations of one upon the other: the fabricated false reality and the fictionally constructed true reality.

5.2 The ethics of emerging cinema Whilst the focus of this chapter is upon current and emerging forms, a historical mapping and diachronic exploration of prior projects which have been associated with suppositions of reality will raise a number of recurrent themes and issues. These will be used to highlight the evolution of audience media literacies, how these are developed by exposure to such forms and how grammars emerge as a result. Some of the renowned progenitors which are the quintessence of emerging media forms are The War of the Worlds (1938), Forgotten Silver (1995), Alien Abduction: Incident at Lake County (1998), The Blair Witch Project (1999), Nothing So Strange (2002), lonelygirl15 (2006) and The Truth about Marika (2007). These examples which are drawn from a range of mono-media and multi-media forms will be examined in further detail in the next section of this chapter to draw out instances of emerging media literacies. The War of the Worlds radio play, based on the H.G. Wells novel, performed by Orson Welles with his Mercury Theatre group was broadcast live in America on 30 October 1938. It was reported that a vast number of audience members tuned in after the broadcast had begun (therefore missing the introduction to the play which clearly stated that it was a Mercury Theatre production).4 The drama was relayed as a series of real-time news bulletins which interjected the musical performances, across the one-hour broadcast where events were reported from various locations across the United States. The narrational style borrowed from the familiar and established operational logic of ‘as-it-happens’ live radio news broadcasting which was endemic of ‘a period in which the radio frequently had interrupted regularly scheduled programs to report developments on the

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Czechoslovakian situation’.5 The effects of the broadcast were compounded by a number of other contextual factors. For example, the USA was just emerging from the Great Depression after the 1929 stock market crash, whilst simultaneously entering into a new period of global instability in which Europe was about to enter into a huge conflict. Furthermore, the sonic images created by the theatre group depicting the Martian landing at Grovers Mill, New Jersey, redolently invoked the recent Hindenberg crash, the passenger air ship which caught fire mid-flight above New Jersey, before crashing and killing thirty-five people in May of 1937. Such was the immersiveness of the story, that the temporal perceptions of the audience became distorted, as one of the writers stated: ‘The acceleration is very carefully calculated and is quite extraordinary; that is why by the time you are twenty minutes into the show you are moving hours at a time … and no one even noticed’.6 The audience reactions that followed the broadcast are notorious and widely reported. In the United States, there were reportedly around 12,500 articles in the press within the weeks following the broadcast.7 On the day following the broadcast, the New York Times proclaimed, ‘A wave of mass hysteria seized thousands of radio listeners’.8 According to one source, ‘Historians calculate that some six million heard the CBS broadcast; 1.7 million believed the events to be true, and 1.2 million were “genuinely frightened” ’.9 The impacts were also temporally far reaching; as a result of the subversion to the language of breaking news, future responses to equivocal breaking-news events were met with suspicion by audiences, according to Gerald Nachman: ‘many didn’t believe the announcement of the attack on Pearl Harbor three years later because of the Martian landing hoax’,10 thus signalling an evolution of the sophistication of audience literacy, an audience who had learnt to adopt a cautious criticallistening stance. The broadcast also impacted upon the dramaturgies and aesthetics of radio; Erik Barnouw claims that Welles ‘did much to loosen up the whole structure of radio drama’.11 and Susan J. Douglas stated, ‘Dramatizations of simulated news bulletins became verboten’.12 The reactions to the audience also led to reform in radio governance, as Paul Heyer observed, as a result of the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) investigation of the broadcast ‘radio dramas would be monitored more carefully – for their manner of presentation as well as their content. Regulations would be effected to prevent mixing news formats with fiction in the extreme way of the Panic Broadcast’.13

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The War of the Worlds thus represented a new dramaturgy, driving new aesthetics and practices forwards, through its strategies of augmented reality and of premediation.14 It not only rehearsed an audience for war but also for new sophisticated modes of audienceship. The mono-medium of radio has not been subject to an equitable ‘scandal’ such as this throughout its subsequent history. There have been a plethora of hoax phone call cases, the impact of which only affects the individuals who are directly involved. The impacts are not felt on the scale of a mass-audience as is the case in the following examples drawn from the televisual. Forgotten Silver, Peter Jackson’s 1995 film, subverted the conventions of the mockumentary (mock documentary) form. Intrinsic to this genre is the mutually consensual ‘mocking’ by the creators and audience of both the conventions of the documentary form itself and the content associated within. The genre was popularized by the 1984 film This is Spinal Tap, which was predicated upon on an audience’s understanding of the grammar of parody. In the case of Forgotten Silver, the exaggerated characteristics of the mockumentary form were muted, and thus its ontological status was obfuscated. The documentary borrowed reality aesthetics and signifiers from both historical documentaries and archive footage in order to re-write film history through the fictional New Zealand film pioneer Colin McKenzie. The premise of the film is that the found film reels reveal a complete reinterpretation of film history, where McKenzie is the first to explore film sound, and responsible for the invention of the close up and other grammars, which casts doubt upon the established film history. Within the use of reconstructed archival footage, aesthetic signifiers of their authenticity such as aged film and exaggerated silent film aesthetics are used. This was underpinned by parodic undertones, but these were downplayed. The film was ‘wrapped’ within a factual discourse; no actors were listed or acknowledged in the end credits and a thank you was listed to the ‘Colin MacKenzie Trust’. These represented what Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight referred to as a ‘rhetoric of objectivity’ and that it was ‘the implicit acceptance of viewers to this same ideology’ that ‘apparently led many to express a feeling of betrayal at having their expectations and assumptions in some sense “violated” by Forgotten Silver not having been labelled as fictional’.15 This sense of deception was exacerbated by the fact that the documentary was first aired and supported by the public broadcasting institution of Television New Zealand (TVNZ) (in its DVD release, the film is clearly identified as a work of fiction, with an associated ‘making-of ’ accompanying the main film). The key modality and root cause

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Figure 5.1  Forgotten Silver, 1995

of the perceived deception of the television transmission was that the formal conventions of a documentary were used (Figure 5.1). In the following example, a different set of conventions are taken from another familiar television genre. Alien abduction: Incident at Lake County in 1998 borrowed from ‘caughton-tape’ TV16 popularized in the 1990s by You’ve Been Framed in the UK and America’s Funniest Home Videos in the US in its depiction of home video footage taken at a family’s thanksgiving dinner, which documented their subsequent abduction by aliens. It also used formal documentary conventions and aesthetics by intercutting testimonies from professionals which included three well-known researchers – Stanton Friendman, Yvonne Smith and Derrel Sims – who were all unaware that their contributions were being edited into the fabricated-film footage. In addition, the surrounding promotion also existed within a discourse of the real; the preceding advertisement stated, ‘UPN (United Paramount Network) will present a one-hour special centered on an alleged videotaped account of a family’s purported encounter with what may be extraterrestrial life forms when Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County airs Tuesday, January 20’. Reported reactions of anger and the sense that this was a genuine attempt to deceive the audience emanated. The narrative instrument of camcorder footage was also used in the notorious and widely studied The Blair Witch Project.17 Of home video aesthetics, Patricia R. Zimmerman stated:

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This same affinity between amateur video as a more authentic, less-warped, more truthful, and less-manufactured representation with a beeline to nostalgia and emotion erupts in many films and videos. It occurs so frequently as a reworking of idealized paraphrases of childhood and as a more raw, less-mediated record of private history.18

Nothing So Strange, a 2002 pseudo-documentary and transmedia project, which also knowingly misappropriates the conventions of the mockumentary form in a similar way to that of Forgotten Silver, does so with minimal parody and as such could be considered a conscious subterfuge of the form. The websites which surrounded the film, which depicts the assassination of Bill Gates, included the fictional grassroots campaign group Citizens for Good whose mission it is to uncover the conspiracy behind the assassination, including images from the scene of the crime and a seemingly authentic police report authored by the LA County district attorney. The hyperdiegesis also includes a Gates memorial19 which includes forums and merchandise including a ‘Bill Gates is Dead’ mug and an authored (factual) book based on the assassination entitled ‘The first shot of the class war’. These elements are understood and contextualized by the core audience within an established internet discourse in which faked reports of the Bill Gates prevail with existence of ‘a wealth of spoof material around concerning Mr. Gates’ demise’.20 Aside from this implicit assumption, there is an absence of explicit fictional indicators; the sites all link back to the core Nothing So Strange website, but the ontological status of this is unclear to a casual observer. The renegade approaches that underpin Nothing So Strange are endemic of the company behind the campaign, GMD Media, who also collaborated on The Blair Witch Project campaign. The campaign inadvertently duped the Korean press into believing the assassination to be real; a BBC news report reads, ‘On a slack Friday afternoon’s trading, the Korean stock market dropped by 1.5 per cent – a value loss of more than $3bn – after local TV reported that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates had been assassinated’.21 Brian Clark, one of the founders, stated that this was as a result of a reinterpretation of the materials of which ‘[…] a fan took part of what we made and changed it to look like Gates had just been shot right now’.22 These tactics that were inaugurated by The Blair Witch Project and Nothing So Strange have been co-opted, as Joon Soo Lim and Eyun-Jung Ki state, by ‘Corporate front groups’ who ‘have been abusing the characteristics of social media, such as user-generated content (UGC), word-of-mouth tactics, and anonymity. In conjunction with such trends, some professional public relations or lobbying firms have started to engage in clandestine campaigns that

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conceal their true identity or the sponsors of these campaigns’.23 This practice has come to be known as ‘astro-turfing’ referring to these techniques as deployed in advertising campaigns which hide the identity of the sponsoring corporate organization, to give the impression that the content originates from a grassroots, localized or community level. The co-option of similar tactics have resulted in the phenomenon of ‘splogs’ (spam blogs) or what Ric Jensen has referred to as practices of ‘flogging’,24 and ‘blogola’, a term derived from ‘payola’ where radio playlists were largely influenced by the payments made by record companies, which according to John L. Sullivan ‘masquerade as individual blog sites, but their purpose is simply to promote affiliate websites or to increase the search engine rankings of those sites’.25 lonelygirl15, an example introduced in the previous chapter, makes similar claims to its truth and authenticity through the semiotics of web-based authenticity as did Nothing So Strange, but in this case through its specific borrowing of the style and aesthetics of webcam culture. The practice of webcamming emerged in the late 1990s whereby ‘real’ women would broadcast themselves via webcam on the internet. Senft tracks the form’s evolution from the infamous JenniCam (1996) and AnaCam (1997) in her ethnographic study of ‘camgirls’.26 Similarly, lonelygirl15 also resonated with the new modalities of self-broadcasting of YouTube as Jean Burgess and Joshua Green: ‘lonelyGirl15 violated the ideology of authenticity associated with DIY culture, while at the same time being wholly consistent with the way YouTube actually works […] The possibilities of inauthentic authenticity are now part of the cultural repertoire of YouTube’.27 The use of webcam aesthetics raises another ethical dimension – as a result of Theresa M. Senft’s ethnographic study into webcam culture she coined the term ‘tele-ethicality’ whereby ‘feminists need to emphasize the question of their responsibilities to the people they encounter online […] a commitment to engage, rather than forestall action in our mediated communities, despite the potential for fakery and fraud […] as a way to derail the process by which women become virtualized’.28 Senft highlights the case through her discussions of a situation in which she was personally involved and had to intervene one of her subjects’ attempts to commit suicide online. The approach that Senft proposes is problematized by the online social morays of the current moment where identities are faked and users duped (as considered in the previous chapter). The Truth about Marika is the first example of a transmedia fiction which combined the authentic web-based modalities as discussed in the examples

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of Nothing So Strange and lonelygirl15 with mainstream televisual media. The Truth about Marika is considered transmedia not only in the number of different media forms that were used but also in its use of the related platform-specific aesthetics. This prompted widespread confusion and debate over its perceived deception of the audience (already subject to a number of studies).29 The threemonth fictional experience which ran in the summer of 2007 was branded as a ‘Participation drama, fiction without limits’ by its creators. It included a five-episode television drama series, a (fabricated) television studio debate series, an online alternate reality game (ARG), several video blogs, chats and forums, an online virtual world game, a mobile augmented reality game and a proliferation of web pages and street interventions throughout Sweden. The first (faked) debate programme which aired on SVT (the Swedish public service broadcaster) was considered to be at the heart of the perceived deception. It was hosted by a well-known celebrity yet all of the participants on the debate show were actors. Based around the disappearance of the main protagonist, Marika, who goes missing on her wedding night, the storyline purposefully resonate with actuality whereby 20,000 people have gone missing without trace in Sweden since 1968. The contextual factors of the cultural moment also included the internationally reported disappearance of Madeleine McCann on 3 May 2007 from Praia da Luz, in Portugal. The premise of Marika was predicated on established audience schemas of real-world missing person campaigns. The Find Madeleine website was set up by the family shortly afterwards and used to broadcast appeal videos. The establishment of a website by Marika’s best friend to raise awareness of her disappearance, and the involvement of the national public service broadcaster embedded the story further into the rhetoric of the real which fed directly into the publics’ psyche. The missing person trope to which these new media forms appear susceptible, since they are premised on the need to solve a real-world problem, pervades throughout numerous transmedia examples which were explored in the preceding chapter. Despite many websites including fictional disclaimers, The Truth about Marika allegedly duped a section of its audience into believing what was being presented as real, and the information contained as fact. In the case of Marika, audience members could have been drawn into the fiction through a number of diegetic portals, unaware of the fictions status, as Jaakko Stenros, Markus Montola and Annika Waern have postulated: ‘Unaware participation is perhaps the most problematic area of pervasive game ethics’ (My emphasis).30

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One news article condemned the producers: ‘It is completely irresponsible by Swedish television to blur the border between fiction and reality’.31 In their research, Waern and Marie Denward discovered that 30 per cent of respondents thought that the experience was real, and that 17 per cent could not make a distinction between truth and fiction, their research concluded that it ‘failed in creating a clear fictional context’.32 Of pseudo-events discussed in Chapter 2, Daniel J. Boorstin states, ‘We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality’33 and that ‘the rise of pseudo-events has mixed up our roles as actors and as audience’.34 In all cases it is the imbrication of contextual factors which were instrumental in generating confusion around the ontological status, and resulted in anger from sections of the audience. As Marshall McLuhan stated, ‘When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavour of the most recent past’.35 The key operational and aesthetic logic of the web-based narrative components was to borrow from the sign system and semiotics of another medium or genre, therefore de-contextualizing their original purpose, whereby the same meaning is attached by the audience member. As Brian Boyd notes, ‘…  narrative requires our unique capacity for metarepresentation: not only to make and understand representations, but to understand them as representations […] this develops in children, without training, between their second and fifth years’.36 All of the examples raised highlight the issues of a lack of adequate sign posting to guide an appropriate comprehension. The Nothing So Strange and The Truth about Marika examples, both highlight the difficulties of decoding fact from fiction in online environs in particular where there is no clear demarcation or alterity of experience between authentic and fictionalized representations of a company, person or news item. In essence, it is the factors of immediacy and real-time, core characteristics of transmedia (where in traditional media there is both temporal and spatial ‘displacement’ that enables the audience to make a clear distinction between fact and fiction) which fuel this ambiguity. These factors are endemic to the emerging form in which textural, textual and content are identical, and elements of which can be accessed independently of any contextual or meta-narrational guidance which clearly indicates its ontological status (which is a core principle of the paratextual framings of film and television such as titles and end credits). There are no such orienting signals within their online counterparts. As Stenros, Montola and Waern observe, ‘For games that deal with serious contemporary subjects, it becomes much harder to create adequate “ludic markers” for nonparticipants’.37 ‘Ludic markers’, which

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indicate the texts fictionality, were absent in most of the examples considered. The most explicitly stated were in The War of the Worlds which was both prefixed and suffixed with a contextual announcement from the theatre company. As the New York Times status of The War of the Worlds, the audience ‘ignored three additional announcements made during the broadcast emphasizing its fictional nature’.38 The visual equivalents can be explicit such as the Cloverfield sword noted in Chapter 2 or the small textual indication at the foot of the page which reads ‘Brought to you by Side Effects movie’, on the film’s Ablixa39 website, in addition to the ‘Fictional Character’ tag that denotes the fabricated profiles of individuals on Facebook. Orienting signals can also be implicit to the text itself; its structuring and textual principles are signifiers of its ontological status. As Magrit Schreier noted in relation to The Blair Witch Project, Formal or semantic characteristics of the text (such as poeticity or elements lacking a reference to the external world, respectively) become ‘orienting signals’ and as such part of the instructional semantics of fictional texts. This instructional semantics in turn constitutes a necessary requirement for readers to understand and reconstruct the text in a co-intentional manner as fiction.40

Orienting signals can be intrinsic to paratextual information such as those found within the frameworks of broadcast scheduling, for example, in the case of The War of the Worlds, the programme was broadcast during the Mercury Theatre’s regular weekly 8.00 p. m. one-hour slot thus its status as a radio play should have been clear to a regular audience. Similarly, the appearance of Jude Law on the Ablixa web page also acts as an orienting signal, since he is a well known actor. However, both of these examples depend on audience literacy and familiarity with forms and modes of production and broadcast. As Umberto Eco observes, ‘…  we commonly think that only in exceptional cases – those in which a fictional signal appears – do we suspend disbelief and prepare to enter an imaginary world’.41 The creators of ARG/Fictional online content have debated the need for more explicit use of fictional signifiers against the belief that interruptional pop-ups will rupture the sense of a consensual suspension of a disbelief. For example, Steve Peters suggests a ‘fiction tag’, a new HTML standard which clearly demarcates fact from fiction.42 In her 2007 article Why ARGs aren’t hoaxes43 Christy Dena defends their status and the need to retain a sense of fictionality since the ARG community are capable of discerning between the factual and

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fictional status of web-based elements in the context of ARG play. Dena uses The Beast as the case in point noting that despite the lengths the creators went to in order to disguise the fake websites, ‘the illusion wasn’t perfect and there were some players who had particular new media literacies that enabled them to critically analyse the construction’. These literacies, as defined by the New Media Literacies Whitepaper,44 are Collective Intelligence, Judgment and Networking, which according to Dena, ‘facilitate players being able to discern a creative work that employs reality aesthetics from a hoax’. These ‘players’ are not necessarily the demographic attuned to these ARG-specific experiences since casual audience members can stumble upon a diegetic portal with no contextual information. Furthermore, the ARG community themselves call for demarcations and distinctions to be made. This is exemplified by the case of the fictional character ‘Martin Aggett’ who infiltrated ARG community forums purporting to be real in order to promote an ARG game, causing widespread condemnation within that self-same ARG community. As the editor of ARG.net stated in response to his perceived deception, ‘our website shouldn’t be regarded as “in-game” ’.45 Even those adept at traversing fact/fiction spaces, can themselves feel duped and is symptomatic of the inherent mediation of the form as defined by Paul Booth as instances of ‘demediation’ which he defines as ‘a state where the ubiquity of mediation hides that selfsame mediation’.46 This, says Dave Szulborski, is as a result of ‘The constructed elements that make up an ARG – primarily the Internet delivered content’ becoming ‘such integrated parts of the gamer’s everyday world that they no longer contain the metacommunication that defines them as part of a game’.47 In these instances real-world communication modalities are transformed into fictional expository devices. Arguably, all were accidental in their disappropriation and assumptions of advanced audience literacies and not deliberate or explicit in their hoaxing and exploitation as in known examples of intentionality which require a different frame of reference. These include the out-and-out hoax documented by the film Český sen (Czech Dream) (2004), which relays the events whereby the two filmmakers work with an advertising agency to run a campaign, deliberately hoaxing the audience that leads to the unveiling of a façade of a hyper-market, which was never built and ‘set out to explore the psychological and manipulative powers of consumerism by creating an ad campaign for something that didn’t exist’.48 The campaign (designed by a renowned advertising agency) involved television and radio spots, 400 illuminated billboards, 200,000 flyers promoting Czech

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Dream brand products, an advertising song, a website, and advertisements in newspapers and magazines. Within Czech Dream, the filmmakers sought to make a political and cultural comment and as such there was a perceptible underlying principle to their activities which was accepted by some factions of the audience. A significantly more irresponsible proposition and one met with numerous declamations is highlighted in the 2008 viral marketing campaign You Other You which was launched to promote the Toyota Matrix car. Devised by Saatchi & Saatchi, Los Angeles, it encouraged its target market to ‘prank a friend’ by passing on their personal details, address and phone number. Over the course of five days, the recipient would be subjected to various personalized texts, phone calls and emails elicited by a one of five ‘maniacs’. Toyota and its ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi were sued for $10 million49 by a woman who feared for her safety believing the harassment to be real. Such a strategy invokes pertinent issues related to the darker side of network culture including issues of fraping (mentioned in the previous chapter), cyberstalking and trolling. Aligning itself so closely to these culturally deviant activities in a quest to generate a buzz for economic gain is a highly questionable technique. Ill-conceived campaigns with little consideration of the potential issues that could arise, in bids to virally generate word of mouth, include a case in 2011 when two marketing employees devised a hoax which involved a biker in a black mask allegedly kidnapping an employee. This campaign to promote the new Dell ‘Streak’ tablet which can interface with Harley-Davidson Motorcycles50 was very quickly quashed when someone called the police believing the hijack to be real. Unforeseen ethical dimensions in which the audience members are placed at risk within fictional environments were experienced within the I Love Bees marketing campaign for Halo 2 (an example discussed in Chapter 2). The narrative required audience members to attend a payphone location at a prearranged time, in order to pick up a recorded message as part of the ARG-play. According to Sean Stewart, ‘On one occasion, one of our players went to answer a phone on a Florida beach only hours ahead of a hurricane landfall. Without meaning to, our game had clearly put him in harm’s way’.51 As Stenros, Montola and Waern attest, ‘Due to design strategies such as indexical representation, temporal seamlessness, differing levels of game awareness, and reality fabrication, players often find it hard to fully understand all the consequences of their actions. This obfuscation of consequences is a major ethical issue both generally and for

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individual players’52 (original emphasis). Andrea Phillips refers to equivalent instances as ‘badly drawn play space’,53 and ill-conceived campaigns in which an ethical evaluation should be undertaken. In her Hoax or Transmedia?54 address at SWSX in 2011, Phillips calls on the industry to be more responsible when devising and developing these pervasive fiction55 experiences. Phillips speaks from her own experiences and her involvement with the marketing campaign for the film 2012 (2009). This involved the creation of a fictional organization, the Institute for Human Continuity (IHC).56 The IHC website of the fabricated foundation included the depiction of ‘real’ scientists, government officials, purporting a 94 per cent chance of doomsday on 21 December 2012. The website reports that the company has established space, underground and floating cities with an invitation to join a lottery to be given the chance to survive 2012. Entering details resulted in a fictitious email from the communications director of the IHC, stating that the ticket is only valid for one person encouraging the audience member to spread the word to their friends and family. There was no indication that this was a Sony Pictures website (this information could be accessed using a Whois search). This succeeded in causing widespread alarm: ‘Dr David Morrison, a senior scientist at NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, said he had received more than 1,000 inquiries from worried members of the public’.57 This perception of deliberate intentionality to deceive within fictional campaigns is captured within Meredith Woerner’s 2011 article in which she asks, ‘are audiences sick of being lied to?’58 in response to the producer of Appollo 18’s claim that the film was ‘real’. States Ken Eklund, ‘there’s certainly an element of transparency and respect missing from so many online things that are happening and it’s quite puzzling, because humans are really wired to being adept in getting an instant read on what the situation is’.59 Furthermore, in addition to highlighting the need for sophistication in practice by the creators of these fictions, these examples also demonstrate how audience behaviours can be trained and conditioned in new ways, by raising the audience’s awareness to these possibilities and enabling the development of new viewing techniques. In turn these result in the co-option of new narrative techniques into storytelling modalities which signifies an acknowledgement of advanced audience comprehension. In all of the cases highlighted within this section, it is the exploitation of the generic conventions associated with actuality and the misappropriation of established factual sign systems which were deliberately invoked in order to generate an affective impact within the audience to meet different ends. In some cases, these techniques were deployed

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to enhance the immediacy and realities of the narrative and in others to generate buzz and word of mouth. In all cases, significant sections of the audience were motivated to respond in some way albeit to express anger at being duped. It is this tangible level of emotive response coupled with the active audience responses previously considered in the fictional domain, most notably in Chapter 2, that has been targeted by the emerging cinema campaigns about to be considered. For instance, if the participants of The Dark Knight, Why So Serious? campaign who took to the streets in protest against the election of the new (fictional) mayor were to channel this level of pseudo-activism into a campaign of real-world consequence, then their actions have the potential to take on a far more purposeful and productive dimension. It is this mobilization of the public imaginary that has the potential to be harnessed by creators that will be an underlying theme of the following discussions.

5.3 The emerging cinema of ethics: Types and modes of engagement There has been a recent groundswell of projects using fictional techniques to explore and involve audiences in the epistemic and ideological dimensions of human rights issues and campaigns for social change. The emerging trend of purposeful storytelling as a recourse for societal good has participation as its genesis. Ken Eklund, one of the key proponents and a prolific producer within this area, states that these works are concerned with ‘making a qualitative change in peoples opinions about those subjects’.60 Lina Srivastava, social innovator and Director of Social Impact on the forthcoming Who Is Dayani Cristal?61 film, asserts, ‘Transmedia is so participatory, its really based on cocreation, collaboration, consensus. […] The entire thrust of my work is to make transmedia more participatory, and create that equal sense of partnership where local communities are architects of the platform with us, and their IP, and their stories are drivers’.62 Galvanized and precipitated by funding initiatives such as the TriBeCa New Media Fund which has been established to support projects that are focused on social good, and substantial investments in Canada from the National Film Board (NFB), has made for a propitious environment within which these projects are flourishing on a spectrum that spans the prosaic to the poetic.

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At the former end of the scale, these have included a number of projects involving story collection. Sandy Storytime aggregates the corpus of stories around a community’s experience living in the wake of Hurricane Sandy,63 whilst the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank collects, archives and preserves stories from both Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy,64 thus far accumulating over 25,000 items in the collections. The records and images are characterized by their indexicality of the truth. Welcome to Pine Point65 tells the story of a destroyed mining community through residents’ memories in Canada. Journey to the end of the coal66 is an interactive documentary set in the Northern China mines where the audience takes the place of one of two freelance journalists hearing stories of the ‘mingong’, the rural migrants traveling their country looking for work, answer questions that you can ask. Told in image and sound, and text, HighRise67 represents experiences of ‘vertical living’ in high-rise blocks, includes two web documentaries Out My Window and One Millionth Tower, characterized by their advanced use of open source Web GL technologies in its creation of 3D environments. This ‘memory collection’ modality is also the prevalent mode of Sharon Daniel’s Blood Sugar68 and Public Secrets.69 Blood Sugar, an audio archive of twenty drug addicts presents an artistic rendering of their stories.70 Generative in their creation of new stories, these examples tend to exist within disrupted milieus and eschew the singular authoritative discourse of monadic media forms in favour of polyvcality. They signal a shifting spectatorial position from one of estrangement and disidentification to one of active creator and collaborator. These examples do not involve fictional techniques per se, and as such are assigned to the emerging Web Doc genre,71 which has been given many appellations including collaborative documentary, interactive documentary, i-doc72 and Open-Space documentary. These forms are characterized by the documentary circle, as Helen De Michiel and Patricia R. Zimmerman state: ‘If the documentary triangle of subject, filmmaker and audience formed a central image for documentary studies, open space documentary conceptualizations shift towards the documentary circle, where vectors are no longer straight lines of contact but endless circular engagements that change and open up discourse and spaces for action’.73 Within these instances, audience members engage as themselves within the context of the scenario in which they find themselves. Extricated from the boundaries and limitations of the traditional and inveterate narrative structures of the traditional documentary form, or by documentarydriven feature films, limited to the mode of main character-driven drama,

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whereby the character symbolizes and embodies the issue of the film, these forms facilitate multiple characters or a holistic situation. Unencumbered by the operational and representational vestiges of the documentary form, fictionalized and speculative examples have emerged which include the 2010 web-based project Collapsus74 so named not just because of a reference to societal collapse, but also as a reference to the collapse of distinctions between media platforms and genres. ‘The energy risk conspiracy’ which centres upon the impact of an energy crisis upon ten young people who are located throughout the world provides a simulated experiential premediation of the future. States the producer Bruno Felix, ‘It’s a documentary on the future […] It’s very useful to mix up fiction and documentary because it’s probably the only way to get a real deep understanding of what the future might look like’.75 The project is a three-paned presentation within the frame of the web browser; within the central frame is the main fictional timeline, which is predominantly animated. On the left hand pane is the ‘documentary’ frame where audience members can look at news reports, blogs from the fictional characters and interviews with real-world experts in the field. To the right is the interactive pane, with gamelike elements (see Figure 5.2). The medium specificity as communicated in the characteristics of a transmedia form collapses, as each of these platforms can be experienced in synchronicity. The project’s director Tommy Pallota states that this is an experience that’s an ‘annotated narrative’76 and ‘an attempt to reach out to a younger audience or an audience that wouldn’t normally watch a traditional documentary’.77 Further extensions of fictional constructs include a number of ARG-based transmedia projects which are manifold and variant in the operational logics

Figure 5.2  Collapsus.com, produced by: Submarinechannel.com, directed by: Tommy Pallotta, copyright: Submarine Channel

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that they employ for enabling social discourse. Kerric Harvey applies the mode of ‘Drama for Conflict Transformation’ used in public anthropology as the basis for his proposition of a ‘Walk-In’ documentary.78 I will extend this notion within the context of emerging cinematic practices in order to propose a concept of ‘displaced’ fiction. In such projects, the spectatorial identification displaces the point of view (POV) of a centralized character, normally associated with traditional documentary forms to that of an implied POV of the audience member. I propose that this alterity repositions the discursive constructions of the audience member through the imbrication of a number of different modes of audience address with different modes for engagement. I identify these modes as follows: Direct mode – the audience member is placed in the same ‘real’ situation as an individual, and experiences the situation from a first-person perspective in a role-play scenario. These include games such as Cart Life,79 a retail simulation which showcases the lives of street vendors in a city in North America, and Spent,80 a game based on the day-to-day financial choices of people in North Carolina. In the latter example, the player is tasked with making $1,000 last a month having lost their job and house as a single parent, and they need to make day-to-day spending decision and choices on whether to pay bills, buy food, opt into health insurance, all of which tend to have deleterious impacts as the month progresses. These are in the serious gaming realm of responsible play; scenario building and play have also been used to solve real-world targeted problems, by channelling the cognitive surplus of the participants. These have included Foldit,81 a scientific initiative which aims to predict the structure of proteins by enabling the audience to engage in the puzzle-solving activity of protein folding. It transforms this endeavour into a game where players compete to fold the best proteins. Situational mode (Factual) – characterized by first-person aesthetics, a ‘what if ’ scenario is ‘played’ as one-self through immersion within that scenario. The examples which adopt this mode are normally characterized by their futurity, some of which generate a fictional miasma around potential environmental issues of the future, as was the case of Collapsus as previously described, and is also present in the film Age of Stupid (2009) a sci-fi documentary which blends documentary with fiction in order to enable understanding the present through future events. The Factual Situational mode is exemplified in the examples of America 2049 (2011),82 proclaimed the first Transmedia Facebook Game to explore human rights issues created by Breakthrough, a global human rights organization, and

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World Without Oil (WWO),83 a collaborative simulation of a global oil shortage. WWO, branded as ‘authentic fiction’ by its creators, was set in the near-future and ‘played’ throughout the world over thirty two weeks in 2007. The audience were served with the warning of the impending crisis and then given time to prepare to start them contributing their stories from across the globe to talk about what their lives would be like without oil, using different social media tools including blogs, emails, videos, images and phone calls. The game’s website presented the increasing hike in oil prices, over the weeks of the experience which audience members then had to respond to by playing a fictionalized alternate reality, and changing behaviour in their ‘real’ lives to adapt to the fictionally premediated situation. The experience was differently levelled depending on how the audience members might conceivably become involved, ensuring the project’s resonance with a diversity of audiences, and to capture multiple-voices and perspectives (Figure 5.3). For example, there was a scoring system presented on a (hidden) score board for gamers and non-gamers, respectively.

Figure 5.3  In the authentic fiction World Without Oil, 2007, a global oil shortage occurs. Image from Pachinko_chance, a character played by Krystyn Wells. Courtesy of Ken Eklund and World Without Oil

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Ken Eklund, one of the creators of WWO, said: this is how we harness this sort of energy that we see in ARGs, but in some sort of socially relevant way where it’s not just entertainment but there’s an underlayment of authenticity of experience and where you’re deliberately trying to cause those cathartic moments for people where they confront something about their lives, and where they feel empowered to be able to change them.84

As well as participating as themselves, people also took on fictional personas: As Eklund observed: it was very clear in WWO that people just said, this is a great opportunity for me to be a storyteller in this alternate world, and in some cases there were very clear that they were going to be a fictitious character of their own creation operating within this authentic but fictional world.85

Situational mode (Fictional) – as above, but the factual scenario is further embedded and obfuscated by the fabric of the fictional and is increasingly speculative in its futurity compared with the factual mode. Examples include Future Coast, a collaboration between Eklund, the PoLAR project at the Columbia Climate Center: Columbia University and the National Science Foundation are specifically focused upon possible climate-changed futures. At the time of writing, the game itself was yet to be played. It will begin in early 2014 and begins with the distribution and discovery of a number of ‘chronofacts’, which are tangibly literalized physical representations of data that have been created as a result of a futuristic software glitch. Eklund explains the fictional context whereby ‘data in the future gets sucked into a virtual mini worm whole, so that process turns it (the data) into a physical object. And that physical object gets scattered in time, and so some of them start landing’.86 In the spirit of geocaching, the sites of the ‘chronofall’ will be mapped on the Future Coast website, for the community to locate and engage in how to extract the information by reverse engineering the data calcification process, and discover that in addition to the chronofall phenomenon, voicemail systems have become hacked and opened. Audience members will be able to record their own messages and access others that have been left from an alternate today or from a cloud of possible futures. These messages portend possible environmental futures; participants express how extreme weather, sea level rise and changing ecosystems might affect their lives in the future, and the community engage in a narrative parsing of all of the messages.

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Figure 5.4  In the fiction of Future Coast, 2014, voicemails made in possible futures take a physical form, and appear in our time as chronofacts. Images courtesy of Ken Eklund and Future Coast

A further example of the Fictional Situational mode is Conspiracy for Good.87 This was an ARG-based experience sponsored and ‘powered’ by Nokia and created by Tim Kring (of Heroes and The Company P, of The Truth about Marika). It was axiomatically branded by the makers as a new form of ‘social benefit storytelling’. A crew of 130 people in five countries were involved with the core activities focused in London in the spring of 2010. Websites, puzzles, twenty webisodes, social media elements, texts and three mobile games were experienced over the first three months of the web-based campaign. Then in July, the experience went live over four weeks of real-world gaming and street theatre in London. Audience members joined the Ancient Secret Society called Conspiracy for Good in order to uncover the secrets behind Blackwell Briggs, a fictional security firm, and the nefarious corporation, behind the disappearance of a cargo of books bound for a library in an Eastern Zambian village, as well as evolving a system to infiltrate CCTV cameras, a social comment upon surveillance relevant to the cultural moment. The audience members share clues, decode documents and decipher music online in order to assist the main protagonist Nadirah in her mission to uncover the truth. During the live street interventions, the audience members use the Nokia device in order to scan, photograph and pick up digital tags hidden in on-street art and graffiti. As Nokia were the core sponsors, Kring states

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that this project used as an advert as to how these new technologies could be deployed. The project also embedded the language of mobile media into the diegesis, for example ‘Flash mobs’ were built into the story as a diversion tactic by which to throw the fictional agents ‘off the scent’. This also made reference to a new cultural practice directly associated with emerging networked filming devices, of which the Nokia mobile represented. The devices were also used to document the secret underground gigs which were part of the experience for the audience members following the trail as well as at the culmination of the experience which was a staged press conference at which Ian Briggs, the CEO of Blackwell Briggs, appears. This is infiltrated by the Conspiracy for Good campaigners as they topple the corporation and a victory speech is delivered by Nadirah. This model of ‘social benefit storytelling’ enabled a type of pseudo-activism, the outcome of which was an in-built and a predetermined facet of the experience, which resulted in the funding and establishment of five libraries in Zambia (presumably funded by the sponsorship of the campaign as opposed to being as a result of the audiences actions). Allegorical mode – refers to instances where a fiction is created to capture and create empathy and to reify and evoke the affect of a real-world personalized situation lyrically as opposed to literally as is the case of the strategies employed within My Sky is Falling (MsiF) (2012) which were intended to evoke the ‘disorientation, uncertainty, distrust, sadness, anxiety, and hope’88 experienced by children leaving the foster care system. Lance Weiler, one of the creators behind the project, stated the intention to create ‘a new kind of participatory, purposeful story’, within which a science fiction experience triggers the same types of emotive and affective responses. This experience by proxy makes explicit (for the audience) the implicit feelings (of the subject) through the allegorical interrelations between the science fiction layer and the social issue layer. The findings of the project revealed that ‘People may reveal more about their feelings and emotions in these rich, interpersonal contexts’,89 which is an observation which resonates with all of the examples in this section. Projected mode – is characterized by third-person aesthetics; the audience watch or ‘play’ a person in that situation, as is the case within the Half the Sky90 Facebook game and the Darfur is dying91 game. Subject to a computer games reductive conceptions and renderings, these can result in problematic representations and the gameification of extreme poverty, resulting in so called ‘poverty porn’.92 As such, there is a need to approach such issues with solicitude and responsibility.

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The 1 Million Shirts campaign (in which an online campaign was initiated to collect a million T-shirts to send to Africa) was met with opprobrium by aids groups and human rights organizations.93 Similarly, the infamous Kony 2012 video by Invisible Children was considered as irresponsible and potentially damaging. The short film which spearheaded the ‘Stop Kony Movement’ (with the aim of securing the arrest of Militia Leader Joseph Kony by the end of 2012) garnered over 97 million views via YouTube in its year of release. In both cases it has been claimed that there have been adverse effects on the vulnerable economics and policies of the cultures and communities to which they are aligned as a result. Each of the modes that I have proposed (direct, situational-factual, situationalfictional, allegorical and projected) either explicitly or implicitly seeks to invoke response and engagement which are dissimulative in their ‘real’ or ‘factual’ contexts. These opportunities for engagement are salient features of the new media forms, and the encounters facilitated more beyond traditional ARG circumventions which are governed by a number of inhibiting rules.94 Bear 7195 is the latest in this lineage of online projects focused on environmental issues. Set in Banff National Park, the web-based documentary enables the audience to use surveillance technologies to track animals through their habitats within the park. Based around the grizzly ‘Bear 71’ who was tagged at the age of three and monitored throughout her life, the project invokes themes of surveillance and conservation. It was so emotive in its presentation that it caused people to cry, as Lance Weiler stated there’s been an ‘Assumption that if it’s digital, it’s void of that kind of ability’.96 This project signals a new layering of emotion and affectivity within digital experience, an endeavour also reflected in chapter, and Christian Fonnesbech’s aim to inaugurate ‘a drive towards emotion which I see lacking in both transmedia and online projects’.97 Despite their aims to do otherwise, many fictional experiences which are focused on social issue campaigns can have a tendency to result in an ennui, and have been termed as invoking ‘slacktivism’ as opposed to being catalytic in their impact upon the real-world issue that they explore. In this sense, the pseudoactivism evoked by the purely fictional campaigns merely translate from one form to another. However, in addition to raising awareness, initiating perceptional shifts and as tools for affectivity there is evidence to suggest that some of these projects are instrumental in informing institutional and international policy. As described in Chapter 2, Pandemic 1.0 involved scientists from the Wellcome Trust in its endeavours to inform how to respond to a real-world pandemic.

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Within Eklund’s Ed Zed Omega,98 such was the creation of a ‘barely fictional space’,99 that one of the characters came face-to-face with policy and decision makers. The project, which is based on the educational experiences of seven teenagers (played by actors) in Minneapolis, engaged in a process of ‘dropping out loud’. They share their experiences with others via social media channels as they consider whether or not to return to high school in September. At the (real-world) ‘Institute for the Future’ ‘Futures of Learning’ summit in Paolo Alto, California, it is the character of Lizzie (not the actress of Lauren) who addresses the forum contribute to the conversation (Figure 5.5). Discussing Ed Zed Omega, Eklund stated that it called into question all the decisions made at the summit. There’s this collision of ideas between what education is and what actually the people who are being educated or are potentially being educated actually feel, and so to me that’s the authentic part. You can have these constructs, that we have where we think we’re talking about a problem, but it’s not in touch with what it’s supposed to be.100

Moreover, this intriguing instance created a new kind of space for negotiation, in which it is the opinions and experiences of the fictional character that are validated and are used to inform real world policy and action. It is the integrity of the fictional character or the fictional experience upon which many of these

Figure 5.5  Lizzie (Lizabeth) Davis interacts with attendees of the Future of Learning Summit at Institute for the Future. Lizzie, one of the Zed Omega characters of the authentic fiction Ed Zed Omega, was played live by teen Lauren Lindquist. Image courtesy of Ed Zed Omega

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campaigns are predicated which subordinate the purely factual representations of reality and within which issues of human rights and social policy are viscerally cohered.

5.4 Conclusion This chapter set out to explore the implications and interrelations between the dual endeavours of fabricating false realities within fiction and bringing true realities to fictional constructs. The first part of this chapter highlighted that ethical boundaries were sidelined or ignored in favour of sustaining a more impactful and authentic narrative experience. Each of the examples highlighted that the content creator’s perceived deception was symptomatic of the unexpected ways that individual and collective audience constituents responded and was indicative of their undeveloped media and digital literacies. The confusion around the reality status of the various examples manifested as a result of complex contextual causations which related to the social and aesthetic codes of the moment. This resonates with Janet Staiger’s belief that ‘contextual factors, more than textual ones, account for the experiences that spectators have watching films and television and for the uses to which those experiences are put in navigating our everyday lives’.101 The shift towards more ‘purposeful’ storytelling practices as illuminated in the second part of this chapter highlighted an enhanced sense of responsibility and culpability in the filmmakers and creators. Alison Norrington, writer of the interactive online fiction Staying Single, firmly believes in three key principles in the creation of ARG-type experiences: to be genuine, credible and relevant.102 The creator’s de facto position as potential behavioural and policy influencers is highlighted in the example of Ed Zed Omega in the final part of this chapter and also by the My Sky is Falling project which was presented to the United Nations Congress. These illuminate compelling instances in which the fictional world pervades that of the real in order to negotiate and address real-world issues. The candour afforded by a fictional character presenting the realities of a social issue is seemingly more impactful in these situations than the actual realities themselves. These signal radical departures in which fiction is used as a tool to tap into the collective imaginaries of the audience. The power of fiction to engage and mobilize an audience is evidenced in the first instances of radio, television and transmedia, which are then harnessed to generate powerful and positive affect

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in the latter examples. This has led to the establishment of the methodology of ‘displaced fiction’ within which the temporal displacement is experienced through the futurity of Collapsus, World Without Oil and Future Coast, and the displacement of alternate identities is enacted as in My Sky Is Falling and Ed Zed Omega. The implication of these displaced modalities is redolent of Jorge Luis Borges’ observation: Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.103

This invokes the complex interrelations that exist within the fact–fiction binary, with which the many emergent cinematic forms that have been considered within this book are experimenting. Furthermore, the examples within this chapter highlight new modes of audienceship and a significant shift towards a notion of audiencehood whereby audience members as well as the creators take on moral responsibilities for the types and forms of content that they consume and create. The multi-voiced nature of these campaigns which have the influence of the crowd at their core is problematized within the following chapter in instances where these strategies are co-opted into industrial structures and frameworks. For example, questions of whether crowdsourcing is a form of fan labour will be interrogated within the context of an emerging and reactionary industry which is becoming ever more shaped by the engagement of its audiences.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

Bruce E. Drushel, and Kathleen German, The Ethics of Emerging Media: Information, Social Norms, and New Media Technology (New York: Continuum, 2011), 8. Sarah Kember, and Joanna Zylinska, Life after New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 153–154. Jane McGonigal, ‘This Is Not a Game’: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play’ (paper presented at the DAC 2003 Streamingworlds Conference. Melbourne), 2. The War of the Worlds: The Day that Panicked America Documentary, 2005 (Dir: John Ross, USA), DVD. New York Times, ‘Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact’, The New York Times, 31 October 1938.

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John Houseman quoted in Leonard Maltin, The Great American Broadcast (New York: Penguin Putman, 2000), 81. 7 Susan J. Douglas, Listening In (New York: Times Books, 1999), 165. 8 New York Times, ‘Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact’. 9 John Dunning, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 10 Gerald Nachman, Raised on Radio (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 445. 11 Erik Barnouw, Radio Drama in Action: Twenty-Five Plays of a Changing World (New York: Rinehart, 1945), 2. 12 Douglas, Listening In, 165. 13 Paul Heyer, ‘America Under Attack 1: The War of the Worlds, Orson Welles, and “Media Sense” ’, Canadian Journal of Communication 28, no. 2, 2003: http://www. cjconline.ca/index.php/journal/article/viewArticle/1356/1421. 14 Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 15 Jane Roscoe, and Craig Hight, Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 148. 16 Amy West, ‘Caught on Tape: A Legacy of Low-Tech Reality’, in The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to Reality TV and Beyond, ed. Geoff King (Bristol: Intellect, 2005), 83–92. 17 See Chapter 2, note 34 for a list of academic studies based on The Blair Witch Project. 18 Patricia R. Zimmermann, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 144. 19 http://www.billgatesisdead.com. 20 BBC, ‘Bill Gates Hoax Hits Korean Market’, BBC News, 4 April 2003, http://news. bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2916135.stm. 21 BBC, ‘Bill Gates Hoax Hits Korean Market’. 22 Andrea Phillips, A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences across Multiple Platforms (New York: McGraw Hill, 2012), 257. 23 Joon Soo Lim, and Eyun-Jung Ki, ‘Resistance to Ethically Suspicious Parody Video on YouTube: A Test of Inoculation Theory’, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 84 no. 4, 2007:713. 24 Ric Jensen, ‘Blogola, Sponsored Posts, and the Ethics of Blogging’, in The Ethics of Emerging Media: Information, Social Norms, and New Media Technology, ed. Bruce E. Drushel and Kathleen German (New York: Continuum, 2011), 213–232. 25 John L. Sullivan, Media Audiences: Effects, Users, Insitutions, and Power (London: Sage, 2013), 231. 6

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26 Theresa M. Senft, CamGirls: Celebrity & Community in the Age of Social Networks (New York: Peter Lang, 2008). 27 Jean Burgess, and Joshua Green, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 29. 28 Senft, CamGirls, 56, 75. 29 Sarah Atkinson, ‘The View from the Fourth Wall Window: Crossmedia Fictions’, in Crossmedia Innovations: Texts, Markets, Institutions, ed. Indrek Ibrus and Carlos A. Scolari (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012), 77–91. 30 Jaakko Stenros, Markus Montola, and Annika Waern, ‘The Ethics of Pervasive Gaming’, in Pervasive Games Theory and Design: Experiences on the Boundary between Life and Play, ed. Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros and Annika Waern (Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann, 2009), 203. 31 News item published by Expressen (2007), ‘Sanningen om Marika – Oansvarigt?’, http://www.expressen.se/noje/tvsajten/1.902787/sanningen-om-marika-oansvarig. 32 Denward, Marie & Waern, Annika. Broadcast Culture Meets Role-Playing Culture. In Markus. Montola & Jaakko. Stenros (Eds.), Playground Worlds. Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games. (Tampere: Ropecon ry, 2008), 1. 33 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1992, Original edition, 1961), 5–6. 34 Boorstin, The Image, 29. 35 Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 74. 36 Brian Boyd, On the Origins of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 129. Boyd notes that the term ‘metarepresentation’ was introduced by Zenon W. Pylyshyn, ‘When Is Attribution of Beliefs Justified?’, Behaviour and Brain Sciences 1, no. 4, 1978:592–593. 37 Stenros et al., ‘The Ethics of Pervasive Gaming’, 203–204. 38 New York Times, ‘Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact’. 39 http://www.tryablixa.com/. 40 Margrit Schreier, ‘ “Please Help Me; All I Want to Know Is: Is It Real or Not?”: How Recipients View the Reality Status of the Blair Witch Project’, Poetics Today 25, no. 2, 2004:310. 41 Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 119. 42 Peter’s states: Set up a new HTML standard. Put a little tag in the source code of a web site (voluntarily, of course). Your browser reads it and puts a small visual indicator somewhere letting you know if the site is real or a part of a

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entering is encrypted and safe from prying eyes. Steve Peters, ‘A Simple Solution’, Steve Peters, (blog), 15 February 2011, http:// www.stevepeters.org/2011/02/15/a-simple-solution/. 43 Christy Dena, ‘Why ARGs Aren’t Hoaxes’, Christy’s Corner of the Universe (blog), 4 April 2007, http://www.christydena.com/online-essays/why-argsarent-hoaxes/. 44 Henry Jenkins, Ravi Purushotma, Katherine Clinton, Margaret Weigel, and Alice J. Robison, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Chicago: MacArthur Foundation, 2006). 45 Jonathan Waite, ‘Getting Played’, ARGNet, 17 June 2009, http://www.argn. com/2009/06/getting_played/. 46 Paul Booth, Digital Fandom: New Media Studies (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 181. 47 Dave Szulborski, This Is Not a Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming (Raleigh, NC: LuLu, 2005), 13. 48 http://www.ceskatelevize.cz/specialy/ceskysen/en/index.php?load=ofilmu. 49 Phillips, A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling, 250 and Kim Zetter, Court Approves Lawsuit against Toyota over Cyberstalking Ad Stunt, 12 September 2011. 50 Max Eddy, ‘Dell Marketers Arrested for Fake Hostage Crisis in Geekosystem’ (blog), 18 February 2011, http://www.geekosystem.com/dell-hostage/. 51 Sean Stewart, ‘Foreward’, in Pervasive Games Theory and Design: Experiences on the Boundary between Life and Play, ed. Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros and Annika Waern (Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann, 2009), xv. 52 Stenros et al., ‘The Ethics of Pervasive Gaming’, 199. 53 Andrea Phillips, Hoax or Transmedia? The Ethics of Pervasive Fiction (Austin, TX: SWSX, 13 March 2011). 54 Phillips, Hoax or Transmedia? 55 Which Phillip’s describes as fiction that uses the real world as a platform; fiction that could theoretically be indistinguishable from events of the ‘real’ world. 56 The original http://www.instituteforhumancontinuity.org website has been removed. 57 Nick Allen, ‘Nasa: World Will Not End in 2012’, The Telegraph, 17 October 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/6356140/Nasa-world-will-notend-in-2012.html. 58 Meredith Woerner, ‘Are Audiences Sick of Being Lied to’ (blog), 4 March 2011, http://io9.com/5774422/are-audiences-sick-of-being-lied-to. 59 In an interview with the author, 3 May 2013.

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60 Ken Eklund, ‘Play It Live It Shape It: Exploring Authentic Fiction’ (Lecture given at BAFTA, London, 2 May 2013). 61 http://www.whoisdayanicristal.com/. 62 In an interview with the author, 18 May 2013. 63 http://www.sandystoryline.com/about/. 64 http://hurricanearchive.org/. 65 http://interactive.nfb.ca/#/pinepoint. 66 http://www.honkytonk.fr/index.php/webdoc/. 67 http://highrise.nfb.ca/. 68 http://vectorsjournal.org/issues/6/bloodsugar/. 69 http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/index.php?project=57. 70 As discussed in the artists own article: Sharon Daniel, ‘On Politics and Aesthetics: A Case Study of “Public Secrets” and “Blood Sugar” ’, Studies in Documentary Film 6 no. 2, 2012:215–227. 71 Kate Nash, ‘Modes of Interactivity: Analysing the Webdoc’, Media, Culture & Society 34 no. 2, 2012:195–210. 72 http://i-docs.org/. 73 Helen De Michiel & Patricia R. Zimmermann, Documentary as Open Space. In Brian. Winston (Ed.), The Documentary Film Book (pp. 355-365). (London: BFI, 2013). 74 http://www.collapsus.com/. 75 http://www.submarinechannel.com/transmedia/transmedia/creators-andproducer-interviewed-on-collapsus/). 76 In the project’s walkthrough video: http://www.submarinechannel.com/ transmedia/collapsus-walkthrough-with-tommy-pallotta/. 77 http://www.submarinechannel.com/transmedia/transmedia/creators-andproducer-interviewed-on-collapsus/). 78 Kerric Harvey, ‘ “Walk-In Documentary”: New Paradigms for Game-Based Interactive Storytelling and Experiential Conflict Mediation’, Studies in Documentary Film 6 no. 2, 2012:189–202. 79 http://www.richardhofmeier.com/cartlife/. 80 http://playspent.org/. 81 http://fold.it/portal/info/science. 82 http://america2049.com/. 83 Ken Eklund, Jane McGonigal, Dee Cook, Marie Lamb, Michelle Senderhauf, and Krystyn Wells, ‘World Without Oil’, Free Online Multiplayer Educational Game, Independent Lens, 2007, http://www.worldwithoutoil.org. 84 Eklund, ‘Play It Live It Shape It’. 85 In an interview with the author, 3 May 2013.

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86 In an interview with the author, 3 May 2013. 87 http://conspiracyforgood.com/. 88 Sarah Henry, A New Story: Purposeful Storytelling and Designing with Data (New York: Harmony Institute, 2013), 5. 89 Henry, A New Story, 8. 90 http://www.halftheskymovement.org/. 91 http://www.darfurisdying.com/. 92 Which was the focus of a discussion at this years Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, 22 August 2013. 93 See Nick Wadhams, ‘Bad Charity? (All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt!)’, TIME World, 12 May 2010, http://content.time.com/time/world/ article/0,8599,1987628,00.html and ‘What Aid Workers Think of the 1 Million Shirts Campaign’, Good Intentions Are Not Enough, 28 April 2010, http:// goodintents.org/aid-debates/1-million-shirts-campaign. 94 See Szulborski, This Is Not a Game. 95 http://bear71.nfb.ca/#/bear71. 96 In an interview with the author, 28 August 2013. 97 In an interview with the author, 15 August 2013. 98 http://edzedomega.org/. 99 Eklund, ‘Play It Live It Shape It’. 100 Eklund, ‘Play It Live It Shape It’. 101 Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 1. 102 In interview with the author, 12 July 2013. 103 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Partial Magic in the Quixote’, in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 196.

6

The Business of Emerging Cinema

6.1 Introduction The industrial frameworks of cinematic consumption can tell us as much about emerging cinema and its audiences as can the outputs of their endeavours, which have been the focus of this book thus far. This chapter attends to a study of the shifting nature of long established cinematic industrial orthodoxies through an evaluation of the impacts that these are having upon cinematic forms and practices of production. This chapter will trace the emergence of new production modalities which are emerging as a result of new patterns and behaviours of audience consumption, through the citation and mapping of numerous notable projects. This chapter aims to explore whether or not, and in what ways, there is a detectable shift in power structures within the cinematic superstructure: between the monopolist modalities which have dominated the industry for decades; the independent sectors which are currently challenging the mainstream and the ever-increasing mobilized and proactive audience. These three dimensions are coalescing in evermore complex ways within which the interrelations between the oppositional ideologies of empowerment and disempowerment are in a constant state of negotiation.

6.2 Context The infrastructure which supports the cinematic industry is currently in a state of destabilization whereby old business models have to be renegotiated as a result of the emergence of new practices. The proclamation of the ‘death of cinema’

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resounds, resonates and permeates throughout the creaking infrastructures of the commercial film industry. The cinema is one industry amongst many reeling from the aftershocks of ‘digital disruption’, which Michael Franklin describes as ‘the conflict caused by the juxtaposition of exponential rates of change in technology on the one hand and incremental rates of change in society, economics, politics and law on the other’.1 There are two key challenges facing the commercial cinematic industry. Firstly, the emergence of transmedia and multiplatform projects fundamentally challenge traditional distribution and funding models. Questions around how such projects are supported, developed and marketed are beleaguering the industry as was noted in Chapter 4, and also highlighted by Henry Jenkins: ‘From the start, most transmedia has been funded through the promotional budget rather than being understood as part of the creative costs of a particular franchise’.2 In addition, Michael J. Clarke states that ‘the industrial and organizational structures of media production impede the integration of transmedia’.3 Secondly, new forms of distribution, circulation and sharing of independent cinematic content which are proliferating in networked spaces and across the social web are challenging mainstreamed established modes. This has been perceived as both a threat and an opportunity. On one side, the commercial industry is keen to reassert control and organization over the shifting landscape, as David Bordwell attests: ‘For about a hundred years, film distributors have sought to control exhibition. The advantages are obvious. Controlling exhibition keeps competitors off screens, it yields more or less assured revenues, and it allows vast economies of scale’.4 Discourses of control prevail and according to Ramon Lobato, distribution works to ‘regulate access to texts, the conditions under which they are accessed and the range of texts available’,5 whilst Graeme Turner argues that ‘Distribution is also about the regulation, provision and denial of audio-visual content – it is about cultural power and cultural control’.6 Within the independent realm, new opportunities are presented to those previously denied access to traditional distribution channels; as Dina Iordanova notes, the formal distribution streams of theatrical and solid state releases such as DVDs are ‘radically undermined by new technologies. Chances are that film distribution as we have come to know it will soon represent a fraction of the multiple ways in which film can travel around the globe’.7 All of these viewpoints collectively emanate from the economic logic upon which much of the theory of the emerging branch of ‘Distribution scholarship’8 is leveraged. The recent theories of distribution scholarship generally express a concordance in a shift

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from a linear framework to a cyclical mode in which the audience members are engaging in ‘spreadable media’ modalities. As Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green assert, these are ‘an emerging hybrid model of circulation, where a mix of top-down and bottom-up forces determine how material is shared across and among cultures in far more participatory (and messier) ways’,9 signalling ‘a movement towards a more participatory model of culture, one which sees the public not as simply consumers of preconstructed messages but as people who are shaping, sharing, reframing, and remixing media content in ways which might not have been previously imagined’.10 Such a shift renders the once hermetic cinematic distribution chain permutable and permeable. No longer is the independent film production cycle characterized by a linear process of funding, production, distribution and consumption. Within emerging modalities of circulation (pioneered within independent cinematic domains) these elements form a continual circle, of bidirectional relationships: funding, production, distribution and consumption are anachronistically displaced, where one does not have to necessarily precede or supersede the other. The non-linear overlapping and interchanging of these processes will be firmly illustrated in the illustrative examples that this chapter includes. Recent threats to the industry are exemplified by alternate channels of content dissemination such as peer-to-peer networks including the notorious Pirate Bay,11 which was met with vociferous protestations from the music and cinema industries. Pirate Bay, the most prolific and infamous website which facilitated peer-to-peer sharing using the decentralized BitTorrent protocol, was established in Sweden in 2003. The founders were subject to imprisonment and over two million pounds worth of fines in 2009 after criminal and civil prosecution. According to Franklin, ‘In its illegal form, Internet-enabled dissemination of film poses an existential threat to the film industry. In its legal form, it presents an exceptional challenge that pushes traditional industry set-ups into radical reorganization’.12 These circulation practices are characterized by their dual conceptualization; on one side they are criminalized by the industry who are desperately trying to eradicate their presence and on the other as initiatives which seek to open access to cultural resources conceived within a discourse of ‘sharing’. Recently, the activities associated with piracy have become an accepted inevitability by certain areas of the industry. The promotional rhetoric surrounding the Game of Thrones celebrates and embraces its ‘most pirated’ status. TorrentFreak reportedly recorded over one million downloads of the first episode of the third season, and set a record for the highest number of simultaneous shares of a ‘BitTorrent’ at

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163,000. HBO’s Programming President Michael Lombardo stated, ‘I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it is a compliment of sorts […] The demand is there. And it certainly didn’t negatively impact the DVD sales. [Piracy is] something that comes along with having a wildly successful show on a subscription network’.13 Furthermore, the tensions between the shifting asymmetric polarities of altruism and commercialism are played out within these relationships and will be exemplified in the various examples that are the focus of this chapter which will be organized and explored within the context of the overarching themes of co-creation and co-option. Firstly, co-creation14 assumes the position that new co-operative and networked forms are destabilizing traditional distribution models whereby the existence of a dynamic feedback system is evidenced. This has been exemplified in prior examples within this book, where networked modalities have facilitated a dialogue and collaboration between filmmakers and their audiences. This will be explored through the consideration of the phenomena of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding and their surrounding discourses which both celebrate and denounce their transformative impacts. Secondly, the counter-action is one of industry co-option which is founded upon the engulfment of the emerging ideals and conceptions of the independent sectors into the frameworks, processes, professions and authoring platforms of the dominant mainstays of commercial cinema. Co-creation modalities are often perceived within rhetorics of empowerment and opportunity. For example, Jon Reiss provides a practical guide for independent filmmakers wanting to challenge the traditional independent film distribution model and to develop, innovate and experiment in the context of a new distribution and marketing landscape.15 As Neil Edelstein (creator of Haunting Melissa which is discussed in Chapter 3) proclaims, ‘the creators are shaping how it’s going to be delivered’.16 Within cultures of co-option, the industry subsumes the strategies evolved within co-creation, replacing altruism with commercialism, and transforming audience engagement into audience labour. Co-creation and co-option are by no means the mutually exclusive domains of the respective independent and commercial sectors and are not conceived as hermetic distinctions, rather emergent bidirectional dynamic interrelationships exist between the two. For example, as the examples to be discussed within this chapter will contend, crowdfunding and crowdsourcing initiatives exist in both cultural and commercial domains.

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This chapter is particularly concerned with how the coalescence between the altruistic behaviours and economic imperatives of co-creation and co-option are framed and communicated within the omnidiegetic meta-narratives of emerging cinematic productions (which manifest in what is herein referred to as the ‘transmedia back-lot’). Moreover, investigations into how these manifest into the diegetic types, genres, techniques and themes of emerging cinematic examples will be undertaken. By firstly mapping the origins and trajectories of the two distinctive cultural practices of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding in their broadest sense, the chapter will progress to explore their nuanced impacts upon emerging cinema as form, industry and spectatorial medium.

6.3 Co-creation The pervading crowdfunding supersystem now incorporates a myriad of platform-based initiatives which have emerged over the past eight years, spanning the altruistic to the profit-driven domains. These platforms offer various flavours of crowdfunding opportunities aimed at a diversity of both broad and niche audiences; for example, Fundable targets small businesses and start-ups whilst Sandawe is a publishing house of comic-strip books. Crowdfunding strategies can be attributed to four broad categories: donation-based, reward-based, lending-based and equity-based. A comprehensive study undertaken by Sara Bannerman synthesizes crowdfunding initiatives and research undertaken so far in this field;17 as such this section will provide a brief overview by way of context. It has been the music industry which has pioneered crowdfunding initiatives as a way of generating funds, even before its popularization as an online strategy. The music industry was one of the first cultural industries to suffer from the effects of digital disruption to its economic model main-stays, through illegal download and peer-to-peer sharing subterfuges. ArtistShare was established in the United States in 2000, as a triangulation of a crowdfunding initiative, a record label and a business model. ArtistShare facilitates a ‘fan-fund’ model which enables the audience to financially support the creative endeavours of the artists and the bands, to experience their creative process and to receive exclusive content at the conclusion of the project. Slicethepie, (UK, 2007) works to the same principles and is focused primarily on the music industry. Other music industry models include SellaBand, (Germany, 2006) and MyMajorCompany (France, 2007) both

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of which showcase the music of the bands to attract investment to a minimum target threshold and upon reaching this, the band is financed to produce and distribute an album. As bandwidth has increased to enable the faster and easier sharing of richer media content such as entire feature films, broader based crowdfunding initiatives have begun to follow the music industry’s lead. Kickstarter launched in 2009 a profit-based organization which facilitates a reward-based system in which the creators must pledge to furnish all funders with a tangible object from the production in return for their investment. Its equivalent UK-based platform Crowdfunder 2010 is also reward-based. wefund, a UK arts based project which claims to ‘make patronage into a retail experience’18 launched in 2010. Notable crowdfunded success stories in the film industry include the film Iron Sky19 (2012) which deployed both a reward-based and investment system to successfully raise over 900,000 Euros of the film’s budget through crowdfunds. Iron Sky has been sold in seventy countries, including the UK, and the film’s trailer has been viewed online more than seven million times, breaking records for an independent film. The entire £450,000 budget for the Age of Stupid (2009, Dir: Franny Armstrong), a futuristic representation of the impacts of global climate change was raised by selling shares to over two hundred investors who all received a share of the film’s profits. The company behind the film, Spanner Films, also pioneered the IndieScreenings model, an online distribution channel for independent films which facilitates the screenings of films in venues across the country, using a means-tested license payment model. The host organization that facilitates the screening is then able to retain any profits accrued from box office sales. The Veronica Mars Movie Project, based on the successful US TV series, launched a campaign via Kickstarter in 2013 in order to finance the making of the feature film. The campaign successfully exceeded the two million dollar target, reportedly generating over five million in pledges. Production is now underway with a release date of 2014. The most notable crowdfunding success, and one of the most successful endeavours to date, stems from the games industry. The development of Star Citizen,20 a space trading and combat simulator for the PC platform, with a massive multiplayer online aspect to be released in late 2014, is being funded entirely through crowdfunds. At the time of writing, the crowdfund has accumulated a staggering 20,000,000 US dollars of investment from over 260,000 backers. The system is a virtual reward-based system in which funders receive a ‘pledge

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packet’ which comprises of their own (computer generated) spaceship to fly in game play, credits (which can be used to modify and enhance the ship, as well as to buy fuel and to cover landing space rental fees) and a game character whose physicality, clothing and back-story can be modified. As the funds continually increase, new levels of game play are being proposed and authored, such as new planetary and galaxy environments. Iron Sky, Age of Stupid, Veronica Mars and Star City each represent a successful inversion of the consumer model, which counterbalances the issue of financial loss caused by illegal duplication once they enter the marketplace. By effectively releasing the product, film or game prior to its production mitigates the risk of any financial loss, abates concerns of piracy and proves levels of consumer demand. Crowdfunding has long since been considered within rhetorics of opportunity and empowerment, existing outside of the commercial machinery of mass consumption. The benefits have been evangelized in the context of the ‘Long Tail’21 age, which as Chris Anderson stated, ‘Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bit-stream’.22 However, it is these fledgling and nubile markets that are now at risk by the very model deployed to emancipate them, if the mainstream television, film and game industries start to co-opt and dominate this practice in the ways highlighted in the examples above (which are all considered as originating from independent bases). The independent producers for which the crowdfunding mechanism is a lifeline are increasingly becoming crowded out, in an overcrowded marketplace, and likely to be subsumed back into the very system that they sought to challenge. Crowdsourcing on the other hand was conceived within commercial frameworks, and has conversely been co-opted by individuals, organizations and artistic projects on the fringes. The term ‘crowdsourcing’ was coined by journalist Jeff Howe in the June 2006 issue of Wired23 and defined as thus: ‘The act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call’.24 Crowdsourcing has tended to be conceived as a commercial modality which meets economic ends, originating and aligned to the core principles of ‘outsourcing’. In the previous chapter, the notion of harnessing the cognitive surplus of the crowd in order to solve a protein problem was cited, and this could be considered a crowdsourced strategy, though it is initiatives such as Amazon’s The Mechanical Turk25 which illustrate a typified economic

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manifestation of crowdsourcing. Workers (or ‘turkers’) are assigned HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), which cannot yet be automated by computational means in order to earn money; requesters use the site to outsource microtasks (for micro-payments). The cognitive surplus of the ‘crowd’ is conceived in a similar way to that of the processing surplus of the computer, the SETI@ homebrowser enables people to offer their networked computer in idle mode for computational processing. Crowdsourcing is also deployed to meet more creative ends as Howe noted in 2009: ‘Far more important are the human behaviours technology engenders, especially the potential to weave the mass of humanity together into a thriving, infinitely powerful organism’.26 This is exemplified in the 99 Designs project which enables the audience members to host a design contest, for T-shirts, logos and websites, stating what they need and how much they are willing to pay. Designers can then evaluate the opportunity and respond accordingly. Crowdsourcing has also been appropriated for creative ends within new data mined and search engine storytelling modalities. These include We Feel Fine,27 (2006) an emotional search engine which simultaneously mines blogs, microblogs and social networking sites, locating and extracting sentences that include the words ‘I feel’ or ‘I am feeling’, as well as the gender, age and location of the people authoring those sentences. The generation and exploration of this emotional humanized data is then presented through a variety of alternate and aesthetically rich data visualization tools known as mobs, metrics, montages, murmurs and madness.28 Within The Johnny Cash Project29 audience members contribute to the project by drawing their own frame of video for the song ‘aint no grave’, providing their own rendition of one of the frames of video through tracing, roto-scoping techniques and free-hand drawing. The composited bricolage is re-assimilated each time a new image is generated and replayed for others to watch. hitRECord, a new collaborative crowdsourcing venture, enables artists of all disciplines including writers, musicians, illustrators, photographers and video editors to contribute their work to the hitRECord community to enable others to collaboratively edit, build upon, develop and remix their work in order to generate new original outputs including songs, animations and short films.30 Within the anti-commercial rubrics that these projects inhabit, the practices could be considered as ‘commons-based peer production’31 which rely less upon solicitation and more upon user generation which are the founding principles and values of the Open Source Software Movement. One such platform for this endeavour is the GitHub32 website which facilitates the hosting and sharing of

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open source computer programming for others to download and build upon. However, there is a clear distinction to be made between crowdsourcing and open sourcing: in the case of open-source production, the code belongs to the community who are able to use, develop and work with it; in the case of crowdsourcing, the exclusivity of use of the ideas belongs to the company. This distinction has been resolved in a number of notable cinematic research and development projects whereby crowdsourcing and open source modalities have been married. This was initiated by Sanctuary (2008), a ‘modifiable film’ written and directed by Michaela Lewidge. The project got as far as the postproduction phase and would have been one of the first films of its kind to have been released both as a theatrical feature, and in a remixable form. The remixable release was to be made available online through Creative Commons and involved the film’s assets being available to the viewing public to download, modify and remix. As Lewidge stated during the production phase, ‘Re-mixable films are films designed to permit explicit sampling of film assets. A film MOD (or modification) is like a game MOD, a modified version which you can experience as a bolt-on (or replacement) to the original experience’.33 Another project with similar ambitions was Swarm of Angels which evolved in 2006 with the creator Matt Hanson developing two fictional scripts with input from ‘the swarm’. The first, The Unfold, was uploaded to a wiki so that members of the swarm can amend and add to it. The second, The Ravages (formally Glitch), was being developed to allow the swarm the opportunity to vote on which story elements to retain and which to delete. Similarly The Open Source Cinema Project proposed to create a collaborative feature length documentary about copyright in the digital age (using the materials from Rip! A Remix Manifesto). The director, Brett Gaylor, invited users to upload their own video content and then enables them to create online remixes of the footage using a mixer interface available through the web browser. The Stray Cinema project operated under the same principles; users could upload and remix content from the site to create their own edits of the fictional film. Each of these prototypical instances aspired to capture the dual ideal of open source production and collective endeavours but as a result of limited funding and lack of resources have yet to materialize in their originally conceived forms. I would suggest that their failure to do so is endemic of them being conceived ahead-of-their-time, prior to the establishment of crowdfunding models and before audience literacies had become conversant in their understandings of the

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new storytelling modalities that are being proposed. These projects did however inaugurate a number of resultant aesthetics and modes of narrative structuring in their approaches to crowd engagements. These can broadly be attributed to two categories: the ‘exquisite corpse’ mode and the ‘bricolage’ mode. The ‘exquisite corpse’ mode of production, which takes both its name and operational principles from the surrealist-inspired parlour game in which players take it in turns to draw the head, torso and legs of a fictional character (the former player folding over the page so only the adjoining lines of the body are visible by the following player) is exemplified by the recent i09 project34 which launched in 2012. The audience members work with high-end concept artists to collectively assemble a story; the artworks generated by a postproduction visual effects company are posted to a website by way of triggering and inspiring short pieces of ‘flash fiction’ from the audience members. Both parties engage in an additive and alternating storytelling process, in which the artists respond to the writers by producing further artworks which continue the story based on the content of the audience members blog posts. The film the Exquisite Corpse (2012)35 in which this alternating process of production is collapsed into the diegesis itself presents a hybrid of a making-of and a feature-length fictional film. The film tells the story of a group of five artists who collaborate in the creation of a script and the production of a film using the framework of the exquisite corpse game. The members take it in turns to write fifteen pages of the script, with the superseding author only being permitted to read the final five pages of their predecessor’s work before continuing the story. The final film intercuts the documentary of this process with the resulting fictional film rendering the ontologies of fact and fiction collapsible into the self same entity. This exemplifies an observation proposed by Heidi Hagebolling (of the creation of multiplatform endeavours): Ultimately, the creative process itself becomes an open-ended work: production and reception merge into a single, mutually conditioning cycle, the viewer space and stage are brought back together, and production and reception are no longer separated by location. In this embodiment, the dramaturgy of interactive media may well become a dramaturgy of interactive processes.36

The ‘bricolage’ mode of filmmaking is premised on the existence of an archive of pre-generated film and video matter; the bricolage typology can be broken down into two sub-categories: the archival bricolage mode and the user-generated bricolage mode. Proponents of the archival bricolage mode of filmmaking

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include Bodysong (2003) produced by Simon Pummell, a feature-length documentary which depicts the arc of a single human life from an archive drawn from a hundred years of cinema. In order to accommodate the density of content that this film involved the accompanying website presented an archive which included all of frames of film, and the associated stories were embedded within the clips as part of the storytelling architecture. Similarly Christian Marclay’s The Clock, produced in 2010, presented a real-time twenty-four-hour montage as an arts-based installation comprised of thousands of time-related scenes from movies and television shows, assimilated and re-assembled in chronological formation to tell the story of a fictionalized twenty four hours. The user-generated bricolage mode has most recently manifested within the film Life in a Day, a 2011 documentary constituting a montage of point-of-view user-generated film clips. These were crowdsourced from a pool of 80,000 clips submitted to YouTube through an open call for contributors to provide global insights into the daily lives of the earth’s human populace based on one day, the 24 July 2010. The filmmakers also distributed 400 cameras to the developing world in their creative endeavour to be as inclusive and representative as possible. This resulted in the generation of over 4,500 hours of footage for which the production team employed a team of ‘taggers’ to label, categorize and organize the overwhelming agglomeration of user-generated matter. This example characterizes an emergent user-generated aesthetic within cinema; the initiation of the mobile vernacular as discussed in previous chapters and its resultant aesthetics of ‘low tech realism’37 manifest within the diegesis. This is combined with an emerging database logic of narrative organization, the implications and effects of which will be explored more fully in the following chapter. Embedded within the user-generated bricolage and the open source modalities previously described are two cultural practices which are further impacting upon the formal aesthetics and themes of exploration within emerging cinema. These are remixing (a previously identified modality of audience engagement) and ‘lifelogging’. Remix culture, which has been explored by numerous scholars,38 has spawned numerous genres and sub-genres which have proliferated across YouTube including the fake trailer, spoilers, foilers, vids, spoofs and parodies to name but a few. These forms highlight the increasing levels of film and digital literacy within audience members who engage in various forms of textual reappropriation and textual analysis. This is exemplified in a recent addition to the remix oeuvre which I have identified as ‘compressed critiques’ a term which

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builds on Carlos Scolari’s ideas of expansion and compression39 as developed through his observations of audience engagements with the television series Lost. The ‘Everything wrong with … ’ (in three, four or six minutes or less) genre consists of micro-critiques which operate at the micro-level analysis of the film text and include continuity errors, narrative flaws, general observations and comedic exclamations which are presented on screen in breathless rapid-fire dialogue. Initiated by a YouTube user going by the name of CinemaSins, some of the videos which include compressed critiques of Prometheus, Jurassic Park and Independence Day have garnered over two million views on its dedicated YouTube channel. The corpus even includes a self-effacing ‘Everything wrong with Cinema Sins in three minutes’. The on-screen ‘Movie Sin’ counter is set against the ‘Movie Sin’ timer, rapidly ringing up the total of sins that are accumulated in a race to compress as many observations into the shortest space of time. Advanced literacy in the language of film is demonstrated through this mode of textual critique which characterizes the audience-appropriated cinematic remix genre which usually functions within the frameworks of parody and pastiche. These modes tend to be antithetical to mainstream cinema’s driving forces of commercialism, and operate outside of the authorized omnidiegetic spaces. As Jonathan Gray noted, there are ‘Increasing situations whereby media firms create policed playgrounds for fans, setting up fan sites that invite various forms of fan paratextual creativity and user generated content, yet often imposing a set of rules and limitations and/or claiming legal rights over the material’.40 Lifelogging, the recording and archiving of your every action from your own point-of-view (POV), manifested long before the portable equipment was introduced that makes this the ubiquitous activity that it is today. The practice was inaugurated in the 1970s with Steve Mann’s cumbersome Wearable Computing (WearComp),41 the invention eventually led to Mann becoming the first person to transmit images captured by the wearable tracking device via the web in 1994. These conceptions of lifelogging and lifecasting are also exemplified by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell’s MyLifeBits (2002), a real-time generator of user data, dedicated to digital lifetime capture which realized and rendered the projected capacity of the web as conceived by Vannevar Bush and his concept of the Memex (Memory Index – an early conception of the web conceived in 1945). The recent proliferation of life logged modalities within cinema such as Life in a Day is endemic of the current period of surplus and superfluity identified by Lev Manovich as a ‘post-compression’ condition.42 This societal state where everything can be (and is) perpetually captured and stored resonates with Sherry

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Turkle’s observation that such projects grow ‘out of the idea that technology has developed capacities that should be put to use’,43 a syllogism that implies that all media has to be interactive as a result of its innate capabilities. The practice of lifelogging is differentiated from other forms of lifecasting and self-broadcast endemic of the 1990s ‘camgirl’ culture discussed in Chapter 5, and the emergent form of surveillance ‘entertainment’ initiated by Josh Harris and his 1999 project, Quiet: We Live in Public, which was documented by the film We Live in Public (2009). The project involved a hundred willing participants inhabiting an underground pod-hotel and being subjected to constant surveillance and broadcast. In 2000 Harris and his girlfriend continued to broadcast their lives online via weliveinpublic.com, where their entire house was monitored by CCTV cameras. These were the precursors of the Big Brother TV phenomenon which launched in the UK in the summer of 2000. Where these examples exist within a discourse of surveillance, characterized by static cameras, CCTV aesthetics and privacy invasion, lifelogging is denoted by the point-of-view being that of the perpetrator, a portable phenomenon, user-centric and self-initiated which signifies a shift to ‘sousveillance’44 which is exemplified in the example of Four Eyed Monsters. Four Eyed Monsters (2005) claimed to be the first feature film ever to be made available on YouTube (and then subsequently via Myspace), and the first feature film premiered in Second Life, at a screening attended by avatars. The feature length film is complimented by various webisodes constituting the video diaries and ‘making-of ’ materials generated by the filmmakers Susan Buice and Arin Crumley which document their creative processes, and their journey towards the film’s successful release. These materials which were released prior to the cinematic release on YouTube, iTunes and Myspace channels provided insights into the real-world intimate relationship of the filmmakers which is the subject of the feature film. The premise is based on the negotiation of a mediated online relationship between the two protagonists in their pursuit of a mutual pledge to only communicate with one another through artistic means. Through the direct addresses to the imagined audience in the webisodes the filmmakers elicited and responded to the audience. In the case of funding for the project, this happened latterly. The filmmakers attempted to retrospectively repay the production costs and subsidize future production through the employment of a number of strategies – these included through advertising revenues, a dollar being generated every time someone is redirected to an advertiser’s site and through a personalized appeal to the audience

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to solicit donations to alleviate their credit card debt. As Susan Luckmann and Julia De Roeper observed, ‘The Four Eyed Monsters producers humanised this reality by adding pictures of them cutting up credit cards as they go which made real the donations made by fans’.45 Independent examples are more adept, agile and nimble at being able to engage in the perpetual ‘circle’ of funding, production, distribution and consumption as described in the introduction to this chapter. Four Eyed Monsters inaugurated what has come to be known as DIY Distribution,46 of what I will refer to as Crowddistribution – these follow in a lineage of alternative independent distribution practices which Julia Knight and Peter Thomas identified as ‘a long tradition of filmmakers and other communities of interest setting up “alternative” distribution organizations and exhibition venues in order to ensure the circulation of both a wider diversity of cultural products and “alternative” sources of information’.47 Online modalities have accelerated these practices which have been actualized within the independent distribution of the Age of Stupid’s IndieScreenings model. Arin Crumley’s project OpenIndie started in 2010 funded by a Kickstarter campaign. OpenIndie is a theatrical distribution platform for independent film to which filmmakers input their films, fans discover the new films and then request local screenings, then depending on the demand for the screenings, the service delivers the films to venues. Similarly, early in 2012, Tugg, a ‘collective action web-platform’, announced plans to bring speciality films to art houses via advanced reservation. A combination of all of the co-creative initiatives has been discussed thus far within this chapter – crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, opensourcing and crowddistribution. The Cosmonaut provides a compelling case study since it exemplifies all of the initiatives which are characteristic of the disrupted economy. In addition, it is a transmedia, multiplatform and multi-streamed project. The fictional film world is set against the backdrop of the late 1960s and early 1970s milieu of the international space race, and the central characters are based at the Star City cosmonaut training camp in Moscow where they prepare for a space mission. The Cosmonaut released its crowdfunding request on the film’s website on 11 May 2009. Given that this was the first film of a young and unknown director, the campaign was highly successful; the film secured pledges totalling over 300,000 euros from over four thousand producers.48 The campaign operated within a reward-based system in which backers received a certificate and a producer-credit at the end of the film. Merchandising was also deployed as an income generation strategy in which badges, T-shirts and pencils were sold via the film’s website.

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Figure 6.1  Examples in which iconography from The Cosmonaut’s diegesis translated into merchandising opportunities

In addition, the filmmakers used the website to draw on the interest that was being generated, and to crowdsource information during the research and development stages, stated the director Nicolás Alcalá: instead of spending four hours researching which was the rocket that Chelomei was building in 1966, I asked in our Twitter and three minutes after that I had three answers. We also decided to stream the shooting so every day during the nine shooting weeks you were able to connect to us for an hour and ask questions and see what we were doing.49

Funding initiatives were interwoven with the production and postproduction activities, exemplifying the perpetual circle and non-linear interrelations between funding, production, distribution and consumption as highlighted in the introduction to this chapter. The Cosmonaut was released on 14 May 2013, almost four years to the day after its initial call for funds (Figure 6.2). It was simultaneously released across all platforms: cinema, DVD/USB and via the film’s website. All content relating to The Cosmonaut are licensed under Creative Commons, to share and attribute but not to benefit commercially from their re-use and re-appropriation, meeting the ideals originally aimed for by projects such as Sanctuary and Swarm of Angels. The release included thirty-five webisodes and fragments of scenes: The Moon Files, a short fictional film depicting the final moments of the character when he loses contact with Earth; The Hummingbird,50 a pseudo-documentary51 filmed in Latvia recreating the ‘Kolibri Mission’ destined for submission to various documentary film festivals, (just as The Blair Witch Project included a The Curse of the Blair Witch documentary aired on the SCI-FI channel prior to the film’s theatrical release) a social media element which involved the creation of a number of fictional character profiles on Facebook through which the characters of the Russian cosmonauts communicate with one another and with the film’s audience. According to the filmmakers, the design of the Facebook

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Figure 6.2  The Cosmonaut, 2013

communication channel is ‘Based upon the primitive military IT messaging network used by the cosmonauts’.52 The characters from the film Stas, Andrei and Yulia, are joined by their historical counterparts such as Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Komarov in a temporal and stylistic discordance of old and new communication cultures. The ‘making-of ’ film which has been alternatively titled ‘the fighting of ’ by the filmmakers also accompanies the compendium of film materials. The director, Alcalá, stated that they produced ‘two films’ one of them is The Cosmonaut; a science fiction film, whatever, and the other … is a story or three guys, three students willing to make a film, and how we told that story over three years with videos and the blog … everything we spoke about, is what made people engage with us and be willing to give us money, and if the project had been about anything else it would have been the same, that’s my guess.53

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Figure 6.3  Art parallels life in The Cosmonaut. Photo by Daniel Torrelló

Every cinematic project has a parallel narrative in the way that Alcalá describes and as previously described in the examples drawn out in Chapter 2. The back-story of their production is presented as extensive transmedia backlots within the context of the examples cited in this chapter, and in these cases, Four Eyed Monsters and The Cosmonaut the second story very often precedes or parallels the main event, or in the case of the Exquisite Corpse is intercut into the main event itself. In these examples, the story of the film’s making can often eclipse the final product of the film itself, in terms of the impact that it has upon the audience. In this sense The Cosmonaut will always be predominantly recognized and discussed for its compelling back-story as opposed to its fictional narrative. It presents a fascinating case of art imitating life in which the diegesis of the film parallels the filmmaker’s struggles. The storyline of the elegiac film retells the story of a pioneering expedition to the moon by one of the film’s main Soviet protagonists in the race to beat the United States on their mission to space; watched by the eyes of the world; paralleling the struggles faced by the filmmakers operating outside of the mainstream cinematic supersystem in their endeavours to achieve the successful completion and widespread circulation of their film (Figure 6.3). Different levels of access were afforded to the audience: free access to all of the transmedia content was made available on the film's website; The K-Pass was a one-off subscription which enables access to all content; and all materials from the creation of the film were made accessible via Creative Commons Licensing on

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the Internet Archive54. The code behind the website has also been made available via the previously cited GitHub platform, for others to download, use and modify. The Cosmonaut also launched its own distribution mechanism, the ‘Partnership Programme’, in which audience members request a screening through the payment of a variable fee, the amount of which depends upon the context of the proposed screening.55 At the time of writing, early indications of the film’s reception indicated that over 175,000 people had viewed The Cosmonaut in the two months following the film’s release.56 As the filmmaker themselves acknowledged ‘The Cosmonaut has not only been a movie, but also a laboratory’,57 an experiment in which the reconfiguration of the dominant modes of the funding, production and distribution cycles have been disrupted and tested. The simultaneous release modality is now being exercised within the commercial (independent realm), which has up until recently sustained a segmented release approach, referred to by Barbara Klinger as a ‘ “windowing” sequence that staggers (a film’s) rerelease in multiple venues across a number of months’.58 Klinger states ‘Such is the health of this market that ancillary variations do not necessarily require a staggered time line’.59

6.4 Co-option As noted in Chapter 3, A Field in England (2013), launched simultaneously across all platforms on the same day, 5 July 2013, in cinemas, on television (via the freeview Film4 channel), DVD/Blu-ray and Video on Demand (Film4OD and iTunes). The sales of the film surpassed expectations in the first week of release. It was the week’s best-selling title on Film4OD. Michael Rosser stated, ‘For a limited release, the results are solid given the niche appeal of the film’.60 A Field in England was ‘the first feature to be developed and fully financed through Film4’s innovation hub Film4.0. It is also among the first to receive funding from the BFI Distribution Fund New Models strand, which supports experimental release models’.61 The BFI have since introduced a slate of projects which are exploring new distribution and engagement strategies; these include the Spirit of 45 (2013) by Ken Loach, which included an online My 45 game in which audience members can enter their details in order to produce a profile of their life in 1945. Extending cinematic properties by engaging the audience within the texture and milieu of the cinematic world was explored in Chapter 2, and it functions as an economic imperative which is clearly the case in this instance.

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As further extrapolated in Chapter 4, value extraction is based on two premises: as an imperative to advance and inform narrative (as was the case of the socially layered storytelling examples considered in Chapter 4) and for economic gain. It functions in two ways through attracting audience attention and through engendering audience contribution. A simultaneous release strategy engenders sustained attention from the audience where according to Jonathan Beller: Technologies such as cinema and television are machines that take the assembly line out of the space of the factory and put it into the home and the theatre and the brain itself, mining the body of the productive value of its time, occupying it on location. The cinema as deterritorialized factory, human attention is deterritorialized labour.62

Audience contribution can be harnessed through crowdsourcing which Howe acknowledges has the potential ‘to foster unprecedented levels of collaboration and meaningful exchanges’.63 Crowdsourcing is perceived as an exploitative form of labour, capitalized via the cinematic mainstream intervention and exploitation of the perpetual circle of funding, production, distribution and consumption. As Howe acknowledges, the potential of this has been recognized by the industries ‘If crowdsourcing runs on people’s “spare cycles” […] that quantity is now in surplus’,64 and by Tiziana Terranova who states ‘free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited’.65 This is an increasingly exploited modality within the contexts of social networking sites where exchanges and encounters are recorded and trackable, as discussed in Chapter 4. The complexities of this interrelationship and its intervention of the cycle by audiences and resultant dialogic exchanges have manifested in instances of what David Brisbin has appellated ‘instant fan-made media’.66 He states Within our Art Department, [working on the production of Twilight: New Moon] we had several devotees of the books who eagerly monitored the fan-site traffic. They kept me updated on anything visual that was getting attention. It was tough to embrace the project, and the larger world around the series, and not be drawn deeper and deeper into the vision of these fans. Fortunately, the visual emphasis of the fan traffic was very much centered on detail rather than themes.67

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This dialogic exchange is of mutual benefit to both the producers and the audience. In the case of the audience their approval of acceptable renderings of their conceptions of the fictional world of Twilight to which they have invested ensures their future enjoyment of the film. In the case of the production team, by having their work validated within the production phase ensure the films future acceptance and success. To meet similar ends, Dawson’s Desktop formally employed an advisory board of twenty five of the fans to work on the online Dawson’s Creek experience.68 The collision between user appropriated content and the industry within the production cycle is also highlighted by Chuck Tryon in instances whereby audience members become enlisted by the industry. Tryon noted The perception that user-generated video could lead to fame – or even a professional career in the industry – has shaped the discourses of amateur film production for some time […] with many commentators depicting the videos as ‘calling cards’ for careers in the industry, thus defining the videos not merely as pleasurable leisure activities but as a form of apprenticeship for an entertainment career.69

This is realized within The Inside Experience which was discussed in Chapter 4, in which one of my interviewees from the Facebook community recounted how he initiated the production of a video, in which members of the community showed and shared their appreciation for the experience, by miming and dancing on camera, ‘I had the idea to make a thank you video’ (to Intel for the experience)and shared it on the (Facebook) page, then The Inside shared it on their page, then the director shared it on his Twitter, and then a few days later one of the producers at the agency contacted me to say that we really love your video, and we’d like to use it as our demo reel, I was then invited to work as in intern for 10 months in San Francisco.70

This particular instant illuminates a responsive and adaptive industry which is nimble in its exploitation of its audiences and their acculturation into production cultures by circumventing the traditional application routes of CV submissions and interviews. Further responsive strategies where audience members are invited to contribute to production processes are exacerbated within transmedia production cultures where productions are open-ended, and seemingly boundless in their development and realization. Transmedia projects are endemically collaborative and open to input. For example, there is definitely evidence to suggest in many

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of the case studies considered within this book that the content creators have been ‘making it up as they go along’ (as noted by Jenkins71 and also as evidenced from the first-person accounts with production personnel working for The Inside Experience, The Cosmonaut, Alison Norrington’s Staying Single and A.I. The Beast). This is primarily the case with any pioneering, exploratory or experimental endeavour which engenders capricious real-time responses within the audience communities. A further collision of collaborative practices between maker and audience is exemplified within a moment of audience appropriation of content in relation to the The Perplex City Wiki.72 One of the project’s writers stated that: This was a great deal of hard work for us but it was nothing compared to the collaborative efforts of the players who spent thousands of man-hours creating maps and websites about the story […] it was truly a labour of love, an encyclopaedic guide to the game that outstripped anything we ever produced in-house. It became the writers’ bible.73

Static how-to guides and manuals with their rigid codes and conventions are replaced with interactive and co-creative modalities reflexive of the form to which they pertain. Such generative story/project systems include the Active Story System devised as the preliminary phase of evolving a Conducttr project as well as and The 7 Transmedia Families game,74 ‘The card game raises awareness among practitioners and thinkers about the concepts and methodologies for transmedia creation. It features ideas for creating or optimizing a project from idea to roll-out’ (Figure 6.4).

Figure 6.4  The 7 Transmedia Families game, courtesy of @TransmediaReady http:// www.transmediaready.com

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These draw out co-creative and collective intelligence behaviours. The Immersive Writing Lab assembled a compendium of development guides covering the five major elements which underpin immersive entertainment: world, characters, multi-stranded plot, audience and memories with which to facilitate the process of writing multiplatform interactive experiences.75 Alison Norrington, a transmedia writer and producer, attests to the importance of writing within transmedia projects stating, ‘its made me highly aware of the fact that the concept work is so different to the actual narrative design and the ability to write in a way that holds a tight story […] and I find, still now that it comes down to the writing’.76 Christy Dena has undertaken a rigorous, comprehensive and informative study into transmedia production modalities in her doctoral thesis77 focusing on the design ecology of transmedia; the production; the funding mandates and a myriad of influencing factors which have informed the work of this chapter. Andrea Phillips claims that organizations and projects need four distinct skill sets upon which the successful delivery of a transmedia project depends; Phillips describes these as ‘someone to manage the storytelling, the look and feel, the technology you’re using, and the administrative work for the project itself ’.78 Clearly, a multitude of new roles and skills are required. Authors are increasingly ‘curators’, ‘story architects’ or ‘experience designers’, co-inhabiting multiple hyphenate professional roles, such as story-architect-writer. A proliferation of new titles now pervade the credit listings of emergent projects; the roles of taggers (postproduction) and data wranglers (production) have emerged to manage the data generated by the digital film production process. Titles also include Transmedia Writer; Transmedia Producer; Interactive Director; Social Media Producer; Transmedia Director; Transmedia Experience Designer and Transmedia Story Architect. The recent professional recognition of these roles has crystallized their acceptance within the industry: a Transmedia Producer credit is given to the person(s) responsible for a significant portion of a project’s long-term planning, development, production, and/or maintenance of narrative continuity across multiple platforms, and creation of original storylines for new platforms. Transmedia producers also create and implement interactive endeavors to unite the audience of the property with the canonical narrative.79

There is also an internalized nomenclature which accounts for the variety of new roles that have emerged from ARG-based experiences upon which transmedia and multiplatform projects are founded. These include ‘Puppetmasters’ who ‘control the puppets on the stage, that is the characters in the game’.80 In addition,

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a ‘sock puppet’ is ‘intended to look like a genuine player in the community, but in reality it’s someone on the production team […] masquerading as an audience member for the purpose of pointing out key pieces of information’.81 Jeff Gomez initiates a trend towards the role of ‘universe stewards’ as a shepherd for very large tent-pole intellectual properties who will be responsible for co-coordinating and creatively escorting the property across multiple media platforms […] they will respect the universe above and beyond studio politics, above and beyond licensing, above and beyond even the producers, directors and actors who are involved in creating individual components of this universe.82

The avant-garde transmedia examples are re-working the notion of the author into the experience, to interweave an authorial consistency within the texture, mood and style. This complex co-management of styles is indicative of a shift towards theatrical modes of production which were foregrounded as the emerging raison d’etre of emerging cinematic practices, in the sense the transmedia director takes the role of the ‘dramaturg’ – as Peter Eckersall explains of ‘performance dramaturgy’ in relation to the theatrical, that it ‘has created the need for creative specialists who keep track of the complicated flow of ideas, technologies and forms associated with such work. Professional dramaturgy has therefore moved beyond literary modes of production into new fields of performance, dance and technical and production work’.83 The rhetorics of stewarding, shepherding and experience present challenges of new teams collaborating together and also inflect the tensions that are beginning to emerge between the distinctive (mono)medium environments and industries, and their respective linear production cycles. As Josh Lamb of Galahad claims, ‘These are resource intensive to manage an experience that spans platforms. The amount of people required to manage the project, and the technologies, ends up driving the process’.84 Julian McCrea of Portal Entertainment observed in his experiences of leading The Craftsman: ‘these people have never worked together before: Film teams, design teams and technology teams working on a project where not anyone is the director (the lead). There is still an executive producer who has the final decision, but you work much more like a collective. The role is more of a showrunner if you have worked in television, except the showrunner must be literate in telling stories across live action, design and technology’.85 Christian Fonnesbech draws on his experiences in the creation of Cloud Chamber in Chapter 4 where he notes

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you’re developing a universe and a visual framework that has to be applied to the filming, the game design, the interface design and the writing style […] So obviously as the transmedia director you have to be a part and the touchstone for all those processes … […] The challenge then becomes managing two or three different creative processes that don’t talk to each other.86

McCrea goes onto state that: The current model is so broken, because they’re not writing the story from the start, they’re still writing for specific mediums. Each medium falls back on the baggage of their medium, so the only way they try and solve the problem is by looking at how they tried to solve the problem in their medium.87

McCrea’s observation highlights the fact that the nature of transmedia projects, and the associated multiplicity of roles, implies previous mono-media solutions are ineffectual. The habitual behaviours that McCrea describes redolently invoke the ‘ritualized forms’ of programme-making, which John T. Caldwell attested are ‘created by “industrial actors” and choreographed through tried-and-proven modes of institutional interaction’.88 The presence and persistence of mechanistic modes of production in a disruptive, free-flowing and converged environment resonates with Laura Mulvey’s observation that ‘The cinema is inhabited increasingly by specters’.89 This haunted metaphor could be applied to account for the analogue, rigid and persistent mono-medial vestiges to which many processes and professional roles still attempt to align. One organization that is seeking to address the transformative impact upon working practices presented by modes of transmedia production is Mirada, a company introduced in Chapter 2 and also features in Chapter 3, and is working at the cutting edge of emerging cinema examples. Mirada compresses and rationalizes the workflow of the teams associated with transmedia productions who are usually geographically and conceptually dispersed and separated by traditional industry boundaries such as film, game, art and computing. As one of the founders, Guillermo del Toro, explains, ‘What we wanted to do was to create a company that would have under one single roof the possibility of creating a creature, a concept, a set, and bring forth the storytelling elements of all those parts that are normally considered technical parts of the process’.90 The streamlining of production processes to one place, circular, cyclical, as opposed to linear and hierarchical. del Toro goes into state ‘As production structures become leaner and delivery systems become as varied and accessible as the internet’.91 Mathew Cullen, one of Mirada’s co-founders, states, ‘What sets us

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apart as a creative business is that we’ve been bringing art directors, conceptual thinkers and designers, People that have a gift for storytelling and we’re bringing them to the centre of our creative process’.92 These ideals represent a humanistic version of a ‘story engine’, the notion of which is normally articulated as a mechanical endeavour. Other sectors of the industry are addressing issues of complexified work-flows by aiming to achieve a unification and coherence of process through the exploration of tailored authoring platforms. The manifestation of these platforms highlights a key industry shift of concentration and investment: from their primary role of content providers to that of platform providers (although in many cases they cohabit the same space, and of course this is a common modality within dominant broadcasting models in which channel operators also fund and produce their own content). This has not been the case within the independent or commercial film sector, where many organizations are now attempting to claim the space of proprietary delivery platform interventions for smartphones, tablets and the social web. The potential for monetization through the sale of these platforms, and their associated licenses and proprietary content experiences (content that is attached to an interactive and individualized modality, such as an iOS experience), is being prioritized over the production of stand-alone content which is freely made, available, accessible and creatable by the audience. This denotes a move towards mainstreaming and massification, where experiences can be made to be repeatable and replicated. A number of these virtual hardware systems are, at the time of writing, in varying stages of development, at both public and private BETA stages. The commercial platforms include Galahad, Conducttr, StoryPlanet, RIDES, Immersion, Klynt, 3WDoc, Korsakow, Storyapp.it, Visual.ly and some of the open source platforms are Zeega, Mozilla Popcorn Maker and Ushahidi. A majority of these tend to be focused on interactive documentary production; fiction production is more explicitly facilitated by Conducttr, Galahad and Zeega.93 They all appear to be doing the same thing, enabling both content curation and networking of content through bespoke interfaces or via the web but operate in nuanced ways. For example, the Immersion platform is a patented storytelling platform by Portal Entertainment developed specifically to deliver suspense thrillers for digital platforms that allows the company to measure the audience’s level of response to their stories, and change the narrative accordingly within its own bounded system. Conducttr, a pervasive entertainment platform and an interactive content management system, enables the time-based, spatialized authoring, layering and

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enhancement of a story through online and offline social and communications media. It is not a delivery platform itself, instead it enables the delivery of a story experience through the proprietary social media channels which the author has chosen to deploy. ‘Conducttr acts like an unseen conductor orchestrating the performance of media across platforms and responding to audience feedback. The audience never knows it exists’.94 Conducttr consists of a storytelling engine programmed to listen for and monitor events generated by real world interfaces; these could be anything as diverse as a temperature change on an external device to a text message, an incoming email or the number of views recorded on a specific YouTube video. The frontend of the Conducttr engine is a browser-based editor system that the creator decides what actions those predefined events will trigger within the different social media accounts representative of the constituent characters that are being deployed to tell the story. A number of possible permutations could ensue: for example to send a reply to an incoming text message; to send a Tumblr blog post when you get that text message. Figure 6.5 depicts an application of the Conducttr tool set. The image shows characters and image assets from a ninety-minute experience for the book launch of Polly Courtney’s Feral Youth which is based on the London riots of 2011. The experience re-told a chapter from the book via Twitter from the perspective of supporting characters and allowed guests to take part in an interactive adventure on SMS in which participants become part of a London gang.

Figure 6.5  Polly Courtney’s Feral Youth in Conducttr, © Transmedia Storyteller Ltd

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Figure 6.6  Conducttr outputs interactive multiplatform stories in the format of a traditional movie script, © Transmedia Storyteller Ltd

In Figure 6.6, the interface illustrates how Conducttr make the content easier to review by audiences unfamiliar with interactive storytelling. The formulaic mechanization of narrative which such platforms support opens itself up for critique, since it belies creativity and fluidity of narrative flows afforded by digital technologies. The operational logics of these platforms replicate the dominant classical dramatic production modalities. Throughout its history, film and drama production has been founded upon a granularization of narrative components, in which action is broken down into scenes and shots, predicated on the economics of access to locations and dictated by actors’ schedules. Action is re-ordered to respond to these pressures and captured in a non-linear fashion. This modality of dramatic micro-moment capture can effectively be translated to the orchestration of narrative arcs within digitally networked spaces in which predefined plot points and character dialogue will be delivered as textual segments in the form of tweets, messages and status updates. In the case of storytelling through social media, the holistic reformation of the disparate elements is cohered through the audience’s engagement with social media aggregation tools in order to rebuild the fragmented narrative. This responds to the audience’s advanced literacies of fragmented narrative modalities (acknowledged in previous chapters). As Victor Burgin asserts, ‘The decomposition of narrative films, once subversive, is now normal’.95

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These new authoring platforms clearly present an array of exciting untapped opportunities in storytelling in which situations as tangential as thermic conditions can instigate a narrative instrumentality. The marrying of classical techniques and conventions with the new modalities which these platforms facilitate is exemplified by a statement made by Jim Stewartson of RIDES who aspires for his platform to become the ‘movie camera of the 21st Century’.96

6.5 Conclusion A number of pertinent implications have arisen from the discussions in this chapter. Firstly, and most notably, a collapse of boundaries within both the independent and commercial sectors has clearly been evidenced. Independent domains have been experimenting with flipped distribution models, which has initiated a collapse of funding and distribution mechanisms into the same modality. Filmmakers are simultaneously pioneering both crowdfunding and distribution mechanisms within the same online channel (these include Tugg; OpenIndie which emerged from Four Eyed Monsters; The Cosmonaut’s Partnership Programme and Age of Stupid’s IndieScreenings) engaging in a pro-cinematic practice where all elements of the process are simultaneously taken into account: the text, the audience, the industry superstructure and the distribution. However, Mike Monello, creative director of marketing agency Campfire, expresses a polemic behind these theatrical screening initiatives: The problem with indie film isn’t being solved by discussions of Kickstarter and crowd funding, and the core problem isn’t even access to funding at all. The problem with indies is that filmmakers are still structuring and formatting their stories under the constraints imposed by theatrical exhibition, as if that’s still a meaningful way for indies to reach audiences.97

Since the purpose of these platforms is to ultimately facilitate a cinematic screening as their goal, the potential for online distribution modalities remains untapped and underexplored, whereby an expansion to the practices of portable cinema as considered in Chapter 3 and the social media delivery of Chapter 4 is being stymied. This schismatic is addressed by Distrify: a relatively new online distribution and marketing toolset for filmmakers to upload their film, specify the format and

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price, and link social media sites directly to the point of sale for the purchase of the film that can be delivered as streamable, downloadable or physical entity. The Silver Goat (the film cited in Chapter 3) used this platform for its distribution in August 2013 and was able to reach an audience in fourteen countries which would have been impossible via prior traditional distribution means.98 In the commercial sector, there is a notable collapse between the delivery and distribution mechanisms. The erosion of the cinematic distribution industries is an inevitability as content creators are taking distribution into their own hands. In my interviews with all those from the professional arena, there were clear and resounding imperatives to be made in terms of the necessary industry interventions required. These were focused on the renovation of outmoded business models and required a call for focus upon scalability; Stewartson argues that in order to scale transmedia, it is imperative that investment is attracted (on a large scale), that, in his words, ‘we go mainstream’ and ‘create a product that is recognizable and repeatable’.99 In essence a broken industry seeks to divert its attention from the confines of content production to platform creation in order to address this aim. Although this could facilitate a potential emancipation from the old distribution structures, there is a significant risk that new proprietary channels could dominate (such as tablet devices and third party social media channels), thus the independent sector is divested from the restraints of one inhibiting modality only to become impeded by another. Furthermore, the popularity contest upon which crowdfunding is founded could lead to a homogenization of content which favours massification and mainstreaming potentially resulting in the stifling of the long tail by replacing one capitalistic, monopolistic paradigm with another. The increasing divide between the commercial and independent sectors raises significant issues of exclusion and diversity which are outside of the purview of this research but certainly require attention and further study. Despite these concerns, the focus of the book remains on the potentials of emerging cinematic forms. The crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, open sourcing modalities of digitally networked environments have opened up to an unprecedented level, the opportunity for dialogues, exchanges and perpetual feedback loops between audience communities and the creators, thus illuminating the polysemic nature of the subtitle of this book – Engaging Audiences (to be engaged by an audience) and Engaging Audiences (to engage an audience). Moreover, it is evolving and impacting upon the new forms of

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emerging cinema in a myriad of ways, to which the next chapter will turn its consideration in the formalization of the resultant aesthetics, grammars, codes and conventions.

Notes 1

Michael Franklin, ‘Internet-Enabled Dissemination: Managing Uncertainty in the Film Value Chain’, in Digital Disruption: Cinema Moves On-line, ed. Dina Iordanova and Stuart Cunningham (St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012), 101–102. 2 Henry Jenkins, ‘The Aesthetics of Transmedia: In Response to David Bordwell (Part One)’, Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins (blog), 10 September 2009, http://henryjenkins.org/2009/09/the_aesthetics_of_transmedia_i. html. 3 Michael. J. Clarke, Transmedia Television: New Trends in Network Serial Production (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 209. 4 David Bordwell, Pandora’s Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies (Madison, WI: The Irvington Way Institute Press, 2012), 48. 5 Ramon Lobato, ‘The Politics of Digital Distribution: Exclusionary Structures in Online Cinema’, Studies in Australasian Cinema 3 no. 2, 2009:169. 6 Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice, Third ed. (London: Routledge, 1998). 7 Dina Iordanova, and Stuart Cunningham, Digital Disruption: Cinema Moves Online (St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012), 1. 8 Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See (London: Wallflower, 2002). 9 Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 1. 10 Jenkins et al., Spreadable Media, 2. 11 See Steal this Film, 2006 and Steal this Film 2, 2007 http://www.stealthisfilm.com/ Part2/. 12 Franklin, ‘Internet-Enabled Dissemination’, 101. 13 Chris Isidore, ‘Game of Thrones Premiere Sets Piracy Record’, 2 April 2013, http:// money.cnn.com/2013/04/02/technology/game-of-thrones-piracy/index.html. 14 Note that I am applying the term of co-creation in a different way to that proposed by Henry Jenkins. Jenkins proposed co-creation as an industry term to describe how content deliverers would collaborate across platforms to ensure consistency across franchise elements (such a games and films). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 107.

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15 Jon Reiss, Think Outside the Box Office: The Ultimate Guide to Film Distribution and Marketing for the Digital Era (New York: Hybrid Cinema LLC, 2010). 16 In an interview with the author, 2 August 2013. 17 Sara Bannerman, ‘Crowdfunding Culture’, Wi: Journal of Mobile Culture 6 no. 4, 2012. 18 http://wefund.com/about-us/. 19 http://www.ironsky.net/site/support/finance/. 20 http://robertsspaceindustries.com/. 21 A term originally coined by Chris Anderson in ‘The Long Tail’, Wired 12, no.10, October 2004, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html. 22 Anderson, ‘The Long Tail’. 23 See both Jeff Howe, ‘Crowdsourcing: A Definition’, Crowdsourcing: Tracking the Rise of the Amateur (blog), 2 June 2006, http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2006/06/ crowdsourcing_a.html, and Jeff Howe, ‘The Rise of Crowdsourcing’, Wired 14, no. 6, June 2006, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html. 24 Howe, ‘The Rise of Crowdsourcing’. 25 https://www.mturk.com:443/mturk/welcome. 26 Jeff Howe, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business (New York: Random House, 2009), 11. 27 http://www.wefeelfine.org. 28 A paper by the artists: Sepandar D. Kamvar, and Jonathan Harris, ‘We Feel Fine’ (paper read at WSDM’11, Hong Kong, China, 9–12 February 2011). 29 http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/. 30 http://www.hitrecord.org/. 31 Yochai Benkler, Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 62. 32 https://github.com/. 33 http://www.modfilms.com. 34 http://io9.com/277802052. 35 http://splitsider.com/projects/exquisite-corpse/. 36 Heide Hagebölling, Interactive Dramaturgies: New Approaches in Multimedia Content and Design (Köln: Springer-Verlag, 2004), 15–16. 37 Amy West, ‘Caught on Tape: A Legacy of Low-Tech Reality’, in The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to Reality TV and Beyond, ed. Geoff King (Bristol: Intellect, 2005), 83–92. 38 Eduardo Navas, ‘Remix Defined’, Remix Theory (blog), http://remixtheory. net/?page_id=3, Eli Horwatt, ‘A Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing: Contemporary Found Footage Practice on the Internet’, in Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, ed. Iain Robert Smith (Nottingham:

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Scope, 2009), http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/cultborr/chapter.php?id=8, Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and Other Media Paratexts (New York: New York University Press, 2010), Virginia Kuhn, ‘The Rhetoric of Remix’, Transformative Works and Cultures no. 9, 2012, Francesca Coppa, ‘Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding’, Transformative Works and Cultures no. 1, 2008, Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), 27, and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega, ‘Spoof Trailers, Hyperlinked Spectators & the Web’, New Media & Society, 2013:1. 39 Carlos Alberto Scolari, ‘Lostology: Transmedia Storytelling and Expansion/ Compression Strategies’, Semiotica no. 195, 2013:45–68. 40 Gray, Show Sold Separately, 165. 41 The evolution of lifelogging and lifestreaming is captured in this article; Kyriacos Achilleos, ‘Evolution of Lifelogging’ (paper presented at he 4th Annual Multimedia Systems, Electronics and Computer Science Conference, University of Southampton, 2003). 42 Quoted from a lecture given by Lev Manovich on 15 November 2005 at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, in Mirko Tobias Schäfer, Bastard Culture! How User Participation Transforms Cultural Production (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 155. 43 Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books), 304. 44 This term, the inverse of surveillance, refers to the direct recording of an activity by the participant of that activity as defined by Steve Mann, Jason Nolan, and Barry Wellman, ‘Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments’, Surveillance & Society 1 no. 3, 2003:331–355. 45 Susan Luckman, and Julia De Roeper, ‘Wagging the Long Tail: Digital Distribution and Peripheral Screen Production Industries’, Cultural Science 1 no. 2, 2008:3. 46 Eugene Hernandez, ‘DIY Distribution: Coming Soon Via the Filmmakers … “Four Eyed Monsters” and “Head Trauma” ’, 17 August 2006, http://www.indiewire. com/article/diy_distribution_coming_soon_via_the_filmmakers…four_eyed_ monsters_and_he. 47 Julia Knight, and Peter Thomas, Reaching Audiences: Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 15. 48 Riot Cinema Collective, ‘The Plan 3: The Strategy of “The Cosmonaut” ’, 2012:5. 49 In personal email communication with the author, 22 April 2013. 50 http://watergun.tv/project/the-hummingbird/. 51 The filmmakers refer to this particular element as a mockdocumentary, but it does not allude to the parodic conventions of the form as detailed in Chapter 5.

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52 Riot Cinema Collective, ‘The Plan 3’, 17. 53 ‘How We Crowdfunded Half a Million Dollars for Our Movie’, 15 November 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sH7eCfyCVE. 54 All of the unedited, uncompressed HD files are available to download at: http:// archive.org/details/thecosmonaut. 55 For professional (cinema) screenings the net proceeds are divided between the host and the Riot Cinema Collective as a 60/40 split. For non-cinema public screenings, a 50/50 split is initiated. All non-profit screenings are freely licensed under the Creative Commons ‘Attribution ShareAlike Attribution 3.0 Unported’ License as detailed in the Riot Cinema Collective, ‘Screening Guide’, 2013. 56 The Cosmonaut Blog, 7 June 2013, http://www.thecosmonaut.org/ blog/?p=826&utm_medium=email&utm_source=acumbamail&utm_ campaign=16-recapitulacion. 57 Riot Cinema Collective, ‘Kolibri Tools: Use Our Code for Your Web’, The Cosmonaut (blog), 2 August 2013, http://www.thecosmonaut.org/blog/?p=852. 58 Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 8. 59 Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex, 72. 60 Michael Rosser, ‘A Field in England Figures Revealed’, Screen, 8 July 2013, http:// www.screendaily.com/news/a-field-in-england-figures-revealed/5058103.article. 61 Rosser, ‘A Field in England Figures Revealed’. 62 Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006, Original edition, 1998), 92. 63 Howe, Crowdsourcing, Why the Power, 14. 64 Howe, Crowdsourcing, Why the Power, xiii–xiv. 65 Tiziana Terranova, ‘Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy’, Social Text 63, 2000:37. 66 Brisbin introduced the term of ‘set tracker’ in Chapter 3, the industry given name for fans who locate film sets to photograph and share, in David Brisbin, ‘Instant Fan-Made Media’, Perspective, December 2009–January 2010:56–57. 67 Brisbin, ‘Instant Fan-Made Media’, 58. 68 Darren Crosdable, Dawson’s Creek: The Official Companion (London: Ebury, 1999), 145–147. 69 Chuck Tryon, Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 152. 70 In an interview with the author, 13 July 2013. 71 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 29. 72 http://www.perplexcitywiki.com.

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73 David Varela, ‘Perplex City: An Alternate Reality Game’, Scriptwriter Magazine 24, 2007. 74 Produced by http://transmediaready.com/. 75 http://www.portalentertainment.co.uk/development. 76 In an interview with the author 15 July 2013. 77 Christy Dena, Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments (Sydney: Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney, 2009). 78 Andrea Phillips, A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences across Multiple Platforms (New York: McGraw Hill, 2012), 171. 79 Producer’s Guild of America, ‘PGA Board of Directors Approves Addition of Transmedia Producer to Guild’s Producers Code of Credits’, 2010, http://www.producersguild.org/news/news.asp?id=39637&hhSearchTerm s=transmedia+and+producer. 80 Dave Szulborski, This Is Not a Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming (Raleigh, NC: LuLu, 2005), 52. 81 Phillips, A Creator’s Guide, 153. 82 Gomez, quoted in Jay Baage, and Jeff Gomez, ‘DMW Vlog: Jeff Gomez on Creating Transmedia Experiences’, in Digital Media Wire (blog), 2009, http://www. dmwmedia.com/news/2009/07/11/dmw-vlog:-jeff-gomez-creating-transmediaexperiences. 83 Peter Eckersall, ‘Towards an Expanded Dramaturgical Practice: A Report on the Cultural Intervention Project’, Theatre Research International 31 no. 3, 2006:387. 84 In an interview with the author, 18 April 2013. 85 In an interview with the author, 9 August 2013. 86 In an interview with the author, 16 July 2013. 87 In an interview with the author, 9 August 2013. 88 John T. Caldwell, ‘Convergence Television: Aggregating Form and Repurposing Content in the Culture of Conglomeration’, in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 57. 89 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 196. 90 Mirada Anthem Video, http://mirada.com/stories/anthem. 91 Mirada Anthem Video. 92 Mirada Anthem Video. 93 http://www.theshadowgang.com/. 94 http://www.tstoryteller.com/single-media-entertainment-is-dead.

The Business of Emerging Cinema Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 8. Jim Stewartson, in an interview with the author, 5 August 2013. 17 May 2013, Facebook post. Paula Vaccaro (producer of The Silver Goat) in an interview with the author, 3 October 2013. 99 Jim Stewartson, ‘Yes, “Transmedia” Is an Empty Buzzword … Until It Isn’t’, Transmedia Coalition, 8 May 2013, http://transmediacoalition.com/jstewartson/ story/yes-transmedia-is-an-empty-buzzword-until-it-isnt. 95 96 97 98

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7.1 Introduction Various allusions have been made throughout this book to the formal qualities, attributes, aesthetics and grammars of extended, live, mobile, social, online, pervasive and industrial cinematic paradigms, in which a range of commercial and avant-garde examples have been considered. This chapter seeks to consolidate, synthesize and further expand on these observations by proposing new frameworks for the formalization of a grammatology of emerging cinema. As Ute Holl has noted, ‘In trying to grasp the effects of online cinema, the problem remains in using anachronistic terminology to describe new experiences’.1 Carlos Scolari has similarly observed, ‘we don’t have a semiotics of transmedia experiences. Narratology and semiotics are unaccustomed to analyzing highly complex multi-modal narratives characterized by textual fragmentation and dozens of characters and narrative programs that inhabit different media and platforms’.2 The study of emerging cinema modes throughout this book has illuminated some radical departures from traditional notions of film and narrative which will be captured in a number of sections – they are genres and themes, narrative devices and participation modalities.

7.2 Genres and themes In the process of synthesizing the emerging cinema area, the recurrence of specific genres and themes has predominated whilst others are seemingly eschewed. The dominant genres include sci-fi (as expounded by Tom Abba,3 and within this book includes Cloverfield and Prometheus), detective murder mystery (Murder

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in Passing), thriller (The Craftsman) and horror (Haunting Melissa and APP). Comedy examples are notably absent with limited exception (such as RIDES’ RVC). In relation to cinema, Janet Staiger has observed The history of movies is a history of diverse modes of address […] some genres might be said to be more in the gaze/narrative mode; others in the glance/attractions mode. For example ‘gaze’ genres are the detective, romance, melodrama, thriller, and gangster movies. ‘Glance’ genres are action-adventure films, many comedies, fantasies, speculative science fiction, westerns.4

The dominant genres that have here been identified in relation to emerging cinema represent the gaze/narrative mode in which opportunities for involved audience encounters are engendered and conspiratorial digressions are facilitated. The familiar codes and conventions of sci-fi, detective murder mystery, thriller and horror enable instant recognition and understandings ensuring accessibility to a wide audience. Moreover, the formulaic nature of these genres also lends themselves to an intuitive translation into digital delivery platforms. The process of this translation has inevitably led to instances whereby the content and themes become deictically related to the form, for example the autotelic aesthetics of Haunting Melissa are imbued within the implied haunting of the iPad device. I have consistently observed that content is continually very reflexive of its form both implicitly and explicitly, for example APP is all about the pervasion and control of mobile communications; Pandemic 1.0 is all about the dualspread of a human and computer virus and Four Eyed Monsters presents the digital mediation of human interrelations. The leitmotifs of these examples and of many others all relate to their principal narrative mechanisms, thematically capturing the complexities of everyday digital life in their themes, and also in the structuring, delivery and consumption patterns that they engender. The intravenous existential thread that runs through both form and content continually reflects and refracts cultural anxieties. In addition to iterating genres, three recurring prevalent themes pervade emerging cinema examples; they can be attributed to the missing person, infection and decay and ‘nefarious corporations versus secret societies’ modes. All three of these contribute to the ‘conspiratorial rhetorical mode’5 as suggested by M.J. Clarke which appears to be an endemic facet of the emerging cinema experience. The theme of missing people has pervaded throughout a number of examples that have been considered within this book including The Truth

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about Marika, The Craftsman and Trixi. Themes of infection and decay are explored through the perpetual presence of pharmaceutical corporations whereby the websites and insignias of fictionalized companies are created as tools through which to extend the fictional diegesis into the real world. Examples include Year Zero (2007) (a campaign for the band Nine Inch Nails) in which a large fictional pharmaceutical company called Cedocore produces Parepin and numerous other drugs. Within the diegesis it is suggested that Parepin is distributed in the drinking water to protect the public from diseases in the event of a bio-terrorist attack. The website6 itself is seemingly virally infected through its presentation of distorted images and corrupt lines of code. This inflects a further level of deictic reflexivity whereby form infects content, which redolently invokes Caroline Bassett’s observation: ‘narrative can be understood to be partly formed through its instantiation in media technologies of various kinds, even as it maintains its claim to be immune from infection by its carriers’ (My emphasis).7 Further examples of pharmaceutical discourses included the production of Ceretin, a cognitive enhancing ‘drug that makes you smarter’8 by the in-fiction company Cognivia in the ARG Perplex City (2005–2007). This need to artificially stimulate the critical faculties of the ARG community intrinsically implies the esoteric nature of the ARG mode which has continually pervaded the associated discourses of the early twenty-first century. It was previously noted in Chapter 2 that Side Effects (2013) and its presentation of the fictional anti-depressant Ablixa, and Strain’s (2012) Department of Human Management borrowed from dominant medical aesthetics in their online presences, by way of authenticating and increasing the mimesis of the extended fictional worlds.9 The use of medical aesthetics in these online mediated representations are reminiscent of the use of emergency services, complicit in the ‘ballyhoo’ happenings as discussed in Chapter 2, which were endemic of the desire to authenticate the fiction and to further embed it into a discourse of the real. The landscape is also dominated by narratives of the conspirational exploits of nefarious corporations, and the secret societies who are formed to undermine them. These underground resistance movements become the narrative instrumentality for active and immersed audience engagements. For example, audience members joined the ancient secret society called Conspiracy for Good in the ARG experience of the same name which was discussed in Chapter 5. Ordo Serpentis was the secret society established in The Truth about Marika. This is a commonly used strategy within ARGs as Jaakko Stenros, Markus Montola

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and Annika Waern note: ‘Making the player group a secret society that wants to avoid attention is an elegant way of discouraging players from alarming unaware participants’.10 The rhetorics of secrecy and unaware participation further resonate with recurrent the references to the ARG’s esoteric origins. In contrast, the notable reliance on the genre conventions of sci-fi, detective murder mystery, thriller and horror can be considered as a strategy for making the emerging cinema experiences more accessible and recognizable to a wider audience. They serve to rehearse audiences in the use of new cinematic modalities to the point at which they become absorbed into everyday practices, at which conjuncture it is inevitable that projects from a broader generic base will start to emerge.

7.3 Narrative devices A number of narrative devices have become the staple of emerging cinematic paradigms. A predisposition and predilection for certain narrative mechanics from the digital palette have resulted in the emergence of distinctive aesthetics which will be examined using two groupings: structuring principles and diegetic portals. The structuring principles of emerging cinema are characterized by the salient features of fragmentation and granularity. These include the organization of episodic bite-sized content which are distinguished by synoptical aesthetics. As noted in Chapter 4, episodic short form storytelling is synonymous with advertising modalities and the impact of this has been addressed in a number of instances throughout this book. The short form has always been the cornerstone of experimentations with emerging media as Jon Dovey has noted ‘web native forms of interruptible content are the constituents of new narrative genres’.11 Moreover, the move towards film and cinema being delivered in a short episodic modality can be considered within a capitalistic framework in that it reduces the need for sustained periods of leisure time, enabling audiences to spend more time working and to consume films during ‘micro breaks’. This is in contrast to the prolonged viewing engagement engendered by the cinema auditorium which is only possible if audiences have the prolonged ‘free’ time to engage in this manner. These short-form structuring principles which have continued to manifest are as a result of our existence within what Leon Gurevitch has termed the ‘pervasive meta-narrative of promotion’,12 in which we are constantly exposed to bite-sized promotional narratives on fragmented and multiple screens.

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The stylistic language of these structuring principles can be compared to those of classical cinema which have existed for a century. For example, the concepts of the fade in and fade out, which are used to denote changes in scenes or time frames are in many cases replaced by mechanisms of character interventions within digital modalities. This has been seen in a number of examples within this book including Cloud Chamber, Haunting Melissa and The Inside Experience where cuts are physically enacted by the subject themselves, in which they physically switch off the camera to punctuate the scene. This indicates a further prevailing structuring principle which is characterized by a simultaneous realtime temporality. In these cases, the characters who are seemingly responsible for the capturing of events through their own recording devices are given authorial and directorial agency. Within these conceptions, a complexified notion of the author emerges as it is either the character or the equipment of image capture that are foregrounded as the narrational agents. A further parallel can be drawn between the grammar of early cinema and the use of textual intertitles to relay exposition and dialogue between the characters in silent films. These are replaced within digital paradigms by the representation of text messages and instant messages produced by the characters (and sometimes by the audience. For example, within The Inside Experience, the audience generated Facebook posts which were then edited into the diegesis in order to perform the function of a narrative intertitle). Cuts and fades between action are also enacted within emerging cinema by moments of analogue interference. The screen can become distorted at the moment at which the character switches off the camera or as a result of other forms of manipulation (such as spectral interference in the case of Haunting Melissa, and signal interference in the case of Cloud Chamber). These moments of analogue obstruction represent examples of skeumorphs, vestiges from an anachronistically misplaced, analogue sign system, which are endemic of remediation and of a medium in transition. According to Steven Holtzmann, ‘Repurposing is a transitional step that allows us to get a secure footing on unfamiliar terrain’.13 These moments of analogue remediation therefore present the audience with an opportunity to ‘try on’ and ‘try out’ a new medium illustrating Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's belief that older media will ‘function in a constant dialectic with earlier media’.14 These digressions from classical cinematic codes and conventions are not unique to emerging cinema forms; such observations have already been made about instances of digital cinema since the 1990s. Numerous analogies have also been proposed to express the impact of the digital upon the narrative mechanics

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of new cinema. The database has been proposed as one such structuring logic as cited by numerous academics15 including Marsha Kinder who proposed that ‘Database narrative refers to narratives whose structure exposes or thematises the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories and that are crucial to language’.16 In recent examples these logics of data-driven modality have taken on a tangible form. These are exemplified in the database landscapes of Cloud Chamber and Ken Eklund’s latest project in which data manifests as real-world objects (the chronofacts in Future Coast). The split screen was also a structuring aesthetic that proliferated around the use of framed windows characteristic of 1990s computing17 that enabled additional layering of narrative exposition which according to Anne Friedberg ‘shattered the fixity of a single-point perspective’.18 There have been numerous films which have adopted a multi-screen aesthetic where windows are visualized, to assist the audience in their conceptualizations of differently ‘framed’ space. The ‘expanded cinema’ movement of the 1960s was also characterized by an explosion of multiple-screens.19 These instances rehearsed the audience in a grammar of multiplicity enabling them to become fluent in the comprehension of multiple streams of information in a cinematic space. The use of time-based compression tactics were first evolved with the establishment of parallel action, whereby two lines of disparate but simultaneous action in different locations were intercut. This was further extended by triangulated parallel action devised by D.W. Griffiths in early 1900 to incorporate a third element of parallel action. We now have instances of multiplicitous parallel action in which multiple iterations, layers and levels of stories are represented. In the current moment we have returned to Friedberg’s ‘single-frame paradigm as an intransigent visual practice’20 in the form of the tablet device, into which all images are collapsed into a windowed frontality. The unification of the image is no longer cohered by simultaneous, perpendicularly organized multiple screens in the same frame, instead they are layered on the euclidean planes of the z-axis and accessible via invisible diegetic portals. In Chapter 2, I introduced the term ‘diegetic portal’, as a structuring principle of the depth axis which is a phenomenon that is explicit to extended cinematic forms. The diegetic portal represents a moment at which audience members can cognitively engage at a latitudinal dimension in a film’s hyperdiegesis. The presence of diegetic portals engenders concomitant, real-time aesthetics which enable multilayered audience encounters. These vignettes which enable access to the film’s epistemic dimensions can be hidden in logos (such as the Slusho! T-shirt logo of

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Cloverfield) and in URLs (including a business card in Heroes – see Figure 7.1). Such moments as those described in relation to Cloverfield are akin to the origami unicorn metaphor used by Henry Jenkins in the title of his book chapter in which he quotes from Neil Young’s conception of ‘Additive Comprehension’. Young refers to the example in Blade Runner (1982) in which the recognition of an implicit narrative device (the origami unicorn) reconceptualizes the entire viewing of the film.21 For the purposes of the discussions of this chapter, I have subdivided the diegetic portal categorization in order to account and explicate the numerous forms and functions that they can take. Within their broader conception, the diegetic portal narrative stratagem can take the form of physical props, characters or lines of dialogue and engender different engagements within the audience which can be accounted for in these categories: inciting diegetic portal, objectified diegetic portal, commodified diegetic portal and spectral diegetic portal. The moment of engagement with an inciting diegetic portal moves the audience beyond a moment of ‘rhetorical metalepsis’.22 Inciting diegetic portals initiate on-screen fictional calls-to-action which require the audience to engage in an activity that will result in some form of interpersonal or computer mediated communication with the fictional world. This hyperlink into the hyperdiegesis is presented in such a way that it will incite action from the audience in contrast to the rhetorical and suggestive diegetic portals. Inciting diegetic portals sequester expository devices, such as telephone numbers which are presented in the diegesis of The Craftsman and the URL that is presented in the online fiction of The Umbrella Sword (see Figure 7.2). A further example is evidenced in season 1, episode 12 of the first series of Heroes (2006). There is a scene in which the main character Noah Bennet passes another character Mohinder Suresh

Figure 7.1  An inciting diegetic portal, Heroes, 2007

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his business card. A tight close-up is held long enough on the card rendering the website and phone number clearly visible. The web address leads to an inworld site of Primatech Paper, Bennet’s employer, and calling the phone number plays a recorded message. These instances represent moments where audience members can gain deeper insights into the fictional world and where exposition is revealed that is exclusive and unique to the portal. An objectified diegetic portal is a physical object which is part of or makes an explicit link to the fiction world. Examples include the jar of honey which was distributed to potential audience members in I Love Bees (Chapter 2), the bus signs and on-street benches of District 9 (Chapter 2) and the chronofact in Future Coast which enables access to the data that it represents (Chapter 5). A commodified diegetic portal is the most explicit commercial expression of this narrative strategy. It represents a call-to-action to engage in some form of economic transaction. These can very often be perceived as a disruption to narrative integrity, and have heretofore been the dominant imperative for access to extraneous content. As Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell observe, ‘The “immersive” ancillaries seem on the whole designed less to complete or complicate the film than to cement loyalty to the property, and even recruit fans to participate in marketing. It’s enhanced synergy, upgraded brand loyalty’.23 This is certainly true of some of the examples of the commodified diegetic portal category which include The Gotham City Pizzeria24 site of the Why So Serious? ARG being powered by Dominos Pizza and the Chalet Girl’s use of the Facebook like button. Furthermore, these commodified diegetic portals can also exist in the ‘real world’ and are the inverse of the fictional props that appear in the film itself. Examples of these include the Dharma, Hanso and Apollo branded paraphernalia

Figure 7.2  An inciting diegetic portal in The Umbrella Sword, Galahad, photo courtesy of The Shadow Gang

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of Lost which were available to purchase. Derek Johnson states, these ‘fictional imprints’25 are ‘a physical tangibility to the diegesis’.26 They are also an example of what Todd Wasserman has termed ‘reverse product placement’ through the creation of ‘a fictional brand in a fictional environment and then release it to the real world’.27 The aesthetics and operational logics of these commodified diegetic portals are symptomatically derivative of an emerging digital media economy. This is further evidenced in the campaign produced by Bing to promote JayZ’s autobiography and memoir Decoded (2010), which had the dual functionality of promoting the rap stars biography as well as showcasing the services of Bing, Microsoft’s web search engine. In a literal commodification of narrative, every single page of the 200-page autobiography was reproduced and geographically placed in the location to which it referred in the book’s pages, creating a realworld treasure hunt for fans to locate all of the pages to re-form the book in online spaces. As well as on billboards, pavements and projections, some of the pages (which could be conceptualized as commodified diegetic portals) were stitched into Gucci jackets and in the paper wrappings of beef burgers, enabling audience members to literally consume the fiction. Spectral diegetic portals have been cited in relation to the use of the phone in the promotional campaign for Carrie in Chapter 2 and also to the example of Haunting Melissa in Chapter 3, in which access to an other-worldly dimension is facilitated or a malediction is evoked through digital devices which revisits the concept of haunted media in the digital era.28 The presence of these portals can sometimes be indicative of an imminent peripeteia. Spectrality thematically emanates within a number of dimensions of emerging cinema which is indicative of the death/ haunted discourse of the cinematic medium as Raymond Bellour conceives of cinema becoming ‘an image-skeleton floating among all the other images’.29 These cognitive, inciting, objectified, commodified and spectral portals are all asynchronous instances, in which the media that the portals reveal have to be accessed separately online or by engaging with an external device. These can of course be accessed simultaneously, but the moments themselves are not temporally tied to a specific moment in the timeline. The temporal dimensions of paratexts as proposed by Gerard Genette30 of ‘prior’, ‘original’, ‘later’ and ‘delayed’ are expanded by Jonathan Gray to encompass ‘paratexts that flow between the gaps of textual exhibition, or that come to us “during” or “after” viewing, working to police certain reading strategies’.31 This temporal assignation is expanded to the category of synchronous paratexts or synchronous diegetic portals which only become accessible at a

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specific moment in timeline of the fiction. This subcategory is further divided into epiphenomenal, analeptic and proleptic. Epiphenomenal diegetic portals refer to those instances in APP and RIDES where simultaneous access is engendered in synchronicity with the film’s timeline via a ‘second screen’ modality. Analeptic Diegetic portals refer back to moments where something has already happened in the film-world chronology; an example of this occurs in the Why So Serious? campaign, where in the opening scenes of The Dark Knight as referenced in Chapter 2, the ARG players would note the joker making his escape in the yellow school bus which they had assisted him to steal in the preceding campaign. The school bus signifies an analeptic diegetic portal to those players. Proleptic Diegetic portals infer events that are yet to happen in the future film-world chronology. An example of such a portal occurs within the app in the film APP which foretells future events on the audience member’s phone. All of these moments support audience behaviours of replay, repeat and review, which is an endemic feature of the deep media paradigm. Diegetic portal devices are active narrative expositional tools, embedded within a codified system which contribute towards a dramaturgical enhancement and a gamification of narrative. They reflect Thomas Elsaesser’s claim that ‘…  the default value of cinematic storytelling is rapidly becoming that of the interactive video-game and the computer simulation game’.32 Diegetic portals are just one device in which the unification of paratextual materials is normally characterized by what Johnson refers to as ‘dispersed textuality’,33 what Göran Bolin has identified as ‘textual divergence’34 and what Janet Murray recognizes as ‘hyperseriality’.35 In addition to this unification strategy, emerging cinema examples are increasingly being conceived against the backdrop of reality. An infinite archive of back-story is therefore available for audience members to engage in as is the case of Cloud Chamber considered in Chapter 4. This invokes Jon Reiss’ observation that ‘as our understanding of film expands, there will not need to be a separate classification between diegetic and extradiegetic; it will all be part of a seamless whole’.36

7.4 Participation modalities The various different ‘dispersal logics’ described in the previous section engender different participatory modalities in order to unify experiences, whereby the

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audience become the editors in their sense making and aggregation activities. As Indrek Ibrus and Carlos Scolari claim, ‘New audiences can be expected to be able to effectively reconstruct multipart narrative worlds and to negotiate multifaceted interpretative contracts with complex textual structures’.37 In the previous chapter, the software authoring tools being evolved by the industry to perform the functions of rationalizing and unifying pervasive storytelling experiences illustrated this imperative. The following section considers the participation modalities of unification in order to reconceptualize the founding principles of narrative and anti-narrative, which are immersion and metalepsis, respectively. The conceptualization of fictional engagement has been premised on the notion of immersion throughout histories of storytelling. These are based on the classical notions of the willing suspension of disbelief as proposed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817 which is identified as ‘that for the moment constitutes poetic faith’,38 which, as Anthony J. Ferri states, is ‘a type of hypnotic process between poet and reader’.39 This concept has been evolved within the context of digitally mediated performance and fiction spaces within which according to Janet Murray ‘we actively create belief’40 and as proposed by Jenkins, we engage in the ‘active production of belief ’.41 Classical modes of theatre and film have also long since been characterized by the presence of the fourth wall as conceptualized by Denis Diderot in 1758 who stated, ‘When you write or act, think no more of the audience than if it had never existed. Imagine a huge wall across the front of the stage, separating you from the audience, and behave exactly as if the curtain had never risen’.42 The fourth wall concept has recently been examined in film by Tom Brown who foregrounds examples where the fictional effect is heightened and not diminished by the use of direct address by the characters to the audience.43 Brown notes that direct address manifests within the ‘fluidity of the diegetic-extra-diegetic boundary’.44 The desire to break this boundary through parasocial interaction is engendered in many of the emerging cinema examples. Parasocial interaction refers to a desire to communicate with fictional characters at the level of the intradiegesis and where such contact cannot be sustained, as was the case with The Beauty Inside; the audience members were enabled to talk with one another at the extratextual levels as fictional characters within the diegetic framework. The ARG inaugurated the possibility to engage on a person-to-person level with characters. As Holl confirms, ‘Feedback relations established between virtual imaging and imagination best describe the aesthetics of online cinema’.45 The use of phone calls was initiated in The Beast, was the primary narrative mechanic in I Love Bees and used most recently in

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the Carrie film campaign. The telephone still clearly invokes a powerful and profound sense of connection and involvement as well as layering authenticity onto the experience. In a questionnaire undertaken as part of an audience study into The Inside Experience which was considered in Chapter 4, one respondent reflected on the experience of being involved in The Dark Knight, Why So Serious? She commented: they did all those cool things to attract our attention from the jokers doings and Harvey Dent taking place. The best is when we got to call Gordon. It’s a huge thrill to be able to even get a recorded message and make it feel like you’re in the movie and story yourself.46

The history of the mediation of phone conversations as presented in film and cinema uses the modality of the split screen to intercut between the two sides of the conversation. In RIDES we experience the phone conversation as the character would, by holding the phone to our ear to eavesdrop on the other side of the conversation. The fictional experience is therefore augmented by being able to experience these encounters in the first and second person. These parasocial interactions are enabled via various computer mediated interactions in the form of off-frame communications such as phone, message and text which pervade throughout emerging cinema narratives. For example, in The Beast, the campaign which was seeded in a print-based poster, pointed to two other rabbit holes into the fictional world, an analogue phone number (through the inscription of the letters on the poster) and to a web site. This behaviour of directing audience members to a www address was common place in all forms of advertising from the late 1990s. The www has recently been replaced with the prefix ‘@’ (at: to denote someone’s identity on social media channels such as Twitter) and ‘#’ (hashtag: to denote a phrase that is made searchable via this prefix across social media sites). The verbalization of these iconographic representations has made their way into everyday parlance. In Prometheus, the latest in the line of the mediated communications continuum represents the corporatization of the ARG in which audience members were targeted by LinkedIn and the medium of TEDTalks and YouTube un-boxing videos were emulated. These communication modalities and the opportunity to engage with additional digital devices during a fictional experience is at odds with prior conceptions with fictional immersion in which the characters exist within a curtained environment, as is the distracted attention modality upon which many

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of the examples of emerging cinema operate. Emerging cinema as conceptualized as a ‘cinema of disruption’ operates within a logic of what Linda Stone has referred to as Continuous Partial Attention (CPA).47 She describes this mode of ‘how many of us use our attention today. It is different from multi-tasking. […] When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention – continuously’.48 At one side of the emerging cinema canon, depth viewing is facilitated (via the instances of extended cinema described in Chapter 2) and in another, surface itinerant viewing is encouraged (mobile cinema and socially layered cinema). Itinerant viewing patterns highlight the influence and impact of the televisual upon the cinematic. According to Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Cinema thus rehearses and readies the human sensorium for the tasks of “distracted attention” ’.49 Metalepsis, as conceived by traditional narratology, represents a transgression, as Debra Malina describes, a ‘violent streak […] a breach in narrative structure that undermines narrative’s illusions’.50 Within a reconceptualization of these assumptions within the context of emerging cinema, metalepsis is conceived as an audience action as opposed to a narrative subterfuge imposed by the author. Within the experience of an ARG the player simultaneously exists within diegetic levels, they do not ‘jump across’ or traverse them, they co-exist within them. This perpetual co-existence within and between levels was apparent in Chapter 2, and also in Chapter 3 where audience members moving seamlessly between the narrative of the film and the meta-narrative of the second screen, simultaneously inhabiting omnidiegetic, extradiegetic and intradiegetic spaces in moments of unconscious metalepsis. These unconscious moments resonate with my discursive construction of the liminal space of real, real life within the preface of this book which refers to the persistent and pervasive fictional overlay which is indicative of the diminishing boundaries between fact and fiction. The existence of such a space has been recognized by various scholars. Eva Nieuwdorp conceptualized the space as being ‘located in the mind of the player and refers to the semiotic switch that has to be made between the sphere of everyday life and the semiotic domain of the pervasive game’.51 Kimberly A. Neuendorf and Evan A. Lieberman refer to it as ‘the mid-level reality (i.e. the place between diegesis and reality)’.52 As emerging cinema constantly evolves new ways of both creating and expressing lived experience in the digital era, the need for such levels of categorization and description may dissipate entirely. The new behaviours of immersion and

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metalepsis reveal how new digital–human communication modalities are very quickly absorbed into everyday life.

7.5 Conclusion This chapter has illuminated a number of fundamental conceptual shifts which call for a recognition of new grammars to characterize the nature and form of the emerging cinema of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Framed by interruptional poetics, disruptional aesthetics and a distracted and distractible audience, these diverse attention patterns can be attributed to the influential forces of economics, commercialization and massification. The conversational modalities which are enmeshed into new experiences which actively encourage talking and discourse as part of the immersive experience are indicative of a cinema increasingly subsumed by televisuality. Contemplation, immersion and engagement are at odds with the rapidity and acceleration of audience comprehension, which has evolved to handle multiple streams of information, and to accept a decentralization of narrative which rejects dominant and classical codes of storytelling. I have proposed a further move towards an aesthetics of engagement where audience encounters are becoming seamlessly embedded into the fictional experience. In some cases purely digital cinematic experiences are eschewed as audience members seek out increasingly real, visceral, corporeal, affective engagements which centralize humanistic contact. The work of this book has clearly implicated cinema in the historicization of self, identity and experience in the digital era. The engagements and techniques recapitulated within clearly indicate that whatever the social morays of the time, cinematic storytelling experiences remain underpinned by a desire for unification, closure, coherence and resolution.

Notes 1

2

Ute Holl, ‘Cinema on the Web and Newer Psychology’, in Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema, ed. Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg and Simon Rothöhler (Vienna: Synema, 2012), 150. Carlos Alberto Scolari, ‘Lostology: Transmedia Storytelling and Expansion/ Compression Strategies’, Semiotica 2013, no. 195, 2013:47.

The Grammar of Emerging Cinema 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

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Tom Abba, ‘Hybrid Stories: Examining the Future of Transmedia Narrative’, Science Fiction Film and Television 2 no. 1, 2009:59–76. Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 22. Michael J. Clarke, Transmedia Television: New Trends in Network Serial Production (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 209. http://cedocore.com/. Caroline Bassett, The Arc and the Machine: Narrative and New Media (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 14. Andrea Phillips, A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences across Multiple Platforms (New York: McGraw Hill, 2012). The ethics of medical theme films have been subject to analysis and instances where fact may have been made subservient to fiction in M. Roy Jobson and Donna Knapp van Bogaert, ‘Just a Story or a “Just Story”? Ethical Issues in a Film with a Medical Theme’, in Signs of Life: Medicine & Cinema, ed. Graeme Harper and Andrew Moor (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 82–91. Jaakko Stenros, Markus Montola, and Annika Waern, ‘The Ethics of Pervasive Gaming’, in Pervasive Games Theory and Design: Experiences on the Boundary between Life and Play, ed. Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros and Annika Waern (Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann, 2009), 203. Jon Dovey, ‘Time Slice: Web Drama and the Attention Economy’, in Ephemeral Media: Transistory Screen Culture from Television to YouTube, ed. Paul Grainge (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 138. Leon Gurevitch, ‘Problematic Dichotomies: Narrative and Spectacle in Advertising and Media Scholarship’, Popular Narrative Media 2 no. 2, 2009:150. Steven Holtzmann, Digital Mosaics: The Aesthetics of Cyberspace (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 15. Jay David Bolter, and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 50. Lev Manovich, ‘Database as Symbolic Form’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 5 no. 2, 1999:80–99 and Jim Bizzocchi, Run, Lola, Run – Film as Narrative Database (Unpublished paper: Simon Fraser University, 2005). Marsha Kinder, ‘Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative Fields Forever: Buñuel’s Legacy for New Digital Media and Interactive Database Narrative’, Film Quarterly 55 no. 4, 2002:6. See Chapter 3 of my thesis, Sarah Atkinson, Telling Interactive Stories: A PracticeBased Investigation into New Media Interactive Storytelling (London: School of Arts, Brunel University, 2009) for a comprehensive recapitulation of multi-screen and split screen narratives.

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18 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 192. 19 Janine Marchessault, and Susan Lord, Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). Judith Shatnoff, ‘Expo 67: A Multiple Vision’, Film Quarterly 21 no. 1, 1967:2–13. 20 Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 192. 21 In this case the action is suggestive that the character of Decard played by Harrison Ford is in actual fact a replicant, in Henry Jenkins, ‘Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling’, in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006). This term originated in an interview undertaken with Jenkins in May 2003. 22 According to Marie-Laure Ryan, there are two main ‘natures’ of metalepsis: rhetorical and ontological. Rhetorical implies a quick glance by the authorial narrator whereas ontological refers to a complete change of ontological sphere. Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). 23 Kristin Thompson, and David Bordwell, ‘Now Leaving from Platform 1’, Observations on Film Art (blog), 19 August 2009, http://www.davidbordwell.net/ blog/?p=5264. 24 http://www.gothamcitypizzeria.com/. 25 Derek Johnson, ‘The Fictional Institutions of Lost: World Building, Reality and the Economic Possibilities of Narrative Divergence’, in Reading Lost, ed. Roberta Pearson (New York: I.B.Tauris, 2009), 28. 26 Johnson, ‘The Fictional Institutions of Lost’, 34. 27 Todd Wasserman, ‘Forward Thinkers Push Reverse Product Placement’, Brandweek, 29 January 2007, http://www.aef.com/industry/news/data/2007/7008. 28 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 29 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory’, in Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception, ed. Ian Christie (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 217. 30 Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 5–6. 31 Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and Other Media Paratexts (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 23. 32 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘The Mind-Game Film’, in Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, ed. Warren Buckland (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 22. 33 Johnson, ‘The Fictional Institutions of Lost’, 36.

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34 Göran Bolin, ‘Media Technologies, Transmedia Storytelling and Commodification’, in Ambivalence towards Convergence: Digitalization and Media Change, ed. Tanja Stuedahl and Dagny Storsul (Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet, 2007), 244. 35 Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999), 254. 36 Jon Reiss, Think Outside the Box Office: The Ultimate Guide to Film Distribution and Marketing for the Digital Era (New York: Hybrid Cinema LLC, 2010), 129–130. 37 Indrek Ibrus, and A. Carlos Scolari, Crossmedia Innovations: Texts, Markets, Institutions (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012), 9. 38 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (Letchworth: Aldine Press, 1907, Original edition, 1817). 39 Anthony J. Ferri, Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith in Film (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2007), 8. 40 Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 110. 41 Henry Jenkins, ‘Creating Transmedia: An Interview with Andrea Phillips (Part Three)’, Confessions of an Aca-Fan (blog), 7 November 2012. 42 Denis Diderot, Oeuvres de théatre de M. Diderot: avec un discours sur la poésie dramatique (Amsterdam: M. M. Rey, 1771). 43 Tom Brown, Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 167. 44 Brown, Breaking the Fourth Wall, 177. 45 Holl, ‘Cinema on the Web and Newer Psychology’, 152. 46 In a questionnaire response from one of the members of the We’re trying to save Christina Perasso Facebook group, 29 July 2013. 47 Linda Stone, ‘Attention: The *Real* Aphrodisiac’ (paper presented at the Emerging Technology Conference, Online, 3 July 2006), http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/ shows/detail739.html. 48 Stone, ‘Attention’. 49 Elsaesser, ‘The Mind-Game Film’, 33. 50 Debra Malina, Breaking the Frame: Metalepsis and the Construction of the Subject (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2002), 3. 51 Eva Nieuwdorp, ‘The Pervasive Interface: Tracing the Magic Circle’, in Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology, ed. Marianne Van Den Boomen, , Marianne Lammes, Sybille Lehmann, Ann-Sophie Raessens, Joost Schäfer, Mirko Tobias (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 205. 52 Kimberly A. Neuendorf, and Evan A. Lieberman, ‘Film: The Original Immersive Medium’, in Immersed in Media: Telepresence in Everyday Life, ed. Cheryl Campanella Bracken and Paul D. Skalski Campanella Bracken (London: Routledge, 2010), 11.

8

Epilogue

So I predict in the next decade or two, any differentiation between these platforms will fall away. Is 13 hours watched as one cinematic whole really any different from a film? Do we define film as something being two hours or less? Surely it goes deeper than that. If you’re watching a film on your television, is it no longer a film because you’re not watching it in a theatre? If you watch a TV show on your iPad, is it no longer a TV show? The device and the length are irrelevant; the labels are useless, except perhaps to agents and managers and lawyers, who use these labels to conduct business deals. But for kids growing up now, there’s no difference watching Avatar on an iPad or watching YouTube on TV or watching Game of Thrones on their computer. It’s all content. It’s just story. Kevin Spacey, 20131 Speaking at the 2013 International Television Festival at the time at which I was finalizing content for this book, Kevin Spacey, Hollywood actor and the star of the exclusive Netflix House of Cards television show, reflected the essence of the central conceit of this book – a call for a reconfiguration and revision of what is considered to be cinematic. House of Cards represents a circumvention of the traditional television broadcasting supersystem by simultaneously releasing an entire season of thirteen episodes for viewers to access at a time and location of their choosing. Furthermore, it is the first television series of its kind to be developed with the aid of big data algorithms. States Greg Satell, Netflix ‘bought House of Cards based on what it knows about the viewing habits of its 33 million users – it knew which and how many users watch movies starring Kevin Spacey and the director David Fincher, and, through its tagging and recommendation

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system, how many sat through other similar political dramas’.2 This signifies a huge conceptual shift in the production and consumption of both televised and (by implication) cinematic drama. If data service providers such as Netflix, Google and Amazon who have increasing insights into the habitual viewing and consumption patterns of its audiences are becoming the superordinate forces for the creation and commissioning of original drama programming, directors and writers could become implicated and controlled by this machinery. As Jessica Leber asks, ‘Will screenplays some day be written to meet the whims of datadriven media streaming companies? Will an algorithm direct writers to produce content to appeal to niche audience profiles on Netflix?’3 Leber’s concerns intimate the potential and worrying implications of algorithmic storytelling which could lead to a homogenization of story dictated by the masses. These trends and their related concerns are set to persist as Netflix has since gone on to commission a further comedy and docu-series.4 The House of Cards also exemplifies emerging patterns of consumption (which were earlier highlighted within the modality of a simultaneous shift which I proposed in Chapter 3) in which multiple blocks of content are released in a box-set modality where audience members literally binge on the excessive access that is enabled. These modes of viewing are impacting upon emerging cinema forms. The paradigm of the cinematic sequel has historically been considered to be a subordinate and substandard form. Sequelization equalled deterioration and impacted upon the integrity of the original film. Prefigured upon a commercial rubric, as Thomas Elsaesser stated: Besides the technical reasons, the serial had an institutional function: to bind the spectator to a particular mode of entertainment, to make going to the cinema a habit, creating a compulsion to repeat, and thus uphold a power of attraction not by the cinema’s novelty value […] but by a more psychological fixation.5

This conception has taken a different turn in the current moment, a number of high profile trilogies and prequelizations have validated the mode of the sequel within the cinematic realm. Rhetorics of seasons and seriality originating from television now pervade the emerging cinema arena (the directors of both Haunting Melissa and Cloud Chamber expressed their intentions to work towards second and multiple seasons). The cinematization of the televisual (or the inverse depending on your point of view) has recently prompted questions such as ‘Is the small screen getting bigger?’6 Alongside current drama series broadcast on the US networks of AMC

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(The Walking Dead, Mad Men and Breaking Bad), HBO (True Blood and Game of Thrones) and Showtime (Homeland and Dexter), the introduction of international serialized dramas is now shaping the space. Examples such as The Returned (Les Revenants), a French television drama (2012) and the Australian Top of the Lake (2013) created by Jane Campion and Gerard Lee are indicative of the frequent heralding of a golden age of television (by critics and commentators) which is characterized by high quality cinematic content. The serialized television format enables the longevity, the creation and maintenance of richer worlds, and deeper characterizations, as director David Lynch stated, ‘I like the idea of a continuing story and television is way more interesting than cinema now. It seems like arthouse has gone to cable’.7 These shifts in production are also reflexive of shifts in consumption. In 2011, UK film viewing statistics revealed that of the estimated proportion of the 5.1 billion film views in the UK, the smallest amount of viewings took place at the cinema (3.4 per cent), whilst the highest proportion of film viewing takes place on television (77 per cent).8 The official data of 2012 highlighted considerable shifts in the way that audiences were now consuming film content with an increasing attrition of numbers in audience members accessing film through traditional means such as at cinemas. IHS Inc. estimates that the combined value of the television-based and online VoD film market was £243 million in 2012, up from £162 million in 2011 (an increase of 50 per cent).9 The continued transmutation of cinema, television, digital media, theatre and game is gaining commercial traction beyond the traditional television networks and film studios. The prodigious environment of a new digital infrastructure is engendering an intensification of both creative and critical activity whereby the field of cinematic production is opening up for a multitude of industries to get involved. One such instance includes the delivery of cinema through an Xbox One10 console. Nancy Tellem, the head of Xbox Entertainment Studios, stated that ‘expanding the canvas and conceiving a whole new art form for the creator, for the viewer, for the community, and the industry’. Xbox hope to achieve this through a triangulation of the following three initiatives: through the advancement of the algorithms of viewing recommendations, through the introduction of a social component through Microsoft’s social network Xbox Live and through the production of original programming. Xbox One have already announced a new ‘television series’ under the guidance of Steven Spielberg. Such interventions will inevitably lead to a further fragmentation of the audience. Television has been contending with fragmented audiences for a

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long time. As Roberta Pearson notes of the TV3 phenomena ‘which emerged roughly from the late 1990s and is characterized by fragmented, not to say splintered, audiences, distribution through digital technologies and industry panic over audience measurement and advertising strategies’.11 However, cinema as an industry is perhaps not so well prepared for the current and imminent developmental paroxysms, a maelstrom of impending interventions by external sectors infiltrating the circumventions of the traditional film industry. These new initiatives of content programming and commissioning by data services and games manufacturers pose questions of whether cinema is expanding or television is engulfing. The ‘space’ of cinema itself is already being challenged by the inception of live ‘alternative content’, including theatre, ballet, opera, drama and sporting events, which disrupt traditional cinematic practice and its associated language and grammars. It is the inverse of these strategies of liveness which have been percolating through to the new spaces of cinema as discussed in Chapter 2 where initiatives such as Secret Cinema are engendering live and the theatrical experiences within the cinema auditorium. There is already an established history within cinema of attempts to stimulate the senses of the audiences, within a ‘cinema of sensations’ modality. More recently, these experiences has come to be known as 4D cinema and are delivered within small venues that have begun to emerge at entertainment complexes, in the high street and at amusement parks.12 Historical precursors to these included earlier experimentations with 3D and Smell-O-Vision,13 the idea being to trigger the entire sensorium within a cinematic experience. Tom Gunning’s research reveals the origins of such practices which existed prior to 1906: ‘Not only did the films consist of non-narrative sequences taken from moving vehicles (usually trains) but the theater itself was arranged as a train car, with a conductor who took tickets, and sound effects simulating the click-clack of wheels and hiss of air-brakes’.14 There is now evidence of a further move beyond the 4D modality into physiologically invasive realms. One such experiment has been undertaken by Filmtrip15 who have developed an emotionally responsive technology that ‘enables both your conscious and emotional choices to personalize any entertainment experience’.16 During an experiment in which audience members watching a short horror film, The Unsound (2011), could collectively shape the narrative experience through their physiological reactions, which were being tracked by the Biosuite platform (Figures 8.1–8.3). Gawain

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Morrison, one of the creators, explained, ‘we had a point where if the audience weren’t scared enough we would release a sub-sonic frequency that would make your skin crawl, and without fail everyone’s response would increase, both with GSR & heart rate, generating a heightened fear response’.17 This account is reminiscent of the infamous scene in Clockwork Orange (1971) in which the character of Alex played by Malcolm McDowell is subjected to physiological conditioning whilst watching film sequences in a cinema using the ‘Ludovico technique’.

Figure 8.1  Heart rate & GSR finger sensors (Filmtrip/Sensum)

Figure 8.2  Story option paths (Filmtrip/Sensum)

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Figure 8.3  Audience responses on screen (Filmtrip/Sensum)

Many Worlds, a short biometric film by Alexis Kirke, works on a similar principle to that of The Unsound. Many Worlds has four alternate narrative branches which are influenced by four individual members of the audience who each have a specific physiological measurement taken (heart rate, brain waves, level of perspiration and muscle tension) in real-time in order to direct the course of the narrative. The rhetoric of a ‘film that watches you’18 that these examples implicate is further imbricated in an instance of a recent on-street installation in New York promoting the Project Runway19 television show. Algorithmically programmed using human tracking technology and cleverly looped sequences of video, the television shows’ judges inhabit a twenty-foot-long screen positioned along a sidewalk watching the passers-by as if they were perambulating a catwalk. In effect, the screen is watching the audience in an intriguing reversal of the objectified gaze. The judges respond with various expressions which span affirmation to disavowal depending on how appealing they perceive the passerby to be. These instances highlight a propensity towards the exploration of surveillance and self-surveillance cultures which exist under the ubiquitous gaze of technology. This is a prevalent theme within many of the emerging cinema examples. In Chapter 3 themes of surveillance were explored in the use of portable devices, Chapter 4 presented ideas of social surveillance in relation to Facebook and social networking culture and in Chapter 6 the concept of sousveillance was explored in relation to lifelogging. The examples of physiological response systems imply a further move towards biosurveillance

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within emerging cinema practices in which emotions and desires can be tracked, measured and transmitted. The surveillance of the gaze is centralized within innovations which will be available in the near-future including Google Glass, an optical display worn as spectacles in which the wearer can view and access networked content through the dual frames of the glasses. Access will be voice activated, and manipuable via controls on the frame of the spectacles which will enable the swiping through of timeline based content. Adam Greenfield in ‘Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing’ argues that ‘the new Foucauldian gaze is no longer visual but biometric, computational, algorithmic and, as individual systems are linked, spreading their data exponentially, the gaze becomes environmental’.20 This initiation of a tracked gaze in which the activity of our eyes will unconsciously indicate content preference and behaviours to data collection services leads to the realization of a commodified gaze which reconceptualizes Jonathan Beller’s observation that ‘to look is to labor’21 and Michael H. Goldhaber’s proclamation that ‘the economy of attention – not information – is the natural economy of cyberspace’.22 The concept of paying attention takes on a whole new dimension. In other developments based on human responsive cinema, Thrill Me by Portal Entertainment (which at the time of writing was in beta testing) responds to the facial expressions of the individual audience member. Thrill Me is a content discovery service and recommendation engine which allows viewers to find horror, thriller and mystery suspense content based on how thrilled they are as expressed by their facial expressions. The service works by presenting two trailers to the spectator and then using the camera on the laptop/mobile/tablet to measure the level of anxiety. Deliberately designed to address industrial concerns of discoverability which currently operates within ‘an economy of abundance’,23 such an initiative emanates from a desire to secure what Ken Eklund termed ‘mind share space’.24 The notions of biosurveillance, content discovery and mind share space are conflated within David Cronenberg’s project Body, Mind, Change, which accompanies his 2013/14 touring exhibition of props from his films. It includes a pervasive and underlying narrative campaign framed by ‘POD’, an acronym of ‘Personal On-Demand’. POD is ‘an emotional sensory learning and data-mining organism designed to enhance your life. This state of the art biotech implant will guarantee your personalized recommendations that are 99.999 per cent relevant all the time. POD grows with you to become an intuitive companion, fulfilling

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your deepest desires on demand’.25 Lance Weiler explained the fictional premise of the campaign: The main conceit of the narrative is that David has licensed his fictional science and technology IP found in his movies to a bio-tech partner, who is looking to evolve humanity. They’re using the basis of the technology from his films, the fictional IP as the foundation for a number of biological implants.26

POD is imbued by the signatory gesture of Cronenberg as a direct reference to the fictional device created in his 1999 film eXistenZ illuminating a moment of intertextual cross-pollination (see Figure 8.4). The ‘POD’ premise has been seeded in a (fictional) online Filmmaker magazine article,27 which states: Earlier this year, without much fanfare, David Cronenberg quietly licensed the fictional technology and science found within his films Shivers, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome and eXistenZ for a mind-bending eight-figure sum. While it is common for a film’s IP to make its way into other mediums, such as books, television or games, it is highly unusual for a film’s fictional elements to become actual biotechnology.

This suggestion of a physiological transgression which viscerally extends cinema into the human form is indicative of discourses of fear that exist around the technologization of society and the body. Moreover, it illustrates societal discourses of the fetishization of technology in an era of hyper-anticipation, in which the excitement for the next technological innovation or gadget overrides and obfuscates consideration of the implications of its use. These physiological incursions are suggestive of a need for caution, in which the evangelistic and inclusive rhetoric of new media technologies should be tempered by considerations of their operational logics of commercialism, surveillance and exclusion. This book sought to illuminate a key defining moment in the evolution of cinematic storytelling at a unique conjuncture that combines the maturation

Figure 8.4  POD was inspired by Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, 1999

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of the digital medium, the pervasion of social networking, the comprehension of narrative complexity and the sophistication of digital literacies. As the rapid acceleration of technologies continues and as social media practices become ever more sophisticated, we are entering both exciting and daunting times for cinematic storytelling which will continue to warrant further and persistent interrogation. Within the prefatory excursion that this book has taken, it can be concluded with certitude that traditional notions of cinema are increasingly senescent. This book serves as a prolegomenon for future study and an expansion of scholarship in the area. The proliferation of the range of emerging cinema projects are an inevitable corollary of the current digital condition, as cinema continues on its continuum of both shaping and reflecting culture. The existential thread which permeates emerging cinematic forms is a through-put for the zeitgeist of the current digital moment which was wonderfully captured within one of my conversational exchanges which informed some of the content of this book. During my interview with Lance Weiler in which he animatedly told me about his plans for David Cronenberg’s Body, Mind, Change exhibition, the connection to the Skype call in which we were engaged was momentarily lost. I was reunited with Weiler’s emphatic account in which he explained that Cronenberg was to be the first recipient of a POD surgical implant which would be announced at a press conference at the Toronto International Film Festival. Caught in the immediacy of the moment, and confused by the status of this exciting revelation, I instinctively sought clarification, ‘Really?’ I said, ‘do you mean in real real life?’

Notes 1

At the Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival on 22 August 2013, The James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture. 2 Greg Satell, ‘What Netflix’s “House of Cards” Means for the Future of TV’, Forbes, 4 March 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2013/03/04/what-netflixshouse-of-cards-means-for-the-future-of-tv/. 3 Jessica Leber, ‘House of Cards and Our Future of Algorithmic Programming’, MIT Technology Review, 26 February 2013, http://www.technologyreview.com/ view/511771/house-of-cards-and-our-future-of-algorithmic-programming/. 4 Alexandra Zeevalkink, ‘Netflix Commissions First Comedy and Docu-Series’, KFTV, 4 September 2013, http://www.kftv.com/news/2013/09/04/Netflix-commissionsfirst-comedy-and-docu-series.

234 5

6

7 8

9

10

11 12

13

Beyond the Screen Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Fantasy Island: Dream Logic as Production Logic’, in Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffman (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998a), 145. Nia Daniels, ‘Is the Small Screen Getting Bigger?’, The Knowledge Blog, 6 August 2013, http://www.theknowledgeonline.com/the-knowledge-bulletin/ post/2013/08/06/Is-the-small-screen-getting-bigger. Tim Walker, ‘An Interview with David Lynch’, The Independent on Sunday, The New Review, 23 June 2013:11–14. 14.2 per cent of the viewing share went to DVD/Blu-ray and 5.5 per cent to downloaded and streamed films. Source: 2012 BFI Statistical Yearbook (London: BFI, 2012), 141. The combined film on VoD revenues represents approximately 6 per cent of the total UK filmed entertainment market, compared with 4 per cent in 2011. Source: 2013 BFI Statistical Yearbook (London: BFI 2013), 143. Randy Astle, ‘What Does Xbox One Mean for Independent Filmmakers?’, Filmmaker Magazine, 30 May 2013, http://filmmakermagazine.com/71674-whatdoes-xbox-one-mean-for-independent-filmmakers/. Roberta Pearson, Reading Lost (New York: I.B.Tauris, 2009), 2. 4D Cinema is not an area that has not been covered within this book. For further reading see Geoff King’s ‘Ride-Films and Films as Rides in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema of Attractions’, CineAction 2000 no. 51, 2000 and his Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (London: I.B Tauris & Co, 2000). These include discussions of the Terminator 2: 3D experience and Disney’s Honey I Shrunk the Audience, both of which included the spraying of liquids into the audience and also motion effects; in the former the seats push upwards to replicate the movement of an elevator, and in the latter the seats shake and vibrate in synchronization with the dominating on-screen characters. See also James Moran, ‘Reading and Riding the Cinema of Attractions at Universal Studios’, Spectator 14 no. 1, 1994 and Graeme S. Baker, ‘I Ride the Movies’ (unpublished thesis, 2013), http://www.cineroama.com/articles-papers-and-other-assortedparaphenalia/. This technology was invented by Hans Laube in 1960 and was only ever used in one film, Scent of Mystery (1960, Dir: Jack Cardiff, USA). There was a trajectory of cinemas creating odours using various makeshift methods of fans from as early as 1906. But Laube’s system actually involved the fitting of pipes to individual vents underneath seats in the cinema through which odours were projected at synchronized moments using a device that timed with key scenes and plot points of the film. See Mark Thomas McGee, Beyond Ballyhoo: Motion Picture Promotion and Gimmicks (Jefferson, NC: Mcfarland & Co, 2011).

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14 Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde’, in Film and Theory: An Anthology, ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 231. 15 A company based in Belfast: http://www.filmtrip.tv/blog/entry/sensum-whatexactly-is-it/. 16 http://www.filmtrip.tv/work/entry/sensum/. 17 In email correspondence with the author, 14 August 2013. 18 Colin Grant, ‘Many Worlds: The Movie That Watches Its Audience’, BBC News Technology, 13 February 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21429437. 19 http://www.nexusinteractivearts.com/work/evan-boehm/project-runway. 20 Adam Greenfield, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (Berkeley: New Riders, 2006). 21 Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press 2006, Original edition, 1998), 2. 22 Michael H. Goldhaber, ‘The Attention Economy and the Net’, First Monday 2 no. 7, 1997, http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/519/440%20. 23 Shawn Shimpach, Television in Transition (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell 2010), 3. 24 Ken Eklund, ‘Play It Live It Shape It: Exploring Authentic Fiction’ (talk, BAFTA, London, 2 May 2013). 25 http://www.bodymindchange.ca/. 26 In an interview with the author, 28 August 2013. 27 Lance Weiler, ‘Pod Wants to Know You’, Filmmaker Magazine, 23 April 2013, http:// filmmakermagazine.com/68303-pod-wants-to-know-you/.

Filmography, Appography, Gameography, Platformography 1 Million Shirts (2010) Jason Sadler. Campaign. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Dir: Stanley Kubrick. Film. 2012 (2009) Dir. Roland Emmerich. Film. 3 Dreams of Black (2011) Dir. Chris Milk. Music Video. 3WDoc (2013) Hecube. Platform. 6:14 (2012) Dir. Toby Wilkins. RIDES.tv. @summerbreak (2013) Chernin Group. Online Fiction. Age of Stupid (2009) Dir. Franny Armstrong. Film. A Field in England (2013) Dir. Ben Wheatley. Film. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) Dir. Steven Spielberg. Film. Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County (1998) Dir. Dean Alioto. TV. America 2049 (2011) Breakthrough. Online. America’s Funniest Home Videos (1990) ABC. TV. APP (2013) Dir. Bobby Boerman. Film. Appollo 18 (2011) Dir. Gonzalo López-Gallego. Film. Avatar (2009) Dir: James Cameron. Film. Bear 71 (2012) Dir. Leanne Allison, Jeremy Mendes. Web Documentary. BIGFLIX (2012) Reliance Entertainment. Online. Big Brother (2000–) Endemol. TV. Blade Runner (1982) Dir. Ridley Scott. BlindSide (2003) Epicycle. iOS App. Blood Sugar (2000) Dir. Sharon Daniel. Online. Body, Mind, Change (2013) David Cronenberg. Interactive experience. Bodysong (2003) Dir. Simon Pummell. Documentary. Breaking Bad (2008–) Vince Gilligan. TV. Breaking the Waves (1996) Dir. Lars von Trier. Carrie (2013) Dir. Kimberly Peirce. Film. Cart Life (2013) Dir. Richard Hofmeier. Game. Casablanca (1942) Dir. Michael Curtiz Catfish (2010) Dir. Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman. Film. Catfish: The TV Show (2012-) Catfish Picture Company, Relativity Television. TV. Chalet Girl (2011) Dir. Phil Traill. Film. Cinemacity (2013) Collaborative Software Ltd, iOS App. Citizen Kane (1941) Dir. Orson Welles. Film. Clockwork Orange (1971) Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Film.

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Cloud Chamber (2013) Dir. Christian Fonnesbech. Online Fiction. Cloverfield (2008) Dir. Matt Reeves. Film. Collapsus (2010) Dir. Tommy Pallotta. Web. Conducttr (2013) Robert Pratten. Platform. Conspiracy for Good (2010) Dir. Tim Kring. ARG. Coraline (2009) Dir. Henry Selick. Film. Curse of the Blair Witch (1999) Dir. Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez. TV. Czech Dream (2004) Dir. Vit Klusák and Filip Remunda. Film. Darfur Is Dying (2008) Dir. Susana Ruiz. Game. Dawson’s Creek (1998–2003) Kevin Williamson. TV. Dead Mans Tracks (2012) Portal Entertainment. iOS App. Decoded (2011) Bing. Interactive promotion campaign. Dementia 13 (1963) Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Film. Dexter (2006–) Dir. John Dahl, Steve Shill, Keith Gordon. TV. Dirty Work (2012–) Dir. Eric Appel, Aaron Shure. RIDES.tv. Distrify (2010–) Distrify Limited. Platform. District 9 (2009) Dir. Neill Blomkamp. Film. Disturbia (2007) Dir. D.J. Caruso. Film. Doctor Who (2005–) BBC. TV. Donnie Darko (2001) Dir. Richard Kelly. Film. Ed Zed Omega (2012) Dir. Ken Eklund. Game. eXistenZ (1999) Dir. David Cronenberg. Film. Exquisite Corpse (2012) Dir. Ben Popik. Film. Foldit (2008) Seth Cooper, Adrien Treuille, Janos Barbero, Zoran Popović, David Baker, David Salesin. Game. Forgotten Silver (1995) Dir. Costa Botes, Peter Jackson. Film. Four Eyed Monsters (2005) Dir. Arin Crumley and Susan Buice. Film. Future Coast (2014) Dir. Ken Eklund. ARG. Galahad (2013) The Shadow Gang. Platform. Game of Thrones (2011–) David Benioff, D.B Weiss. TV. Greed (1923) Dir. Erich von Stroheim. Film. Grey’s Anatomy (2005–) Shonda Rhimes. TV. Half the Sky (2012–) Frima Studio, Show of Force. Game. Halo 2 (2004) Microsoft Game Studios. Game. Haunting Melissa (2013) Dir. Neal Edelstein. iOS App. Heroes (2006–2010) Tim Kring. TV. Highrise (2009–) Dir. Katerina Cizek. Web Documentary. Homeland (2011–) Dir. Michael Cuesta. TV. Hope Is Missing (2007) Dir. Lance Weiler. ARG. House of Cards (2013–) Media Rights Capital, Panic Pictures (II), Trigger Street Productions. TV.

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Hugo (2011) Dir. Martin Scorsese. Film. Hunted (2013) Campfire Media. Campaign. Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (2005) CHNM. Website. I Love Bees (2004) 42 Entertainment. ARG. I’m Your Man (1998) Dir. Bob Bejan. Film. Immersion (2013) Portal Entertainment. Platform. Inception (2010) Dir. Christopher Nolan. Film. Independence Day (1996) Dir. Roland Emmerich. Film. Iron Sky (2012) Dir. Timo Vuorensola. Film. Journey to the End of the Coal (2008) Dir. Samuel Bollendorff, Abel Ségrétin. Web Documentary. Jurassic Park (1993) Dir. Steven Spielberg. KateModern (2007–2008) Dir. Miles Beckett. Web Series. Klynt (2013) Honkytonk Films. Platform. Kony 2012 (2012) Dir. Jason Russell. Film. Korsakow (2000) Florian Thalhofer. Application. Last Broadcast (1998) Dir. Lance Weiler. DVD. Late Fragment (2007) Dir. Daryl Cloran, Anita Doron and Mathieu Guez. DVD. Law and Order: Criminal Intent (2001–2011) Dick Wolf. TV. Les Misérables (2012) Dir. Tom Hooper. Film. Life in a Day (2011) Dir. Andrew MacDonald. Film. LOL (2006) Dir. Joe Swanberg. Film. lonelygirl15 (2006–) Miles Beckett, Greg Goodfried, Mesh Flinders, Glenn Rubenstein. Web Drama. Looper (2012) Dir. Rian Johnson. Film. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) Dir. Peter Jackson. Film. Lost (2004–2010) J.J. Abrams, Jeffrey Lieber and Damon Lindelof. TV. Mad Men (2007–) Matthew Weiner. TV. Made in Chelsea (2011–) Dir. John Pereira. TV. Making Motion Pictures: A Day in the Vitagraph Studio (1908) Film. Many Worlds (2013) Dir. Alexis Kirke. Biometric Film. Memento (2000) Dir. Christopher Nolan. Film. Memory of a Broken Dimension (2012) Ezra Hanson-White. Game. MirrorWorld (2013) Mirada. iOS App. Mozilla Popcorn Maker (2012) Mozilla. Application. Murder in Passing (2013) Dir. John Greyson. Installation. My Sky Is Falling (2012) Lance Weiler. ARG. Night Fishing (Paranmanjang) (2011) Dir. Park Chan-wook. DVD. Nothing So Strange (2002) Dir. Brian Flemming. Film. Olive (2013) Dir. Hooman Khalili and Pat Gilles. Film. One Millionth Tower (2011) Dir. Katerina Cizek. Web Documentary.

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On_Line (2002) Dir. Jed Weintrob. Film. Out My Window (2010) Dir. Katerina Cizek. Web Documentary. Pandemic 1.0 (2011) Dir. Lance Weiler. ARG. Perplex City (2005–2007) Mind Candy. ARG. Phony (2001) Susan Schupli. CD Rom. Primer (2004) Dir. Shane Carruth. Film. Project Runway (2004–) Dir. Craig Spirko. TV. Prometheus (2012) Dir. Ridley Scott. Blu-ray. Public Secrets (2007) Dir. Sharon Daniel. Online. Random Adventures of Brandon Generator (2012) Dir: Tommy Lee Edwards. Online. Rage (2009) Dir. Sally Potter. Film. Redrum (2012–) Dir. Daniel Fries. RIDES.tv. Requiem for a Dream (2000) Dir. Darren Aronofsky. Film. RIDES.tv (2011–) Fourth Wall Studios. TV Platform. RVC (2012) Dir. Jeff Tomsic. RIDES.tv. Sanctuary (2008) Dir. Michaela Lewidge. Film. Saw (2004) Dir. James Wan. Film. Scanners (1981) Dir. David Cronenberg. Film. Secret Cinema (2007) Fabien Riggall. Event. Sensum (2013) Filmtrip. Platform. Shawshank Redeption (1994) Dir. Frank Darabont. Film. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) Dir. Guy Ritchie. Blu-ray. Shivers (1975) Dir. David Cronenberg. Film. Side Effects (2013) Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Film. Silent History (2011) Eli Horowitz, Kevin Moffett, Matthew Derby, Russell Quinn. iOS App. Skins (2007–) Jamie Brittain, Bryan Elsley. TV. Skyfall (2012) Dir. Sam Mendes. Film. Snakes on a Plane (2006) Dir. David R. Ellis. Film. Social Commentary (2013) FingerSprint Pty Ltd. iOS App. SOTCHI 255 (2010) Dir. Jean-Claude Taki. Documentary. Spent (2011) Mckinney. Game. Spirit of 45 (2013) Dir. Ken Loach. Film. Star Citizen (2014) Cloud Imperium Games Corporation & Roberts Space Industries Corp. Game. Staying Single (2009) Alison Norrington. Multiplatform story. Steal This Film (2006/2007) Dir. The League of Noble Peers. Film. Steal This Film 2 (2007) Dir. The League of Noble Peers. Film. Storyapp.it (2013) Platfom. Storyplanet (2012–) Bjarke Myrthu. Platform. Strain (2012) Mirada. Online Campaign.

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Superman Returns (2006) Dir. Bryan Singer. DVD. Switching (2003) Dir. Morten Schjødt. DVD. Tender Loving Care (1997) Dir. David Wheeler. DVD. The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) Dir. Marc Webb. Blu-ray. The Art of the H3ist (2005) Mckinney. ARG. The Beast (2001) 42 Entertainment. ARG. The Beauty Inside (2012) B-Reel Films, Intel, Toshiba. Social Film. The Black Diamond Express (1927) Dir. Howard Bretherton. Film. The Blair Witch Project (2009) Dir. Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez. Film. The Brood (1979) Dir. David Cronenberg. Film. The Clock (2010) Dir. Christian Marclay. Installation. The Cosmonaut (2013) Dir. Nicolás Alcalá. Film. The Covered Wagon (1923) Dir. James Cruze. Film. The Craftsman (2013) Portal Entertainment. iOS App. The Dark Knight: Why So Serious? (2007) 42 Entertainment. ARG. The Dark Knight Rises (2012) Dir. Christopher Nolan. Film. The Fountain (2006) Dir. Darren Aronofsky. Film. The Green Hornet (2011) Dir. Michel Gondry. Film. The Hummingbird (2013) Dir. Rafa Pavón. Documentary. The Hunger Games (2012) Lionsgate and Ignition. Social Media Campaign. The Hunger Games (2012) Dir. Gary Ross. Film. The Inside Experience (2011) Dir. D.J. Caruso. Intel, Toshiba. Social Film. The Jazz Singer (1927) Dir. Alan Crosland. Film. The Johnny Cash Project (2010) Dir. Chris Milk. Online. The Kings Speech (2010) Dir. Tom Hooper. Blu-ray. The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (2012–) Dir. Bernie Su. Online Series. The Matrix (1999) Dir. Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski. Film. The Night Vision Experiment (2013) Dir. Craig Griffith. Online theatre. The Only Way Is Essex (2010–) Tony Wood, Ruth Wrigley. TV. The Power Inside (2013) Intel, Toshiba. Social Film. The Returned (2012) Dir. Fabrice Gobert, Frédéric Mermoud. TV. The Ring (2002) Dir. Edelstein Gore Verbinski. Film. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) Dir. Jim Sharman. Film. The Silver Goat (2012) Dir. Aaron Brookner. iOS App. The Smurfs (2011) Dir. Raja Gosnell. Blu-ray. The Truth about Marika (2007) Dir. Christopher Sandberg & Martin Erikkson. ARG. The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) Dir. Chris Weitz. Film. The Unsound (2011) Dir. NG Bristow. Biometric Film. The Walking Dead (2010–) Frank Darabont. TV. The War of the Worlds (1938) John Houseman and Howard Koch. Radio. The War of the Worlds: The Day that Panicked America (2005) Dir. John Ross. DVD.

Filmography, Appography, Gameography, Platformography The Wizard of Oz (1939) Dir. Victor Fleming. Film. This Is Spinal Tap (1984) Dir. Rob Reiner. Film. Thrill Me (2012) Portal Entertainment. Online Application. Top of the Lake (2013) Dir. Jane Campion and Garth Davis. TV. Total Recall (2012) Dir. Len Wiseman. Film. Trixi (2006) Yahoo. Online interactive drama series. True Blood (2008–) Alan Ball. TV. Ushahidi (2008) Ushahidi. Platform. Vanished (2013) Pixel Heart, iOS App. Veronica Mars (2014) Dir. Rob Thomas. Film. Videodrome (1983) Dir. David Cronenberg. Film. Visual.ly (2013) Visually. Inc. Online. We Feel Fine (2006) Jonathan Harris, Sep Kamvar. Online. We Live in Public (2009) Dir. Ondi Timoner. Documentary. Welcome to Pine Point (2010) Dir. Michael Simons, Paul Shoebridge. Interactive web documentary. Who Is Dayani Cristal? (2013) Dir. Marc Silver. Film. Wilderness Downtown (2010) Dir. Chris Milk. Music Video. World Without Oil (2007) Ken Eklund, Jane McGonigal, Dee Cook, Marie Lamb, Michelle Senderhauf, and Krystyn Wells. Online multiplayer game. Year Zero (2007) 42 Entertainment. ARG. You’ve Been Framed UK (1991–) ITV. TV. Zeebox (2013) Zeebox ltd. iOS App. Zeega (2013) Jesse Shapins. Platform.

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Index Note: Locators followed by ‘n’ refer to notes. 1 Million Shirts 162, 170n. 93 3D 93 environments 73, 74, 75, 155 landscape 127 models 73 stereoscopic 3, 12n. 17, 228 3 dreams of black 103, 132n. 7 3WDoc 195 4D Cinema 228, 234n. 12 6-14 93 7 Transmedia Families game 191 9/11 31, 34, 35, 39, 52n. 10, 166n. 14 42 Entertainment 33, 55n. 59, 56n. 63, 91 90/9/1 rule 3 1% 3, 17, 33, 34, 115, 130 99 Designs 178 100 Poster (The Hunger Games) 27 360-degree 75 2001: A Space Odyssey 126 2012 (Film) 153 Abba, Tom 207, 221n. 3 Abrams, J.J. 35, 38, 41, 57n. 87 Abu Graib 134n. 29 Academy Award Campaign 82 Acevedo, Dennis 36 Achilleos, Kyriacos 202n. 41 Active Story System 191 Additive comprehension 213 Adventure Pictures 65 advergaming 4 advertainment 4, 103, 109, 123 advertisement 78, 116 break 106 in-film 42, 84 Lexus 83 magazines 152 newspapers 152 radio 120, 151 television 145

advertising 102, 107, 111, 124, 131, 147, 151 agency (BBDO) 109 modalities 210 native 115 revenues 183 aesthetics of delay 70 affect 50, 94, 104, 134n. 30, 139n. 98, 161, 162, 164 affective economics 106 affective impact 51, 128, 153 affective map 128 Age of Stupid 157, 176, 177, 184, 198 Aggett, Martin (hoax) 151 A.I. Artifical Intelligence 27, 28 Alcalá, Nicolás 185, 187 algorithmic programming 227, 230, 233n. 3 storytelling 225–6, 230 Alias (TV Show) 41 Alice in Wonderland 30 Alicoate, John.W 53n. 14–16 Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County 142, 145 Allegorical mode (of engagement) 161, 162 Allen, Nick 168n. 57 Aloi, Peg 54n. 34 alternate angles 88 Alternate Reality Game (ARG) 5, 8, 13n. 25, 16, 17, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 39, 44, 49, 56n. 68, 91, 111, 117, 122, 124, 128, 130, 137n. 66, 137n. 67, 148, 150, 151, 152, 156, 158–9, 162, 164, 168n. 43, 192, 204n. 73, 209–10, 217, 218 community 56n. 80, 151, 159, 160–1, 179 definition 25 next generation 130 players 151, 158, 216, 219

266 alternate takes 84 amateur film production 166n. 18, 190 amateur video 146 Amazing Spiderman, The 83 Amazon 226 Mechanical Turk, The 177–8, 201n. 25 AMC (US TV Network) 226 America 27 America 2049 157, 169n. 82 American Sign Language (ASL) 78 America’s Funniest Home Videos 145 Amplify (Twitter) 135n. 34 anachronistic 96n. 14, 102, 128, 207 analogue interference 211 remediation 211 residual culture 24, 46 semiotics 128, 211 signifiers 128, 211 Anderson, Chris 177, 201n. 21, 201n. 22 Android 99n. 59 Ang, Ien 2, 12n. 9 anti-advertising 109 anti-commercial 178 anti-depressant fictional– 209 anti-multiplex cinema 46 anti-technology 91 anxiety 94 measurement of 231 social 89 aphasia 24 API 99n. 59 Apollo (brand) 214–15 apparatus 11, 62, 69, 91, 95 APP (the film) 9, 61, 87–91, 95, 100n. 76, 208, 216 Apple App Store 83 Appollo 18 153 Apps (iOS) 66, 68, 83, 86, 99n. 59, 105, 195 Arcade Fire 103 archival bricolage mode 180 archive 84 audio 155 footage 144, 180–1 Arendt, Hannah 57n. 96

Index ARG.net 151 Aronofsky, Darren 23, 24, 54n. 28 Art Department 82, 189 art directors 195 Art of the H3ist, The 32 art house cinema 184 Arthur, Paul 86, 99n. 67 Ascott, Roy 110, 135n. 36 Astle, Randy 234n. 10 astro-turfing 147 Atkinson, Paul 111, 135n. 40 Atkinson, Sarah 12n. 17, 100n. 71, 136n. 60, 167n. 29, 221n. 17 @summerbreak 108–9, 110, 131, 132, 134n. 33 AT&T 109, 134n. 32 attention 106, 112, 189 economy 60n. 146, 96n. 5, 104, 107, 114, 133n. 13, 134n. 22, 203n. 62, 221n. 11, 235n. 21, 235n. 22, 235n. 21, 235n. 22 fragmented 131, 227 Audi A3 (Car) 32, 56n. 62 audience confusion 116, 149, 189 contribution 189 distracted 220 the fourth factor 2 imagined 183 interaction 136n. 60 literacies 43, 141, 164, 179, 181, 197 opinion polls 83, 92 ratings 99n. 59 research into 2–3, 13n. 29, 105, 111 safety 152 testing 22 viewing figures 227, 234n. 8 audiencehood 165 audienceship 165 audio fingerprinting 99n. 59 audio narration 73 audio recognition 92 audio signal 21, 125, 128 audio synchronization 83 audio watermarking 90, 99n. 59 auditorium 61, 85, 87, 210, 228 augmented reality 144, 148 cinema 76, 97n. 27

Index Austin, Bruce.A 58n. 121 Australia 27 Auter, Philip.J 137n. 71 auteurism 99n. 65 authentic fiction 5, 10, 158–9, 163, 169n. 60, 235n. 24 authenticity 64, 69, 85, 107, 109, 110, 146, 147, 149, 159, 163, 218 inauthentic 147 author 85, 193 authorial presence 85, 111, 127 authoring platforms 195, 217 Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) 99n. 59 avant-garde 102, 123, 207 transmedia 9, 71, 193 Avatar 3, 183, 225 Aveyard, Karina 2, 12n. 11, 138n. 83 Ayeroff, Jeff 104 Baage, Jay 204n. 82 Babelgum 64 back-story 187 badges 83, 96n. 11 Baker, Graeme S. 234n. 12 Balcerzak, Scott 52n. 10 Baldwin, David 32 Ballyhoo 12n. 20, 18, 19, 53n. 11, 53n. 25, 100n. 76, 209, 234n. 13 bandwidth 176 Banff National Park 162 Bank Night 49 Bannerman, Sara 175, 201n. 17 barely fictional 10, 163 Barnouw, Erik 143, 166n. 11 Barthes, Roland 48, 59n. 129 Bassett, Caroline 209, 221n. 7 Batman 33, 56n. 65 Baudelaire 15 Bazin, André 1, 11n. 1 BBC 146, 235n. 18 Bear 71 162, 170n. 95 Beast from 20, 000 Fathoms, The 38 Beast, The 28–31, 57n. 90, 91, 112, 151, 191, 217, 218 Beauty Inside, The 111, 116, 123, 138n. 88, 138n. 90, 217

267

Bebo 107 Bechkoff, Jennifer 137n. 63 behind-the-scenes 51, 59n. 143, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 98n. 44, 98n. 54, 106, 113 Bell, Gordon 182 Beller, Jonathan 105, 133n. 13, 189, 203n. 62, 231, 235n. 21 Bellour, Raymond 5, 13n. 29, 84 Benecchi, Eleonora 55n. 60, 104, 133n. 12 Benjamin, Walter 41, 49, 57n. 96, 59n. 132 Benkler, Yochai 201n. 31 Bennett, James 98n. 44, 98n. 46, 98n. 48, 99n. 65 Benson-Allott, Caetlin 56n. 73 beta phase 95 testing 231 Bethnal Green Library 46 BFI 64 Distribution Fund: New Models 188 Imax 49 Statistical Yearbook 98n. 51, 234n. 8, 234n. 9 Big Brother 54n. 33, 183 big data algorithms 225 billboards 15, 26, 32, 151, 215 Bing 215 binge box-set 226 biometric 231 Biosuite platform 228, 229 biosurveillance 230, 231 bio-terrorism 209 birth of cinema 80 Bishara, Nina 80, 97n. 34 BitTorrent Protocol 173–4 Bizzocchi, Jim 221n. 15 Black Diamond Express, The 19 Blackton, Stuart.J 97n. 37 Blade Runner 213 Blair Witch Project, The 25, 54n. 33, 54n. 34, 116, 126, 136n. 61, 142, 145, 146, 150, 166n. 17, 167n. 40, 185 Blast Theory 47 blogger 102, 134n. 25 blogola 147, 166n. 24

268 blogs/blogging 42, 78, 102, 107, 147, 148, 156, 158, 166n. 24, 178 Blood Sugar 155, 169n. 68, 169n. 70 Blu-ray 38, 43, 80, 83, 84, 85, 87, 188, 234n. 8 Body, Mind, Change 231, 233, 235n. 25 Bodysong 181 Boellstorff, Tom 12n. 12 Bogaert, Donna Knapp van 221n. 9 Bolin, Göran 16, 52n. 6, 121, 138n. 79, 216, 223n. 34 Bolter, Jay David 136n. 49, 211, 221n. 14 bonus materials 81 bonus scenes 92 Boomen, Marianne Van Den 223n. 51 Boorstin, Daniel. J. 18, 50, 53n. 13, 55n. 56, 59n. 140, 149, 167n. 33, 167n. 34 Booth, Paul 26, 31, 43, 54n. 40–1, 55n. 57, 58n. 104, 122, 138n. 85, 151, 168n. 46 Bordwell, David 1, 6, 11n. 4, 14n. 40, 40, 57n. 91, 85, 99n. 63, 100n. 79, 172, 200n. 2, 200n. 4, 214, 222n. 23 Borges, Jorge Luis 165, 170n. 103 Bottomore, Stephen 53n. 17 Bourne Identity 32 box-sets 226 Boyd, Brian 149, 167n. 36 Boyd, danah 136n. 54, 138n. 76 brand awareness 116 familiarity 123 identity 84 loyalty 106, 214 perception 123 branded content campaigns 4, 32, 115 branded entertainment 4, 9 Breaking Bad 227 breaking-news 143 Breaking the Waves 124 Breakthrough 157 Breathing books 95 Brereton, Pat 104, 133n. 11 Brewster, Eugene.V 97n. 37 bricolage 178 aesthetics 181 mode of production 180

Index mode of production (archival) 180–1 mode of production (user-generated) 180, 181 Brisbin, David 59n. 141, 82, 98n. 57, 203n. 66, 203n. 67 British Film future of 3 British Museum 49 broadcast, scheduling 150 Brood, The 232 Brooker, Will 33, 56n. 65, 56n. 67 Brown, Glenn 135n. 34 Brown, Tom 98n. 44, 98n. 46, 98n. 48, 99n. 65, 217, 223n. 43, 223n. 44 browser-based editing 196 Buckland, Warren 132n. 4, 222n. 32 Buice, Susan 183 bulletin boards 112 Burgess, Jean 147, 167n. 27 Burgin, Victor 2, 6, 11n. 3, 11n. 6, 13n. 36, 15, 52n. 1, 52n. 2, 59n. 136, 79, 97n. 33, 132n. 2, 197, 205n. 95 Bush, Vannevar 182 business cards 71, 213, 214 business models 130, 171 Buzz marketing 104, 114, 152, 154 Caldwell, John Thornton 12n. 19, 59n. 138, 81, 83, 98n. 44, 98n. 45, 98n. 56, 100n. 86, 194, 204n. 88 call-to-action 113, 213, 214 camcorder footage 145 see also home video Camera 34, 38, 40, 62, 63, 64, 67, 68, 76, 86, 88, 113, 190, 198, 231 Cameron, Allan 72, 96n. 14, 97n. 20–2 Campanella Bracken, Cheryl 223n. 52 Campfire Media 34, 56n. 70, 198 Campion, Jane 227 Canada 117, 154, 155, 162 Toronto 77, 96n. 4, 97n. 32, 233 Vancouver 82 Cannes 138n. 90 awards 12n. 21, 97n. 26, 138n. 90 International Film Festival 2013 4 capacity 95 capitalism 105, 199, 210 Cardiff, Jack 234n. 13

Index Carrie 31–2, 215, 218 cars Audi A3 32, 56n. 62 Toyota Matrix 152, 168n. 49 Cart Life 157, 169n. 79 Caruso, D.J 111 Casablanca 46 Catfish 110 Cathy’s Book 29 caught-on-tape TV 145, 166n. 16, 201n. 37 CBS 143 CCTV 121 aesthetics of 183 cameras 160, 183 footage from 67, 88 CD Rom 96n. 12 celebrity 105, 148 Chalet Girl 137n. 73, 214 Channel 4 133n. 18 Chan-wook, Park 62 chapterized 68, 71, 77 Chatman, Seymour 30, 55n. 54 chat rooms 116 Chen, Liu 137n. 64 Chernin Group 109 China 27, 87, 137n. 64, 155 Christie, Ian 13n. 29, 97n. 35, 222n. 29 Christina Perasso Case Group Clues, The 117 Christopher, David 109 chronofacts 159, 160 chronofall 159 Chrono Malleable 111 cinema ARG 5 cinema of attraction 4, 12n. 18, 98n. 43, 234n. 12, 235n. 14 Cinemacity (app) 76, 97n. 28 cinema of disruption 219 cinema fetishist 86 cinema of sensations 228 CinemaSins 182 cinematification 77 Cinemax Television 34 Cinemetrics 136n. 47 cinephilia 52n. 10, 83, 98n. 48, 99n. 68 cinewalks 77 circulation 172

269

Citizen Kane 81 Citizens for Good 146 civil prosecution 173 Civolution 99n. 59 Clark, Brian 146 Clarke, Cath 58n. 111, 59n. 130 Clarke, Michael J. 172, 200n. 3, 208, 221n. 5 climate change 156–9 changed-futures 159 global 176 Clinton, Katherine 168n. 44 Clock, The 181 Clockwork Orange 229 close-up 41, 57n. 97, 96n. 15 Cloud Chamber 9, 102, 103, 123, 124–31, 138n. 91 Cloudmakers 30, 31, 112 Cloverfield 93, 126, 207, 213 film 8, 27, 34–42, 47, 56n. 74 monster 36, 37 sword – fictional marker 35, 150 Cloverfield Clues 36, 37, 56n. 81 Cloverpedia 35 co-creation 10, 132, 154, 174, 183, 200n. 14 cognitive surplus 157, 177, 178 Cohen, David.S 12n. 16 cohesion devices 40, 57n. 91 Colapinto, Cincia 55n. 60, 104, 133n. 12 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 217, 223n. 38 collaboration 174 collaborative documentary 155 editing 178 simulation 158 Collapsus 156, 157, 165, 169n. 74, 169n. 75, 169n. 76, 169n. 77 collective consciousness 50 collective intelligence 30, 151, 192 Collins, Suzanne 27 Columbia TriStar Interactive (CTI) 105, 133n. 15 Columbia University 159 comedy 91, 208, 226, 233n. 4 ComicCon 33 commercial

270 art 104 cinema 174 expression 214 commercialized sociality 115 commercialism 174, 182, 220, 232 commodified narrative tool 109, 113, 123 commons-based peer production 178 communities 118, 128, 129, 137n. 68 grassroots 147 interpretive 8, 17 mediated 146 commuters subway 77 Company P, The 160 compressed critiques 181 compression 182, 202n. 39, 220n. 2 computer corruption 24 computer mediated communication (CMC) 71, 117, 132, 137n. 63, 213 computer mediated engagements 43, 218 Conducttr 191, 195–6, 197 conduit 40 connected entertainment 4, 103 conspiracy 39, 44, 125, 146, 208 Conspiracy for Good 160–1, 170n. 87, 209 consumer demand 177 consumption 173 patterns 71, 226 shifts 227 content creators 95 discovery 11, 231 providers 195 rhetoric of 4, 12n. 19 continuous partial attention (CPA) 219 control discourses of 172 of exhibition 172 convergence 5, 12n. 19, 14n. 38, 56n. 74, 82, 115, 132n. 5, 142 conversations 101, 102, 117, 131, 163, 220 Cook, Dee 169n. 83 co-option 10, 153, 174 industry 165, 174 Coppa, Francesca 202n. 38 corporations (fictional) 160, 208, 209

Index Corrigan, Timothy 80, 97n. 40 Cortesi, Sandra 134n. 28 Cosmonaut, The 10, 184–8, 191, 198, 202n. 48, 203n. 56, 203n. 57 Courtney, Polly 196 Covered Wagon, The 19 Craftsman, The 71–2, 193, 208, 209, 213 Crawford, Chris 13n. 34 Creative Commons 179, 185, 187, 203n. 55 creative processes 183 Creeber, Glen 6, 13n. 32, 119, 137n. 69, 137n. 70 Criminilisation 173 Cronenberg, David 231, 232, 233 Crosdable, Darren 203n. 68 Crowddistribution 184 crowdfunding 10, 174, 175–84, 198, 199, 201n. 17, 203n. 53 platforms ArtistShare 175 Crowdfunder 176 Fundable 175 Kickstarter 176, 184, 198 MyMajorCompany 175 Sandawe 175 SellaBand 175 Slicethepie 175 Wefund 176, 201n. 19 succeses 176 types donation-based 175 equity-based 175 lending-based 175 reward-based 175, 176, 184 virtual reward-based 176 crowdscapes 124, 127 crowdsourcing 10, 51, 165, 174, 175, 177–85, 189, 199, 201n. 23, 201n. 24, 201n. 26, 203n. 63, 203n. 64 Crumley, Arin 183, 184 Cui, Yan 137n. 63 Cullen, Mathew 53n. 21, 194 cult cinema 47 Cunningham, Chris 104 Cunningham, Stuart 139n. 103, 200n. 1, 200n. 7

Index Curse of the Blair Witch, The 185 Curtis, Dustin 58n. 99 Curtis, Nick 59n. 125, 59n. 128, 59n. 131 cyberculture 110 cyberspace 47, 118, 231 cyberstalking 152, 168n. 49 cybertheatre 47 Czech Dream (Český sen) 151–2, 168n. 48 Czechoslovakia 143 Daniel, Sharon 155, 169n. 70 Daniels, Nia 234n. 6 Darfur is dying 161, 170n. 91 Dark Knight, The 27, 56n. 65, 91 Dark Knight Rises, The 27 data 127, 170n. 88 calcification 159 collection 115, 202n. 44, 231 humanized 178 landscapes 125, 129, 131, 212 manifestation 159 meta– 99n. 59 mined 178 mining 178, 231 service providers 226 services 228 user 115, 128, 182 visualization 126, 131, 178 visualization tools 178 wranglers 192 database 82, 129, 136n. 46 aesthetics 126 literalization 126 narrative 72, 212, 221n. 15 storyelling 221n. 15 structuring logic 212 Da Vinci Code, The 32 Dawson’s Creek 105, 190, 203n. 68 Dawson’s Desktop 105, 106, 133n. 15, 190 Dayan, Daniel 59n. 139 Dead Mans Tracks 95 death of cinema 1, 51, 171–2 Death Valley 80 Debord, Guy 50, 59n. 135 decay themes of 24, 54n. 28, 126, 208, 209 Decoded 215 deleted scenes 84

271

Deleuze, Gilles 25, 51, 54n. 35, 60n. 145, 104, 133n. 9 delivery mechanism 66 Dell tablet 152 del Mar Grandío, María 133n. 19 del Toro, Guillermo 20, 53n. 21, 194 dematerialization 82, 94 demediation 43, 151 Dementia 13, 22 De Michiel, Helen 155, 169n. 73 Dena, Christy 131, 139n. 104, 150, 151, 168n. 43, 192, 204n. 77 Denmark 117 film movement of 124 Denton, Beryl 97n. 39 Denward, Marie 149, 167n. 32 Department of Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) 3 Department of Human Management (DHM) 20, 21, 53n. 22, 209 depression 22 era 49 depth axis structuring principle 212 depth viewing 219 Derby, Matthew 77 De Roeper, Julia 184, 202n. 45 detective murder mystery 78, 207, 208, 210 Dexter 227 Dharma brand 214–15 logo 38 Dickinson, Thorold 2, 11n. 7, 12n. 8 Diderot, Denis 217, 223n. 42 diegetic properties 16 tools 92 diegetic portals 39, 41, 74, 75, 93, 113, 121, 148, 151, 210, 212, 213, 216 anileptic 89, 216 business cards 71, 213, 214 commodified 213, 214, 215 epiphenomenal 216 inciting 213, 214 objectified 213, 214 proleptic 89, 216 rhetorical 39, 213

272 spectral 213, 215 suggestive 213 synchronous 89, 92, 215 T-shirts 40 digital archaeology 128, 132 digital communication devices 91 digital disruption 139n. 103, 172, 175, 200n. 1, 200n. 7 digital entertainment properties 4 digital identity 9, 135n. 35, 220 digital natives 111, 135n. 44 digital spectatorship 50, 114 Digital Spy 82, 98n. 54 digitextuality 50, 59n. 138, 93, 100n. 86 direct camera address 113, 136n. 60, 137n. 71, 183 direct mode (of engagement) 157, 162 directorial 90, 113 agency 211 calling cards 104 commentary 85 imprint 85 intent 127 presence 85 Dirty Work 93 discourse time 30, 44, 102 discoverability 231 discursive imprints 64 disembodiment 69 Dish Night 49 disjuncture 79 dispersal logics 216 dispersed textuality 216 displaced fiction 10, 157, 165 disruptional aesthetics 220 distracted attention 219, 220 distribution 115, 223n. 36 alternative 183 cinematic 173 cyclical 173 flipped– 198 Hollywood 81 IndieScreenings 176, 184, 198 linear 173 methods 66 models (independent) 183 models (new) 10 models (traditional) 172, 199 online channels 176, 198

Index OpenIndie 184, 198 scholarship 172 studies 172 District 9 26, 214 Distrify 198 Disturbia 111 diversification strategies 8 Dixon, Steve 47, 58n. 119 DIY culture 147 DIY Distribution 184, 202n. 46 Doane, Mary Anne 41, 57n. 97, 70, 96n. 15 documentary 156 aesthetics 145 circle 155 feature length 181 film festivals 185 footage 128 formal Conventions 145 futuristic 156, 176 interactive (i-doc) 155, 162, 169n. 72 open-space documentary 155 studies 155 triangle 155 walk-in 157, 169n. 78 docu-series 226, 233n. 4 Donaton, Scott 138n. 90 Donnie Darko 54n. 28 Don Quixote 165, 170n. 103 dot-com boom 43 dot-com crash 24 double time structuring 30 Douglas, Susan J. 143, 166n. 7, 166n. 12 Dovey, Jon 51–2, 60n. 146, 96n. 5, 100n. 74, 106, 107, 134n. 22, 134n. 26, 134n. 30, 134n. 31, 135n. 38, 210, 221n. 11 downloadable film 64, 68, 199 downloads illegal 173, 175 drama for Conflict Transformation 157 of filmmaking 80, 186 genre 91 online 5 political 226 production cycle 80, 190

Index programming 226 dramatic communities 9, 130 micro-moments 197 production 197 techniques 141 dramatic irony 89, 90, 92 dramaturgy 4, 87, 90, 104, 143, 144, 193, 195, 216 interactive 180, 201n. 36 drug addiction 23, 24 Drushel, Bruce E. 165n. 1, 166n. 24 dual awareness of film 81, 186 dual screen 87 dual-stream 92 Duggan, Maeve 134n. 28 Dunning, John 166n. 9 DVD 81, 83, 86–7, 98n. 44–6, 98n. 48, 98n. 52, 98n. 53, 98n. 65, 98n. 68, 100n. 73, 133n. 11, 144, 165n. 4, 172, 185, 188 bonus features 80 extras 59n. 143, 81, 82 sales 82, 174 sales figures 98n. 51, 234n. 8 viewing figures 234n. 8 DV (Digital Video) 35 dynamic story elements 69 E3 Expo 32 E4 105 early cinema 62, 80 grammar 211 eavesdrop 92, 121, 218 eBook 77 interactive 72, 74, 95 Eckersall, Peter 193, 204n. 83 economy of abundance 231 of attention 115, 231 Eco, Umberto 167n. 41 Eddy, Max 168n. 50 Edelstein, Neal 69, 70, 174 Edinburgh International Television Festival, 2013 170n. 92, 225, 233n. 1 education 81–2, 83, 98n. 50, 163, 168n. 44, 169 see also literacy

273

Ed Zed Omega 163–4, 165, 170n. 98 Effie (award) 123 Eklund, Ken 153, 154, 158, 159, 160, 163, 169n. 60, 169n. 83, 169n. 84, 170n. 99, 170n. 100, 212, 231, 235n. 24 El Barco 133n. 19 Ellis, John 47, 58n. 122 Elsaesser, Thomas 16, 29, 43, 47, 48, 49, 52n. 3, 55n. 49, 58n. 103, 58n. 117, 59n. 127, 59n. 134, 81, 84, 98n. 43, 99n. 61, 216, 219, 222n. 32, 223n. 49, 226, 234n. 5 emails 26, 42, 58n. 99, 68, 71, 92, 94, 105, 109, 124, 133n. 14, 152, 153, 158, 196, 202n. 49, 235n. 17 emotion 129 emotionally responsive technology 228 empirical analysis 117 encyclopaedic 130, 191 engagement based media 4 Ensslin, Astrid 7, 14n. 41, 14n. 43 Entourage (Open audio finger printing by Gracenote) 99n. 59 environment 156, 162 anxieties around 39 futures 156, 157–60 ephemeral 17, 24, 51, 52, 60n. 146, 96n. 5, 111, 134n. 22, 135n. 42, 221n. 11 deliberate ephemerality 51 hyper-ephemerality 111 epiphenomena 81 episodes 78, 83, 109, 225 episodic 68, 71, 72, 79, 91, 96n. 19, 117, 210 e-reader 128 ethical 166n. 23, 221n. 9, 221n. 10 dimensions 9, 132, 141–70, 165n. 1 framework 141 ethno-aesthetics 111 ethnography 111, 117, 137n. 63, 147 Europe 143 European Space Agency 124 Evans, Elizabeth 2, 12n. 13, 51, 59n. 142, 135n. 42 Evans, Nicola Jean 51, 59n. 143, 98n. 53 event cinema 46

274

Index

event-led distribution 46 Everett, Anna 50, 59n. 138, 100n. 86 everyday life 223n. 51 exclusion 132, 172, 199, 200n. 5, 232 exhibition 46–49 eXistenZ 232 expandable hubs 109 expanded Cinema 212, 222n. 19 expansion 182, 202n. 39, 220n. 2 experiential time 30, 44 Expo 67 222n. 19 expositional tool 89 exquisite corpse mode of production 180 Exquisite Corpse (film) 180, 187, 201n. 35 extended exhibition 17 extradiegetic 7, 17 extra-texts 81 extratextual 7, 39, 81, 113, 117, 217 fabricated footage 145 fabula 6, 17, 30, 128 Facebook 48, 51, 78, 86, 107, 108, 110–111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 123, 134n. 28, 190, 223n. 46, 230 affirmation 120, 129 algorithms 121, 138n. 74–5 apps 115 fictional characters 113, 150, 185 friends/friending 59n. 124, 120, 121, 138n. 76 game 157, 161 Like button 120, 137n. 72, 214 likes 120, 123 posts 205n. 97, 211 storytelling 115 wall 117 factual discourse 144 situational mode (of engagement) 157–9, 162 Fake Trailers 181 fan 51, 82, 136n. 54, 146 community 119, 121, 122 creation 51, 99n. 59 cultural capital 83, 95, 119 culture 122

-dom digital 54n. 40–1, 138n. 85 film– 61, 97n. 36, 102 fund 175, 184 labour 101, 165 made-media 59n. 141, 98n. 57, 189, 203n. 66, 203n. 67 movie 97n. 36 paratexts 182 shadow cultural economy 122 sites 107, 182, 189 Fast Company (blog) 55n. 42 Fearless 72 feature films 176 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 143 Feineman, Neil 132n. 8 Felix, Bruno 156 feminism 147 Feral Youth 196 Ferri, Anthony.J 217, 223n. 39 fictional brand 149 characters and audience interactions with 113, 156, 163–4, 217 imprints 215 indicators 146, 150 tag 150 Fictional Situational mode (of engagement) 159–62 Field in England, A 82, 98n. 58, 188, 203n. 60–1 Film4 82, 188 Film4.0 188 Film4OD 188 film festivals Ciné Pocket 96n. 4 Festival Pocket Film 96n. 4 indieFoneFilmFest 96n. 4 International Mobil Film Festival 96n. 4 iPhone Film Festival 96n. 4 Mobifest 96n. 4 Mobile Film Festival 96n. 4 Mobile phone 62 The Original iPhone film festival 96n. 4 Tribeca (2013) 101

Index film industry 104, 172 film locations/sets 51, 82 Filmmaker Magazine 232, 235n. 27 film MOD 179, 201n. 33 film noir 78 film school 98n. 50 Filmtrip 228, 229, 230, 235n. 15, 235n. 16 Film Year Book, 1927 18 Fincher, David 225 first-person 117, 120 aesthetics 64, 67, 157 commentary 67 experience 72, 218 perspective 157 POV 31, 157 testimonials 77, 191 voice 107 first screen 79 Fiske, John 122, 138n. 82 flash fiction 180 flash mob 59n. 144, 161 Flaxman, Gregory 54n. 35, 133n. 9 Flickr 70 flogging 147 Fludernik, Monika 67, 96n. 9, 96n. 10 Foilers 181 Foldit 157, 169n. 81 foley 82 Fonnesbech, Christian 124–5, 126, 127, 129, 130, 162, 193 Forbes Media 42, 57n. 98, 115, 136n. 57 Forde, Steve 133n. 18 Ford, John 12n. 21 Ford, Sam 173, 200n. 9 Forgotten Silver 10, 142, 144, 145, 146 found footage 67, 124, 128, 144, 201n. 38 horror 67 Fountain, The 54n. 28 Four Eyed Monsters 183–4, 187, 198, 202n. 46, 208 fourth wall concept 137n. 71, 217, 223n. 43, 223n. 44 Fourth Wall Studios 29, 91 fragmented 210 advertising 115 consumption 71, 102 delivery 112, 124

275

viewing 68, 125 frame-stepping 38, 40, 70 see also freeze framing France 87, 175 franchise 105, 172 elements 200n. 13 Franklin, Harold.B 53n. 12, 53n. 18 Franklin, Michael 172, 173, 200n. 1, 200n. 12 fraping 110, 152 fraud 147 freeze framing 38, 70, 84 see also frame-stepping French Art TV 76 Friedberg, Anne 64, 96n. 6, 212, 222n. 18, 222n. 20 Friendman, Stanton 145 Fritz, Benjamin 134n. 33 Fuller, Kathryn. H 97n. 36, 97n. 37 funding models 172 Funke, Cornelia 14n. 47, 72, 73, 75, 95 Future Cinema 46, 58n. 110, 59n. 126 Future Coast 159–60, 165, 212, 214 Futures of Learning summit 163 futuristic 176 futurity 163 Galahad 193, 195, 214 gameplay mechanics 124 games industry 176, 177 manufacturers 228 MOD 179 play 158–9 Game of Thrones 105, 173, 200n. 13, 225, 227 gamification of narrative 216 of poverty 161 gaming 142 cultures 160 immersive 142 serious 157 Gasser, Urs 112, 134n. 28, 135n. 44, 136n. 45 Gates, Bill 146, 166n. 19, 166n. 20, 166n. 21 Gaylor, Brett 179

276 gaze 74, 75, 208 commodified 231 democratization of 121 environmental 231 Foucauldian 231 objectified 230 surveillance of 231 tracked 231 ubiquitous 230 virtual 64 Gemmell, Jim 182 generative fiction 115 project 191 storytelling 9, 155, 191 Genette, Gerard 16, 52n. 4, 98n. 42, 215, 222n. 30 geo-caching 159 George Burns and Gracie Allen Show 137n. 71 geo-spatial cinema 77 geo-specific 77 German, Kathleen 165n. 1, 166n. 24 Germany 87, 175 GetGlue 86 Giddings, Seth 135n. 38 Gillan, Jennifer 105, 106, 133n. 16–17, 134n. 20 Gilles, Pat 62 Gimmickry 4, 12n. 20, 100n. 76, 133n. 16, 133n. 17, 134n. 20 GitHub 178, 188, 201n. 32 Glee 134n. 19 Glitch 179 GMD Media 146 Goldhaber, Michael H. 231, 235n. 22 Goldman, Billie 112, 115, 123, 138n. 87 Gomez, Jeff 193, 204n. 82 Gondry, Michel 104 Google 28, 103, 226 Chrome web browser 103 Glass 231 GPS, Locations 31 Street View 103 trends 43, 58n. 102 Gracenote open audio finger printing 99n. 59 Gracia, Angela Cora 117, 137n. 63

Index grafitti Batman 27 Grainge, Paul 60n. 146, 96n. 5, 134n. 22, 135n. 42, 221n. 11 grammar 41, 50, 90, 112, 116, 130, 134n. 30, 136n. 60, 141, 142, 144, 150, 200, 207–20, 227 grammatology 10 Grant, Catherine 85, 99n. 65 Grant, Colin 235n. 18 Grant, Iain 135n. 38 Gray, Jonathan 16, 52n. 5, 81, 85, 98n. 49, 99n. 64, 182, 201–2n. 38, 202n. 40, 215, 222n. 31 Grease 58n. 111 Great Depression, The 143 Greed 80, 97n. 39 Green, Joshua 147, 167n. 27, 173, 200n. 9 green screen 64 Greenaway, Peter 1, 11n. 2 Greenfield, Adam 231, 235n. 20 Grey’s Anatomy sync app 83 Greyson, John 77, 97n. 32 Grieveson, Lee 98n. 50 Griffiths, D.W 212 Grusin, Richard 17, 52n. 10, 136n. 49, 166n. 14, 211, 221n. 14 GSR finger sensors 229 Gubbins, Michael 130, 139n. 103 Gunning, Tom 4, 12n. 18, 228, 235n. 14 Gurevitch, Leon 104, 133n. 10, 210, 221n. 12 gyroscopic routing 75 Hagebölling, Heidi 180, 201n. 36 Half the Sky 161, 170n. 90 Halo 2 31, 152 Hamlet 165 hand-held 64 aesthetics 38, 62 video 34 hand-made 75 Hanso (brand) 214 Hanson, Matt 13n. 33, 179 haptic 74, 97n. 24 pseudo 75

Index hapticality 74 textual 74 textural 75 Harley Davidson Motorcycles 152 Harper, Graeme 221n. 9 Harries, Dan 13n. 35 Harris, Josh 183 Harvey, Kerric 157, 169n. 78 hashtag 79, 105, 218 Hatfield, Erin 97n. 32 haunted media 9, 69, 215, 222n. 28 haunting 67, 68 mediations of 69 metaphor 194 Haunting Melissa 67–71, 72, 89, 95, 174, 208, 211, 215, 226 Haunting Melissa 2.0 95 Haynes, Natalie 46, 58n. 113 HBO 174, 227 headphone experience 67, 127 Head Trauma 202n. 46 heart rate 229, 230 Heath, Stephen 62, 96n. 3 Hediger, Vinzenz 6, 11n. 3, 13n. 31 Heffernan, Virginia 134n. 24 Henry, Sarah 170n. 88, 170n. 89 Hernandez, Eugene 202n. 46 Heroes 103, 160, 213 heterotopia 2, 15, 101 heterotopic 77 Heyer, Paul 143, 166n. 13 Higgins, John 58n. 114 HighRise 155, 169n. 67 Hight, Craig 144, 166n. 15 Hills, Matt 14n. 45, 55n. 44, 119, 137n. 70 Hindenberg crash 143 Hi-Res! 23, 53n. 27, 54n. 28 histoire 30 Hitchcock, Alfred signifiers 71 hitRECord 178, 201n. 30 hoaxes 9, 141, 143, 144, 150, 151–2, 168n. 43, 168n. 53, 168n. 54 Hoffman, Kay 52n. 3, 55n. 49, 99n. 61, 234n. 5 Hogan, Chuck 20 Holl, Ute 207, 217, 220n. 1, 223n. 45

277

Hollywood 13n. 22, 81, 95, 136n. 47, 166n. 16, 200n. 8, 201n. 37, 225, 234n. 12 Holtzmann, Steven 211, 221n. 13 Homeland 227 home movies 106 home video 81 aesthetics 145 footage 145 television 145 Honey I Shrunk the Audience 234n. 12 Hooked Digital Media 67, 70 Hope Is Missing 45, 58n. 107, 108 Hopgood, Fincina 25, 54n. 33, 54n. 34 Horowitz, Eli 77 horror film 67, 87, 88, 115 genre 91, 208, 210, 231 Horton, Donald 137n. 72 Horwatt, Eli 201n. 38 hot spots 83 House of Cards 225, 226, 233n. 2, 233n. 3 Houseman, John 166n. 6 Howe, Jeff 177, 178, 189, 201n. 23, 201n. 24, 201n. 26, 203n. 63, 203n. 64 HTML 150, 167n. 42 HTML5  4, 103 Hugo 82 human responsive cinema 228, 231 human rights issues 10, 157, 164 human tracking technology 230 Hummingbird, The 185, 202n. 50 Humphrey, Michael 57n. 98 Hunger Games, The 27, 51 social media campaign 20, 55n. 42 summer camp 27, 55n. 43 Hunted 34 Hurricane Digital Memory Bank 155, 169n. 64 Hurricane Katrina 155 Hurricane Sandy 155 hyper-anticipation 232 hyperdiegesis 7, 30, 39, 55n. 44, 146 hills, definition 14n. 45, 55n. 44 latitudinal dimension 212 hyperdiegetic links 29, 213 reference points 39 residual fragments 41

278 hypermediation 92, 113 hyper-publicity 136n. 54 hyperseriality 216 hypersociability 103 hypodiegetic 7, 17, 28, 79, 102 hypo-hypodiegetic (H2D) 28 hypo-hypo-hypodiegetic (H3D) 28 i09 180, 201n. 34 Ibrus, Indrek 14n. 46, 52n. 6, 55n. 60, 133n. 12, 136n. 60, 138n. 79, 167n. 29, 217, 223n. 37 identity 110, 220 disposable culture 123 faked 110, 147 MULTIPLE 110, 123 online 110, 135n. 35 i-doc 155, 162, 169n. 72 illegal downloading 173, 175 duplication 177 illusion 84 I Love Bees 29, 31, 33, 55n. 58, 55n. 59, 91, 152, 214, 217 Imagine Game Network (IGN) 27, 55n. 43 immediacy 120, 149, 154, 233 immersion 50, 114, 116, 157, 217, 218, 219, 220 platform 195 immersive 3, 34, 118, 127, 143, 220 ancillaries 214 cinema 46, 102 entertainment 192 gaming 142 theater 46 Immersive Writing Lab 192 I’m Your Man 86, 100n. 72 Inception 28, 30 Independence Day 182 independent film 171, 183 film distribution 174 filmmakers 174 film production cycle 173 production company 95 indexicality 69, 152 temporal 71, 128, 143

Index IndieScreenings 176, 184, 198 industry frameworks 165 industrial actors 194 infection themes of 208, 209 in-film websites 19, 26, 47 1–18–08.com (Cloverfield) 35, 36, 37 angelcam (On_Line) 53n. 20 Ballederma (A.I./The Beast) 29 Capitol.pn (The Hunger Games) 27 Citizens for Good (Nothing So Strange) 146 d-9.com (District 9) 26 Final Exit (On_Line) 53n. 20 Gotham City Pizzeria (The Dark Knight: Why so serious?) 33, 56n. 64, 214, 222n. 24 Institute for Human Continuity (IHC) (2012) 153, 168n. 56 Intercon-x (On_Line) 53n. 20 Jamieandteddy.com (Cloverfield) 35, 36, 56n. 78 Last resort retrieval (The Art of the H3ist) 32 Mathsfromouterspace.com (District 9) 27 MissingTeddyHansen Blog (Cloverfield) 37, 57n. 85 Mnuspreadslies.com (District 9) 27 multinationalunited.com (District 9) 27 Pasiv Device (Inception) 28, 55n. 46 Project Genesis (Prometheus) 43 Silent City (On_Line) 53n. 20 Slusho! (Cloverfield) 35, 56n. 77 Tagruato (Cloverfield) 35, 36, 37, 56n. 75, 57n. 86 T.I.D.O wave (Cloverfield) 35, 37, 56n. 76, 56n. 83 www.whatis101112.com (Prometheus) 43 info-graphics 132 infrastructure 171 Inside Experience, The 9, 102, 103, 110– 123, 131, 132, 190, 191, 211, 218 Instagram 108, 134n. 33 Instant Chat 86

Index instant messaging (IM) 67, 89, 105, 133n. 14, 211 Institute for the Future 163 institutional interaction 194 instructional semantics 150 Intel 12n. 21, 111, 112, 113, 116, 122, 123, 138n. 87, 138n. 90, 190 Interactions dynamic 92 interactive 132n. 1 adventure 196 cinema 6, 13n. 36 content 83 content management system 195 documentary 155, 162, 195. see also i-doc; Web Doc DVDs 86–7 eBook 72, 74, 95 entertainment 13n. 34 experiences 91 media 104, 183 media (dramaturgy of) 180 movie 100n. 72 narrative 13n. 34, 86 pseudo 86 storytelling 13n. 34, 86, 100n. 71, 169n. 78, 197, 221n. 17 theater 47 trailers 137n. 73 video 73 voice response (IVR) technology 32 interactive theatre in cyberspace 47 interface 23, 68, 70, 73, 74, 84, 94, 105, 127, 152, 156, 179, 194, 195, 196, 197 internal (or inner) monologue 67, 93 International Game Developers Association (IGDA) 25 Whitepaper 25 Internet 110, 151 enabled-dissemination 173 as mirror 114 Internet Archive 188 Internet Explorer 7 4 Internet Explorer 9 42 Internet Movie Database (IMDb) 86, 105 interpretative activity 50 interpretive communities 8, 17

279

interruptional poetics 220 intertextuality 25, 232 interuption 116, 131, 142 intradiegetic 7, 17, 21, 28, 42, 113, 117, 217, 219 intramedial 95 Invisible Children 162 Iordanova, Dina 139n. 103, 172, 200n. 1, 200n. 7 iOS 96n. 11 apps 69, 77, 87 devices 67, 83 platform 66 technologies 87 iPad 9, 14n. 47, 64, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 75, 77, 208, 225 iPhone 62, 77, 96n. 8, 105 IP (Intellectual Property) 154, 232 Iron Sky 176, 177, 201n. 19 Isidore, Chris 200n. 13 Italy Rome 82 itinerant viewing 124, 219 iTunes 183, 188 Jackson, Peter 144 Jackson, Samuel, L. 32 James Bond Skyfall 109 James, Peter 95 Japan 62 JayZ 215 Jazz Singer, The 3 Jenkins, Henry 6, 14n. 38, 14n. 39, 106, 121, 130, 132n. 5, 134n. 21, 138n. 81, 139n. 101, 168n. 44, 172, 173, 191, 200n. 2, 200n. 9, 200n. 10, 200n. 14, 201–2n. 39, 203n. 71, 213, 217, 222n. 21, 223n. 41 Jensen, Ric 147 Jimenez, Javier 53n. 21, 166n. 24 Jobson, M. Roy 221n. 9 Jogovich, Alexander 54n. 28 Johnny Cash Project, The 178, 201n. 29 Johnson, Derek 215, 216, 222n. 25, 222n. 26 Johns, Stephen 96n. 8 Jones, Janna 122, 138n. 83, 138n. 86

280 Journey to the end of coal 155 Jurassic Park 182 Jurgenson, Nathan 121, 136n. 54, 138n. 78 Karpel, Ari 27, 55n. 42 KateModern 59n. 142, 107, 108, 135n. 42 Katz, Elihu 59n. 139 Kember, Sarah 141, 165n. 2 Kennedy, Helen 100n. 74 Khalili, Hooman 62 Kickstarter 176, 184, 198 Kielly, Kieran 135n. 38 Ki, Eyun-Jung 146, 166n. 23 Kinaesthetic perception 74–5 Kinder, Marsha 6, 13n. 37, 212, 221n. 16 King, Geoff 54n. 34, 166n. 16, 201n. 37, 234n. 12 King Kong 38 Kings Speech, The 83 King, Stephen 32 Kirke, Alexis 230 Klimek, Sonja 7, 14n. 42, 14n. 44 Klinger, Barbara 2, 11n. 5, 81, 86, 98n. 47, 98n. 48, 99n. 68, 188, 203n. 58–9 Klynt 195 Knight, Julia 184, 202n. 47 knowledge cultures 130 Koch, Gertrud 11n. 3, 13n. 26, 220n. 1 Kony 2012 162 Kony, Joseph 162 Korea 146 Korsakow 195 Kracauer, Siegfried 40, 57n. 92–3 Kring, Tim 160 Kubrick, Stanley 126 Kuhn, Virginia 202n. 38 Kukkonen, Karin 7, 14n. 42, 14n. 44 LA 56n. 68, 109, 146, 152 Union square station 119 labour audience 174, 189 fan 101, 165 free 189, 203n. 65 LA Film Fest 14n. 47 Lamb, Josh 193 Lamb, Marie 169n. 83 Lammes, Marianne 223n. 51

Index Larsson, Donald.F 80–1, 97n. 41 LaserDisc 81 Last Broadcast 25 Late Fragment 86 latitudinal depth 93 Latvia 185 Laube, Hans 234n. 13 law 168n. 49 Law, Jude 22, 23, 150 Law and Order: Criminal Intent 107 Leber, Jessica 226, 233n. 3 Lee, Gerard 227 legal action 152 rights 182 Lehmann, Sybille 223n. 51 Lenhart, Amanda 134n. 28 lenticular apparatus 76 Les Misérables 98n. 54 Lewidge, Michaela 179 Lexus 83 licenses, means-tested 176 Lieberman, Evan.A 219, 223n. 52 life casting 182 Life in a Day 181, 182 life logging 181, 182, 183, 202n. 41, 230 lifestreaming 202n. 41 liminal devices 98n. 42 Lim, Joon Soo 146, 166n. 23 linear distribution 173 LinkedIn 42, 43, 57n. 98, 218 Lionsgate 27 Lister, Martin 110, 135n. 38 literacy advanced 182, 197 audience 71, 86, 95, 102, 127, 143, 150, 151, 153, 164, 197 new media 141–2, 151 new media literacies White Paper 151 production 82 social media 112 transmedia 71, 142 live broadcasting 59n. 139 live cinema 17 live events 46 liveness 47, 49, 50, 51, 64, 106, 112, 119, 228 Lizzie Bennet diaries, The 108

Index Loach, Ken 188 Lobato, Ramon 172, 200n. 5 location-based media 76 Locative cinema 61 media 76–7 LOL 109, 110 Lombardo, Michael 174 London 58n. 111, 66, 160 Canary Wharf 58n. 110 Carnaby Street 59n. 142, 135n. 42 Euston 48 riots 196 Route Master Bus 66 lonelygirl15 107, 108, 134n. 24, 142, 147, 148 Lonesome Gal, The 120 Long Tail 114, 177, 199, 201n. 21, 201n. 22, 202n. 45 Looper 85, 99n. 66 Looping 86, 87, 89, 93, 230 Loops 87, 199 Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers 81–2 Lord, Susan 222n. 19 Los Angeles Times 107 Lost 38, 126, 134n. 19, 182, 202n. 39, 215 Lostology 220n. 2, 222n. 25–6, 222n. 33, 234n. 11 Lovink, Geert 112, 114, 136n. 46, 136n. 50, 136n. 54 Lucas, George 12n. 16 Luckmann, Susan 184, 202n. 45 ludic markers 149–50 Ludovico technique 229 Lunenfeld, Peter 6, 13n. 35 Lux Graphicus 80 Lyczba, Fabrice 19, 52–3n. 11, 53n. 19 Lynch, David 5, 13n. 30, 227, 234n. 7 Lynn, Teddy 109 Madden, Mary 134n. 28 Made in Chelsea 108 Mad Men 134n. 19, 227 magic circle 26 mainstreaming 81, 195, 199 making-of 85, 98n. 44, 99n. 67, 144, 183 documentary 82, 84, 186

281

Making Motion Pictures: A Day in the Vitagraph Studio 80 Malina, Debra 28, 55n. 45, 219, 223n. 50 Maltin, Leonard 166n. 6 Manga comic 35 Mann, Steve 182, 202n. 44 Manovich, Lev 182, 202n. 42, 221n. 15 Many Worlds 230, 235n. 18 Maps 191 Marchessault, Janine 222n. 19 Marclay, Christian 181 marketing 15, 101, 104, 111, 120, 130 buzz 104, 114, 152, 154 novelty film 22 pre-release 82 viral 152 word of mouth (WoM) 104, 105, 114, 146, 152, 154 Markham, Annette.N 111, 135n. 41 Marks, Laura 74, 75, 97n. 24 Marwick, Alice 100n. 84, 121, 138n. 77 Mashable 115, 136n. 53 Mashable Product pages 43 massification 10, 195, 199, 220 massive multiplayer online 176 master-class 82 Matrix, The 6, 14n. 39 matte painting 82 McCrea, Julian 71, 72, 96n. 17, 96n. 18, 193, 194 McDowell, Malcolm 229 McGee, Mark Thomas 12n. 20, 53n. 25, 100n. 76, 234n. 13 McGonigal, Jane 55n. 55, 142, 165n. 3, 169n. 83 McKenzie, Colin (fictional) 144 McLuhan, Marshall 149, 167n. 35 Meadows, Mark Stephen 13n. 34 meaning-making 102 media event 43 mediaphilia 17 mediated communication 67 phone conversations 218 relationship 183 technology 26

282 mediation of social media communication 110, 114 medical aesthetics 209, 221n. 9 themes 209 Memento 24, 54n. 29, 102, 132n. 4 Memex (Memory Index) 182 Memory of a Broken Dimension 24 merchandising 184–5 Mercury Theatre Group 142, 150 messenger bot 106 metacommunication 151 metadata 99n. 59 metafictional 84, 99n. 60, 114 metalepsis 7, 14n. 41, 14n. 42, 14n. 44, 117, 217, 219–20, 222n. 22, 223n. 50 interactional 7 ontological 222n. 22 rhetorical 39, 213, 222n. 22 unconscious 7, 219 meta-narrational 149 meta-narrative 175, 219 metarepresentation 149, 167n. 36 metatext 121 Metro (newspaper) 78 Metz, Christian 47, 58n. 123, 64, 86, 96n. 7, 100n. 69 micro-blogging 178 micro-breaks 210 micro-critiques 182 micro-payments 178 microsoft Internet Explorer 7 4 Internet Explorer 9 42 Search-engine 215 micro-tasks 178 Milk, Chris 103 millennium bug 24, 43 Miller, Carolyn Handler 13n. 34 Miller, Toby 12n. 18 mimesis 67, 209 mind share space 231 Mirada 20, 21, 22, 53n. 21, 53n. 23, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 194, 204n. 90, 204n. 91, 204n. 92 MirrorWorld 14n. 47, 72–6

Index mise-en-abîme 39, 57n. 89 missing person (theme) 107, 148, 208 Mitchell, William John Thomas 55n. 54 Mittman, Arika 105 mobile cinema 8, 93, 219 mobile games 160 Mobile Lions 97n. 26 mobile phone 61, 79, 131 aesthetics 63 footage 106 games 160 synchronization 87 vernacular 62, 134n. 30, 181 viewing 63, 66–79 mockdocumentary 202n. 51 mockumentary 21, 144, 146, 166n. 15 modifiable, film 179 modularity 72, 78 modular narratives 72, 96n. 14 Moffett, Kevin 77 Moho Film 62 Molloy, Claire 132n. 4 momentum pictures 137n. 73 Monello, Mike 198 monochrome 78 mono-media 10, 142, 144, 194 mono-medium 193 monopolistic 171, 199 monotone 64 Montola, Markus 26, 29, 30, 54n. 36, 54n. 37, 55n. 52–3, 57n. 90, 147, 148, 149, 152, 167n. 30, 168n. 51, 209, 221n. 10 Moon Files, The 185 Moor, Andrew 221n. 9 Moran, Albert 2, 12n. 11, 138n. 83 Moran, James 234n. 12 Morrison, Gawain 228–9 Moscow 184 Motion Picture Magazine 97n. 39 Motion Picture Story Magazine (MPSM) 80, 97n. 37 movie theater 47, 59n. 129 Mozilla Popcorn Maker 195 mp3 56n. 68 players 85 MTV 110 multi-media 142

Index multi-perspectivism 142 multiplatform 2, 30, 92, 172, 180, 184, 192, 197 writing 192 multiple characters 102, 156 perspectives 142, 158 screens 210, 212 streams 212 voices 158, 165 multiplicity grammar of– 212 multi-screen aesthetic 212, 221n. 17 multi-streamed 105 multitasking 91, 112, 219 Mulvey, Laura 5, 13n. 28, 50, 59n. 137, 61, 70, 96n. 1, 96n. 2, 96n. 16, 99n. 62, 194, 204n. 89 mumblecore 109 murder mystery 78, 92 Murder in Passing 77–9, 97n. 30–2, 207–8 Murray, Janet 216, 217, 223n. 35, 223n. 40 music industry 173, 175, 176 video 103, 104, 132n. 8 Must-Click TV 106 My 45 188 My Generation 134n. 19 MyLifeBits 182 Myrick, Daniel 54n. 34 My Sky is Falling (MSiF) 161, 164, 165, 170n. 88 Myspace 35, 37, 106, 107, 183 mystery 91, 124, 231 mythologies 125 Nachman, Gerald 143, 166n. 10 narration 142 narrational agency 85, 111, 114, 115, 120, 211 narrative annotated– 156 complexity 126 comprehension 26, 28, 30, 49, 85, 102, 110, 112, 116, 125, 153, 220 devices 210 expansion 8

283

granularity 197, 210 instrumentality 130, 145 intertitle 211 mechanics 211, 217 structuring 28, 127, 180, 210 three-dimensional 50 narratology 7 NASA 153, 168n. 57 Nash, Kate 169n. 71 National Film Board (NFB) Canada 154 National Science Foundation 159 native advertising 115 Navarro, Guillermo 53n. 21 Navas, Eduardo 201n. 38 Netflix 225, 226, 233n. 2, 233n. 4 Netherlands 87 networked 95, 104, 105, 112, 115, 116, 123, 142 networked entertainment 4 networks 105 peer-to-peer 173, 175 subscription 174 Neuendorf, Kimberly.A 219, 223n. 52 news broadcasts 109 news bulletins 142, 143 newsreel 80 news reports 146 fictionalized 35, 37, 39, 43, 79, 88, 156 New York 19, 32, 34, 35, 38, 58n. 112, 64, 109, 230 Central Park 19 Coney Island 38 Manhattan Island 34, 37 New York Times 143, 150, 165n. 5, 166n. 8, 167n. 38 New Zealand 144 Nichols, Bill 100n. 80 Nicholson, Judith.A 59n. 144 Nicholson, Max 55n. 43 Niederer, Sabine 136n. 46 Nielsen Media-Sync Platform 99n. 59 Nielsen, Jakob 3, 12n. 15, 52n. 8 Nieuwdorp, Eva 219, 223n. 51 Night Fishing (Paranmanjang) 62 Night Vision Experiment, The 47, 58n. 118 Nine Inch Nails (NIN) 33, 56n. 68, 209 Nokia 160, 161

284

Index

Nokian. 8, 62 Nolan, Jason 202n. 44 Norrington, Alison 107–8, 164, 191, 192 Nothing So Strange 10, 142, 146, 147, 148, 149 Nöth, Winifried 80, 97n. 34 novelty 87 vibrating cinema seats 100n. 76 obfuscation of consequences 152 obsolescence 94 Odin, Roger 97n. 35 off-screen studies 16, 81 Olive 62, 63 Olsson, Jan 12n. 19, 204n. 88 omnidiegetic 7, 41, 79, 113, 116, 117, 175, 182, 219 omniopticon 121 On_Line (film) 19, 22, 53n. 20, 110 images from 20 One Millionth Tower 155 online 102 distribution 176 drama 5, 135n. 42 Only Way is Essex, The 108 open audio finger printing 99n. 59 open source 10, 155, 179, 181, 199 cinema project 179 computer programming 179 platforms 195 software movement 178 open-space documentary 155, 169n. 73 Ordo Serpentis 209 orienting signals 150 Origami unicorn 213, 222n. 21 Örvarsson, Atli 73 out-of-character 118 Out My Window 155 outsourcing 177, 178 overlay ads 109 Page, Ruth. E 135n. 35 Palfrey, John.G 112, 135n. 44, 136n. 45 Pallota, Tommy 156 Pandemic 1.0 44–5, 162, 208 pandemic 44, 162 panic broadcast 143 Pantenburg, Volker 11n. 3, 13n. 26, 220n. 1

parallel action 212 multiplicious 212 triangulated 212 parallel event streams 40 Paramount 82 Paranmanjang (Night Fishing) 62 parasocial interaction 117, 120, 137n. 71, 137n. 72, 217, 218 relations 105, 137n. 71 paratexts 50, 52n. 4, 52n. 5, 98n. 42, 98n. 49, 215, 222n. 30, 222n. 31 paratextual 8, 16, 26, 27, 83, 113, 118, 121, 149, 150, 182, 201–2n. 39, 216 excess 83 study 16, 81 Paris 76, 82 Parks, Billy 109 parody 144, 146, 166n. 23, 181, 182, 202n. 51 participation drama 148 unaware 148 participatory 154, 161, 168n. 44, 173, 216, 217 Partnership Programme 188 pastiche 182 Pastor, Tony theater 19 paying attention 231 payola 147 payphones 31, 152 PC, platform 176 Pearce, Guy 42 Pearl Harbor 143 Pearson, Roberta 222, 228, 234n. 11 Perasso, Christina 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 223n. 46 Percepto 100n. 76 Pereira & O’Dell 138n. 90 Pérez-Gómez, Miguel 134n. 19 performative 130 Perplex City 204n. 73, 209 Wiki 191, 203n. 72 pervasive 207 entertainment platform 195 fictional overlay 219

Index game 26, 45, 54n. 36, 54n. 37, 148, 167n. 30, 168n. 52, 168n. 53 interface 223n. 51 -meta-narrative of promotion 210 storytelling experiences 217 Peters, Kathrin 107, 134n. 23 Peters, Steve 167–8n. 42 Peter Weyland Files 83 pharmaceutical companies/corporations Ablixa 22, 23, 53n. 24, 150, 167n. 39, 209 Cedocore 209, 221n. 6 Ceretin 209 Cognivia 209 Fictional 22, 23, 53n. 26, 209 Parepin 209 Slim n Happy 23 Phillips, Andrea 16, 28, 29, 33, 52n. 7, 55n. 47–51, 56n. 66, 56n. 80, 152, 153, 166n. 22, 168n. 49, 168n. 53, 168n. 54, 192, 204n. 78, 204n. 81, 221n. 8, 223n. 41 Phony 96n. 12 physiological response systems 230 physiology 11, 228, 230 Pinewood 98n. 54 sound stage 82 Piper, Helen 49, 59n. 133 piracy 173–4, 177, 200n. 13 record 200n. 13 Pirate Bay 173 platform providers 195 play space 153 plot devices 41 POD (Personal-On-Demand) 231, 232, 233, 235n. 27 point-of-view (POV) 182, 183 different 93 implied 157 multiple 93 Polan, Dana 100n. 80 polyvocality 85, 142, 155 Pond, Steve 132n. 1 portable cinema 61 devices 64, 66, 230 phenomenon 183

285

Portal Entertainment 71, 72, 95, 193, 195, 204n. 75, 231 post-compression condition 182 posters Art of the H3ist, The 32, 56n. 62 Byzantium Security (Hunted) 34 Hunger Games, The 27 A.I. 28, 29, 218 Potter, Sally 63, 65 Potton, Ed 47, 58n. 116 poverty porn 161 Power Inside, The 111, 122, 123, 135n. 39, 138n. 89 premediation 52n. 10, 89, 92, 144, 156, 158, 166n. 14 premiere 66 prequelizations 226 Pride and Prejudice 108 Primer film 102, 126 universe 102, 132n. 3 privacy 92, 134n. 28, 136n. 54 invasion 90, 115, 183 networked 136n. 54 pro-cinematic 198 Producer’s Guild of America 204n. 79 production crew 113 culture 98n. 58 personnel 86 practices 150, 171 processes 84 values 114 product placement 109 profiles audience 226 celebrity 105 character 35, 48, 105, 106, 113, 150, 185 production personnel 86 projected mode (of engagement) 161–2 Project Runway 130, 235n. 19 pro-mercials 109 Prometheus 42–4, 47, 48, 57n. 98, 83, 182, 207, 218 app 84–6 Project Prometheus 42 Weyland Industries 42, 47, 57n. 98, 58n. 100, 84

286 promotion discourse of 104 promotional budget 172 campaign 15 narratives 210 surround 16 videos 109 Prototype 98n. 44, 179 pseudo-activism 154, 161, 162 pseudo-documentary 146, 185 pseudo-events 18, 149, 167n. 33 pseudo-interactivity 86 psychic spaces 15 Public Secrets 155, 169n. 69, 169n. 70 public service broadcasting 144, 148 SVT (Sweden) 148 Television New Zealand (TVNZ) 144 Pummell, Simon 181 Punch Drunk 46 Punctum 84 Puppetmasters 192 purposeful storytelling 10, 45, 132, 142, 154, 161, 170n. 88 Purushotma, Ravi 168n. 44 push notifications 68, 87, 96n. 11 puzzle film 102, 132n. 4 puzzles 117, 157, 160 Pylshyn, Zenon W. 167n. 36 PYMK (People you may know) 121, 138n. 74 quasi-interaction 119 Quiet: We Live in Public 183 Quinn, Russell 77 QVC 93 rabbit hole 30, 39, 54n. 38–9, 57n. 90, 137n. 66, 218 radio 120, 144, 164 aesthetics 143 drama 142, 150 governance 143 listeners 143 news 142 playlists 147 regulation 143 Raessens, Ann-Sophie 223n. 51

Index Rage 63–5 Random Adventures of Brandon Generator 4 Rasch, Miriam 136n. 54 Ravages, The 179 realism 117, 131 low-tech 181 reality 117, 120, 144 false 141, 142, 163 true 142, 163 reality discourses 117, 120, 145, 150, 153, 158, 209 reality television 166n. 16 real-time 17, 27, 47, 67, 69, 71, 92, 93, 105, 107, 108, 111, 112, 115, 116, 124, 142, 149, 181, 191, 230 aesthetics 212 generator 182 temporality 72, 112, 128, 211 Reckless 72 recommendation engine 231 system 225 record label 175 Redrum 92 reflexive 108, 208 regulate 172 regulation 172 Reiss, Jon 174, 201n. 15, 216, 223n. 36 Reiss, Steve 132n. 8 release models experimental 188 remediation 43, 136n. 49, 211, 221n. 14 remix culture 181 defined 201n. 38 genre 182 taxonomy 201n. 38 theory 201n. 38 remixable film 179 remixing 173, 181 remote control 87 helicopter 62 television 1, 11n. 2 repetition 93 replay 93, 216 repurposing 12n. 19, 204n. 88, 211

Index Requiem for a Dream 23, 43, 53n. 27, 54n. 28, 126 website 23 residual culture 24, 46 responsive cinema 5, 228 Returned, The (Les Revenants) 227 re-use 185 reverse product placement 215, 222n. 27 Reynolds, Simon 98n. 54 Rey, P.J. 136n. 54 Rhodes, Gary. D. 54n. 33 RIDES 61, 87, 91–4, 195, 198, 208, 216, 218 RIDES.tv 9, 34, 91–4, 100n. 81, 100n. 83 sync app 92 Ridleygrams 84 Riggall, Fabien 46, 48 Ring, The 24 Riot Cinema Collective 202n. 48, 203n. 52, 203n. 55, 203n. 57 Rip! A Remix Manifesto 179 ritualized forms 194 Ritzer, George 121 Robert Space Industries 201n. 20 Robison, Alice J. 168n. 44 Rocky Horror Picture Show, The 47, 58n. 121 Rodowick, David.N. 5, 13n. 27 Rodríguez, Vincente 202n. 38 Roeper, Julia De 184, 202n. 45 role-playing 111, 118, 157 Rombes, Nicholas 24, 34, 54n. 31, 56n. 72 Ronnell, Avital 118, 137n. 68 Roscoe, Jane 54n. 34, 144, 166n. 15 Rosenbaum, Jonathan 5, 13n. 26, 200n. 8 Rosser, Michael 188, 203n. 60, 203n. 61 Rossum, Emmy 113 Rothöhler, Simon 11n. 3, 13n. 26, 220n. 1 roto-scoping 178 Royston, Martin 119, 137n. 69, 137n. 70 Ruddock, Andy 12n. 10 Rules of engagement 122 RVC 93 Ryan, Marie-Laure 39, 57n. 88, 94, 100n. 72, 100n. 87, 222n. 22 Saatchi & Saatchi 152 Salt, Barry 136n. 47

287

Sánchez, Eduardo 54n. 34 Sanctuary 179, 185 Sandwell, Ian 59n. 126 Sandy Storytime 155, 169n. 63 San Francisco 42, 138n. 90, 190 Satell, Greg 225, 233n. 2 Saw 54n. 28 Scanners 232 Scent of Mystery 234n. 13 Schäfer, Joost 223n. 51 Schreier, Margrit 54n. 34, 116, 136n. 61, 137n. 62, 150, 167n. 40 Schupli, Susan 69, 96n. 12 science-fiction (sci-fi) 91, 102, 126, 157, 161, 186, 207, 208, 210 channel 185 Scolari, Carlos.A 14n. 46, 52n. 6, 55n. 60, 133n. 12, 136n. 60, 138n. 79, 167n. 29, 182, 202n. 39, 207, 217, 220n. 2, 223n. 37 Sconce, Jeffrey 222n. 28 scopophilia 19, 71 scoreboard 158 Scott, Ridley 85 screen capture 70 search engine emotional 178 storytelling 178 seasons 226 Second Life 12n. 12, 107, 183 second screen 9, 61, 79–94, 99n. 59, 106, 216, 219 second shift 82, 83 Secret Cinema 8, 46–9, 58n. 112, 58n. 115, 58n. 116, 59n. 124, 59n. 125, 59n. 128, 59n. 131, 228 secret societies 160, 208, 209–10 Seier, Andrea 107, 134n. 23 self aesthetics of 134n. 23 broadcasting 183 -hood (digital) 132, 220 public/private 115 publishing 109, 119 representation of 117 second 136n. 51 surveillance 230 selfies 108

288 self-reflexive 100n. 80, 107 semantic web 103 semiotics 19, 58n. 123, 128, 147, 149, 150, 153, 207 semi-reality show 108 Senderhauf, Michelle 169n. 83 Senft, Theresa M. 147, 167n. 26, 167n. 28 Sensum 229, 230, 235n. 15, 235n. 16 sequelization 226 sequels 226 serial 226 serialized 77, 91, 227 serial narrative public 77 serious gaming 157 SETI@homebrowser 178 set tracker 51, 203n. 66 Shadow Gang 204n. 93, 214 Shapiro, Laurie Gwen 58n. 112 sharing 172, 173 Shatnoff, Judith 222n. 19 Shaviro, Steven 128, 139n. 98 Shaw, Jeffrey 13n. 33, 57n. 94 Shawshank Redemption 46, 48, 58n. 116 Shazam 99n. 59 Sherlock Holmes: a game of shadows 83 Shimpach, Shawn 235n. 23 Shivers 232 Shlain, Tiffany 101 short form media 104 showrunner 193 Showtime (US TV Network) 227 side Effects 22, 150, 209 silent film aesthetics 144 history 144 Silent History 77, 79 Silver Goat, The 66–7, 96n. 8, 199, 205n. 98 Sims, Derrel 145 simultaneous cinema 87 simultaneous content 83 simultaneous release 82, 188, 189 simultaneous shift 83, 95 single viewer 93 situational mode (factual) of engagement 157–9, 162

Index situational mode (fictional) of engagement 159–62 Skalski, Paul D. 223n. 52 Skins 105, 106, 133n. 18, 133n. 19 Skype 233 slacktivism 162 slow motion 41 Slusho! 41 T-shirt 39, 40, 212 smartphone 61, 62, 79, 87, 90, 95, 128, 195 Smell-O-Vision 228 Smith, Aaron 134n. 28 Smith, Albert 18 Smith, Chris 12n. 14 Smith, Iain Robert 201n. 38 Smith, Jo.T 81, 82, 98n. 46, 98n. 52 Smith, Yvonne 14 Smurfs, The 83 Snakes on a Plane 32 Snapchat 108 Snickars, Pelle 134n. 23 social benefit storytelling 160–1 social change 141, 142 campaigns 10 Social Commentary 86 social discourse 157 social film 5, 86, 110–23, 122, 136n. 60 social impact 154 social interactions 101 social issue 162 social layer 83, 131, 161 socially layered cinema 9, 18, 106, 219 social media 55n. 42, 83, 103, 105, 108, 119, 142 campaign 27, 48 channels 82, 163 as data collection device 131 drama 107 influencers 42 marketing 114 metrics 59n. 124, 105, 133n. 14 narrative 112, 197 platforms 114 profiles 35, 59n. 124 tools 158 vernacular 49, 109 social networking sites 9, 117, 137n. 64, 189

Index social networks 47, 111, 114, 233 closed 124 social policy 163–4 social practices 90 social storytelling 107 social surveillance 9, 93, 121, 132, 138n. 77, 138n. 80, 230 social television 104–6, 135n. 34 social-textual networks 111 social web 172 Socket Puppet 193 Soderbergh, Steven 22 software authoring tools 217 development kit (SDK) 99n. 59 Solon, Olivia 58n. 110 sonic landscape 127 Sontag, Susan 108, 134n. 29 Sony Pictures 153 SOTCHI 63 SoundCloud 99n. 66 Soundhound 99n. 59 Sousveillance 183, 202n. 44, 230 South by South West (SWSX) Film Festival in 2011 153, 168n. 53 Spacey, Kevin 225 Spanner Films 176 spectacle 4, 83 spectral 194 apparitions 69 interference 211 presence 68 Spent 157, 169n. 80 Sperb, Jason 52n. 10 Spielberg, Steven 3, 12n. 16, 28, 227 Spigel, Lynn 12n. 19, 204n. 88 Spirit of 45 188 split screen 96n. 19, 212, 218, 221n. 17 splogs (Spam blogs) 147 Spoilers 181 Spoof Trailers 181, 202n. 38 spreadable media 91, 173, 200n. 9 Springer, John Parris 54n. 33 Srivastava, Lina 154 Staiger, Janet 164, 170n. 101, 208, 221n. 4

289

Stam, Robert 12n. 18, 235n. 14 Standlee, Alecca.I 137n. 63 Star Citizen 176, 177 Star Trek 42 status updates 112, 197 Staying Single 107, 164, 191 Steal this Film 200n. 11 Steal this Film 2 200n. 11 Steinberg, Brian 134n. 32 Stenros, Jaakko 29, 30, 54n. 36, 54n. 37, 55n. 52–3, 57n. 90, 148, 149, 152, 167n. 30, 167n. 37, 168n. 51, 168n. 52, 209, 221n. 10 Stereoscopic 3-D storytelling 3, 12n. 17 Stewart, Sean 26, 29, 54n. 36, 55n. 48, 152, 168n. 51 Stewartson, Jim 33, 34, 56n. 68–9, 86, 91, 92, 93, 100n. 70, 198, 199, 205n. 96, 205n. 99 stock market 146 stock market crash (1929) 143 Stone, Linda 219, 223n. 47, 223n. 48 Storsul, Dagny 223n. 34 Storyapp.it 195 storyboards 84 story collection 155 story engine 75, 195 StoryPlanet 195 story-time 30, 44, 102 Strain 20–3, 209 Strauven, Wanda 98n. 43 Stray Cinema 179 streamable 199 street theatre 160 structure of feeling 128 Stuedahl, Tanja 223n. 34 stunt advertising 18, 168n. 49 Street Car Stunt 18 style (Bordwell) 6 subscription networks 174 sub-sonic frequency 229 subtext 93, 125 subtitles 78 subway screens 78 Sullivan, John.L 12n. 10, 147, 167n. 25 Summers, Nick 135n. 34 Sundance Film Festival 44

290

Index

Sundance ‘New Frontier’ storytelling lab 4, 13n. 24, 44 Superman 98n. 53 Superman Returns 82 superstructure cinema 171 supersystem 187 surveillance 9, 19, 89, 90, 100n. 84, 121, 160, 183, 202n. 44, 230, 232 technologies 89, 90, 162 suspense thrillers 71, 195 Swanberg, Joe 109 Swarm of Angels 179, 185 Sweden 148, 173 Switching 86–7, 100n. 73 Switzer, Sharon 77 sync app 83, 92 synchronization, of audio 83 content 84, 87 manual 83 second screen 84, 87 synchronous 83, 84, 86, 89, 106, 111, 156 data inputs 92 SyncNow 99n. 59 syncretic self 110 synoptical aesthetics 210 syuzhet 6, 17, 26, 27, 28, 30, 33, 126 Szulborski, Dave 54n. 38–9, 118, 137n. 66, 137n. 67, 151, 168n. 47, 170n. 94, 204n. 80 taggers 181, 192 tagging 225 tags digital 160 fictional 150, 167–8n. 42 Take this Lollipop 115, 136n. 53 Taki, Jean-Claude 63 tangible 94 Tappy Tibbons 24 technology anxiety of 89, 92, 94, 208 TEDTalk 42, 43, 84, 218 tele-ethicality 147 telephone 69, 89–94, 96n. 12, 121, 215, 216, 218 calls 92, 93, 152, 158, 217

numbers (to call) 28, 33, 71, 152, 213, 214, 218 payphone 31, 152 recorded messages 56n. 68, 214, 218 telepresence 69, 223n. 52 Televidente 2, 0, Cocktail Analysis 2011 133n. 14 television 12n. 19, 43, 50, 60n. 146, 69, 82, 99n. 59, 105, 115, 164, 189, 225 caught-on-tape 145, 166n. 16 communities 105 drama 2, 128, 133n. 19, 148 episodes 83, 225 genre 145 programme 79 studio 148 televisual (style) 2, 9, 47, 102, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 124, 125, 131, 219, 220 textual analysis 13n. 32, 181 Tellem, Nancy 227 Telotte, Jay.P. 54n. 34 temporal displacement 149 perceptions 143 Tender Loving Care 86 tent-pole 193 Terminator 2: 3D Experience 234n. 12 Terranova, Tiziana 189, 203n. 65 tests aptitude 42 mathematics (District 9) 27 quizzes 83 text messages (SMS) 79, 88, 92, 108, 109, 152, 160, 196, 218 textual analysis 181 textual divergence 216 textual hapticity 74, 75 textual reappropriation 181, 185 textual reflexivity 113, 136n. 60 texture 74 digital 75 theatre 18, 19, 46, 47, 142, 143, 150, 160, 189, 217, 227, 228 theatrical release 172, 184 Them 38 third-person aesthetics 161

Index This is Not a Game (TINAG) 26, 32, 55n. 55, 137n. 67, 165n. 3 This is Spinal Tap 144 Thomas, Peter 184, 202n. 47 Thompson, Kristin 214, 222n. 23 Thriller 71, 95, 111, 114, 208, 210, 231 Thrill Me 231 time-based 51 timeline 23, 24, 33, 37, 42, 44, 71, 72, 84, 86, 92, 94, 102, 117, 121, 156, 215, 216, 231 time-machine 102 time-travel 102 Timoner, Ondi 138n. 78 Tingler, The 100n. 76 Tobias, Mirko 223n. 51 Tokunaga, Robert.S 121, 138n. 80 Top of the Lake 227 Toronto International Film Festival 233 TorrentFreak 173 Toshiba 12n. 21, 111, 116, 122, 123, 138n. 90 Total Recall 83 touch points multiplatform 92 touch screen swipe 85 tablet 2, 8, 23, 61, 66, 67, 72, 73, 74, 79, 91, 95, 133n. 14, 152, 195, 199, 212, 231 trailers 27, 95, 137n. 73, 176, 231 transgender 78 transmedia 2, 6, 10, 42, 100n. 70, 103, 107, 124, 128, 129, 146, 148, 149, 153, 154, 156, 157, 162, 164, 168n. 53–4, 169n. 75–7, 172, 184, 190, 191, 199, 200n. 2, 204n. 74, 204n. 82, 205n. 99, 207, 223n. 41 audiences 133n. 19 back-lot 175, 187 business 39 campaign 12–13n. 21, 44 components 16, 187 curators 192 director 192, 193, 194 experience designer 192 fictions 22, 131, 147 franchise 103, 105, 132, 172

291

narrative 132, 221n. 3 nomenclature 30, 39 post– 130 practice 139n. 104, 142, 204n. 77 producer 192, 204n. 79 production 190, 192, 194 story architect 192 storytelling 14n. 39, 25, 52n. 7, 111, 124, 166n. 22, 168n. 49, 196, 202n. 39, 204n. 78, 220n. 2, 221n. 8, 222n. 21, 223n. 34 strategies 134n. 19 television 12n. 13, 200n. 4, 221n. 5 tools 16 Whodunit 77 writer 192 treasure hunt 27, 215 Trend, David 137n. 68 Tribeca Film Festival (2013) 101, 132n. 1 TriBeCa New Media Fund 154 trilogies 226 Trixi 4, 209 trolling 152 Trope, Alison 82, 98n. 50 True Blood 105, 134n. 19, 227 Truth about Marika, The 10, 142, 147, 148–9, 160, 167n. 31, 208–9 Tryon, Chuck 190, 203n. 69 T-shirts 162, 170n. 93, 178, 184 Nine Inch Nails 56n. 68 Slusho! 39, 40, 212 Tugg 184, 198 Tumblr 27, 108, 109 posts 196 Turkle, Sherry 110, 114, 135n. 37, 136n. 51, 136n. 52, 183, 202n. 43 Turner, Graeme 47, 58n. 120, 172, 200n. 6 TV3 228 Tweets 79, 135n. 34, 197 Twilight Saga: New Moon, The 82, 189, 190 Twitter 47, 59n. 124, 78, 86, 105, 106, 107, 108, 112, 113, 123, 134n. 28, 134n. 33, 185, 190, 196, 218 Amplify 135n. 34 two-shot 66 ubiquitous computing 235 UK 175

292 Umbrella Sword, The 213, 214 unaware participation 148, 210 un-boxing 42, 43, 58n. 101, 84, 218 unboxing.com 43 Unboxing live! 43 uncanny 68 underground resistance movements 209 unfiction forum 35, 56n. 80 Unfold, The 179 unification 10, 75, 76, 79, 91, 127, 195, 212, 216, 217, 220 United Nations Congress 164 United Paramount Network (UPN) 145 universe stewards 193 Unsound, The 228, 230 upgrade culture 87 USA 117, 137n. 64, 142, 143, 145, 157, 163, 166n. 13, 167n. 33, 175 Minneapolis 163 New Jersey 143 North Carolina 157 Paolo Alto, California 163 USB 185 Usenet 112 user-generated 106, 107, 109, 121, 181, 190 aesthetic 181 Bricolage mode 180, 181 content (UGC) 146, 190 documentary 181 news footage 35 Ushahidi 195 Utah Park City 44 Vaccaro, Paula 205n. 98 value production 105 vampires 20 propoganda 20–1 Van Dijck, José 115, 120, 136n. 55, 137n. 73, 138n. 75 Varela, David 204n. 73 Verbinski, Gore 24 verisimilitude 64, 112, 128, 131 Verizion FiOS TV 43 vernacular video 96n. 5, 134n. 30 Veronica Mars 176, 177 Veronica Mars Movie Project, The 176

Index VHS generation 122, 138n. 83, 138n. 84, 138n. 86 tapes 24 Vidar, John 58n. 115 video conferencing 64 video diaries 183 director’s 82 Videodrome 232 Vids 181 viral aesthetics 44, 209 viral campaign 38 viral lift 115 viral marketing 104, 152 viral marketing campaign 32, 57n. 87, 152 viral videos 32, 37 virtual harware systems 195 virtual reality 118 virus 89 Visual.ly 195 Vitagraph Studio 97n. 37 VOD (Video On Demand) 12n. 16, 227, 234n. 9 voice activated 231 voicemail 67, 159 Vonderau, Patrick 134n. 23 Von Stroheim, Erich 80, 97n. 39 voyeurism 19, 71, 93, 121, 132 Wadhams, Nick 170n. 93 Waern, Annika 54n. 36, 54n. 37, 148, 149, 152, 167n. 30, 167n. 32, 168n. 51, 210, 221n. 10 Waite, Jonathan 168n. 45 walk-in documentary 157, 169n. 78 Walker, Tim 13n. 30, 58n. 101, 234n. 7 Walking Dead, The 227 Warner Brothers 82 War of the Worlds, The novel 142 radio play 9–10, 126, 142–4, 165n. 4, 165n. 5, 166n. 8, 166n. 13, 167n. 38 Wasserman, Todd 136n. 53, 215, 222n. 27 Wasson, Haidee 98n. 50 Watson, Thomas 69 Waugh, Patricia 84, 99n. 60

Index wearable computing 182, 202n. 44 WearComp 182 web browser 156 Webby Awards 97n. 29 webcam(s) 19, 67, 73, 106 aesthetics 147 AnaCam 147 Camgirls 19, 147, 167n. 26, 167n. 28 culture 147, 183 JenniCam 147 Web Commons 31, 122 Web Doc 155, 162, 169n. 66, 169n. 71 Web drama 60n. 146, 96n. 5, 107, 134n. 22, 221n. 11 Web GL 155 webisodes 113, 114, 160, 183, 185 websites, fake 151 We Feel Fine 178, 201n. 27, 201n. 28 Weibel, Peter 13n. 32, 57n. 94 Weigel, Margaret 168n. 44 Weiler, Lance 4, 13n. 22, 25, 44, 45, 58n. 105, 161, 162, 232, 233, 235n. 27 Weintrob, Jed 19 Welcome to Pine Point 155, 169n. 65 We Live in Public 138n. 78, 183 Wellcome Trust, The 45, 162 Welles, Orson 126, 142, 143, 166n. 13 Wellman, Barry 202n. 44 Wells, H.G 142 Wells, Krystyn 169n. 83 We’re trying to save Christina Perasso Group 117, 118, 119, 122, 223n. 46 Wessels, Emmanuelle 56n. 74 West, Amy 166n. 16, 201n. 37 We Used to Wait 103 Who is Dayani Cristal? 154, 169n. 61 Why So Serious? 33, 56n. 63, 91, 118, 154, 214, 216, 218 WiFi 113 Wikipedia 105 Wilderness Downtown, The 103, 115, 132n. 6 Williams, Raymond 46, 58n. 114, 128, 139n. 96, 139n. 97 willing suspension of disbelief 118, 150, 217 Windeløv, Vibeke 124

293

window analogy 212 virtual 222n. 18, 222n. 20 windowing 188 Windows Live Messenger 106, 133n. 18 Wired Magazine 13n. 22, 177, 201n. 21, 201n. 23 wireless network 84 Wizard of Oz, The 3 Woerner, Meredith 153, 168n. 58 Wohl, Richard 137n. 72 word of mouth (WoM) marketing 104, 105, 114 World Without Oil (WWO) 158–9, 165, 169n. 83 Writer’s Bible 191 WWW-ADHD 112 Xbox 31, 227 entertainment studios 227 Live (social network) 227 One console 227, 234n. 10 Yahoo 4 Yahoo 7 priority products 4 Year Zero (NIN) 33, 91, 209 Youngblood, Gene 40, 57n. 94, 57n. 95 Young, Neil 213 You Other You 152 YouTube 32, 35, 37, 38, 39, 43, 47, 60n. 146, 82, 96n. 5, 97n. 27, 97n. 31, 97n. 38, 98n. 55, 107, 108, 112, 113, 114, 115, 119, 134n. 22, 134n. 23, 135n. 42, 136n. 46, 147, 162, 166n. 23, 167n. 27, 181, 182, 183, 196, 203n. 53, 218, 221n. 11, 225 You’ve been Framed 145 Zaccone, Emanuel 133n. 19 ZeeBox 105 Zeega 195 Zeevalkink, Alexandra 233n. 4 Zeller, Tom 134n. 24 Zetter, Kim 168n. 49 Zimmerman, Patricia R. 145–6, 155, 166n. 18, 169n. 73 Zylinska, Joanna 141, 165n. 2