Ephemeral Media Workshop 2
21st - 22nd July 2009
The Promotional Surround:
Logos, promos, idents, trailers
Key speakers: Professor John Caldwell (UCLA), Professor William Uricchio (MIT), Charlie Mawer (Executive Creative Director, Red Bee Media), Victoria Jaye (BBC Vision)
John Caldwell
The Insider's Promotional Surround: Rationing Production Knowledge, Managing Unruly Machines, and Worker Buy-in
This paper considers how video meta-texts circulate off-screen within professional film/TV production communities and how practitioners use them to respond to, negotiate, counter, discipline and/or make sense of new technical production innovations. This “insider's promotional surround” does not just include top-down technical and manufacturer “demo” tapes, but also encompasses individual worker “comp” and sample “reels,” “spec” scenes, training videos, production worker blogging, snarking, leaking, tracking boards, and counter-tracking boards. I am particularly interested in tracing the origins and transformations of these practices over time, and in grounding these “ephemeral” textual exchanges within real word social relations, cultural trends, labor histories, and industrial habits. In addition to better understanding these cultural and technology arcs over time—trajectories arguably spurred by the exponential increase in hardware and software complexity—I hope to offer some provisional insights about what might be termed a taxonomy of professional meta-texts and demo tapes that circulate as part of physical production practices in contemporary film/TV. I argue that although these videos may rarely be seen by audience members directly, they do in fact influence and “leak” into primary primetime or widescreen textual forms. Likewise, although industrial demos don't play out explicitly in traditional “external” branding schemes, they do in fact fuel “internal” branding initiatives, organizational team building and consensus-making among production workers. Getting all of one's workers (or all of one's craft cohort) “on the same page” with such inside initiatives promises managers the kind of quality control upon which a corporation's external promotional surround ostensibly depends.
Catherine Johnson
Branding Interstitial Spaces on UK Television
This paper examines the use of branding in the interstitial spaces between programmes. Interstitials include promotional campaigns, logos, idents and advertising – all forms of ephemeral media. Through a comparison of different junctions between programmes in the UK over the past 25 years this paper will examine the ways in which interstitial space is used to construct and communicate the brand values of a broadcaster and a channel to the viewer and also functions to manage the viewer's engagement across the range of media where television content can be accessed, such as interactive television and on-line services.
John Ellis
Ephemeral… But evocative and easily recalled: the comparison between programmes and interstitials.
The whole of television can be seen as an ephemeral medium, in literal sense that it “lasts only for a day”. Broadcast television's structures of scheduling; its forms of direct address; the immense efforts that it takes to make timely content all contribute to this. Just like a website, broadcast television aims to be never twice the same… except, that is, in its ephemeral content: the repeated idents, links, promos and commercials. It is a paradox that interstitials, the most ephemeral material on broadcast television, are also the most repeated. As a result, these ephemera of broadcasting tends to be more designed, less factual, less current, more elusive and less allusive in meaning than the programming that surrounds it. Yet precisely through this repetition, interstitials rest in the memory as defining a particular period of broadcasting more clearly than the programming itself.
Joshua Green
What does (American) television look like?
As US networks adjust uneasily to a future as tributaries feeding branded spaces rather than fonts viewers visit, the nature of the television network is changing. Industry focus across platforms requires re-imagining what a television network is, a challenge that is definitional as much as promotional -- what does a television network look like in a post-broadcast era, and significantly, how do viewers engage with it? At this moment, the network promo, historically crucial to constructing network identity, is conspicuously absent. How do the few contemporary branding campaigns position US networks and their audiences, especially when placed within historical context?
Barbara Sadler
Identities and Idents: How far is it possible to trace the history of ITV through its regional and national idents?
Television station idents are a significant site for the establishment and negotiation of relationships and identities between broadcasters and their audiences. For ITV this situation has been complicated due to its evolving regional/national structure and ownership issues. The idents appear to offer the opportunity to chart the history of the institution. Using a selection of idents it is the aim to investigate changes in the relationships and identities being constructed and circulated and consequently how far it is possible to plot the major points of ITV history through its identifiers and promotional breaks.
Paul Middleton
Short Life Design
This paper will articulate the notion of short life design (SLD) in broadcast television. The research interest explores the production of visual design material produced in support of news production, principally through collaboration with ITV Central, but also including collaborators in North America and the Netherlands . The research investigates the use of visual and text based language which can often embrace still and moving image, text, virtual environments and sound. The outputs are the product of collaboration between journalists and designers producing a redefined form of communication intended to present information rich material for platforms designed for the merging PC and broadcast television technologies (including hand-held communication devices).
More information is available at www.shortlifedesign.co.uk
James Bennett
Dislocating public service broadcasting: negotiating content and brand at the interface.
This paper suggests that as the BBC exploits convergence television practices, content is increasingly framed by the commercial contexts of iTunes, YouTube and SkyPlayer, whose interfaces shape an understanding of the Corporation that, whilst profitable and audience-maximizing, may ultimately dislocate the content from any sense of public service ethos or obligation. Framing this investigation in terms of how interfaces both shape our media experiences and exhibit production strategies, I suggest that the BBC's public service value might need to be found in the ephemera that surrounds content: particularly the spaces where users might interact with each other and the BBC.
www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer
Paul Grainge
Elvis Sings for the BBC: broadcast branding and digital media design
This paper uses a striking example of digitextual promotion - BBC Radio 2's Elvis ad - to examine developments in the contemporary branding and broadcast environment. Suggestive of the BBC's attempt since the late 1990s to make its brand ‘sing', and m emorable for its found-footage chutzpah, I consider how the Elvis ad signifies a moment in which corporate media brands such as the BBC are responding deliberately and reflexively to a situation where concepts of media time and space, present and past, liveness and the archive, have become, if not entirely revolutionized, then at least, as the King would have it, ‘all shook up'.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=0NXZpy_kjUY
Mark Brownrigg and Peter Meech
Surround: Sound
If the promotional surround is routinely overlooked in academic research into television, then the ‘sound of the surround' remains doubly neglected. In our paper we compare the BBC's approach to the aural branding of its channels with those of the proliferating, small-scale, niche-oriented digital channels. We combine the textual analysis of a selection of channel idents with a consideration of the practical circumstances of their production. The paper is illustrated with a wide-ranging package of clips.
Charlie Mawer – Industry perspectives (Red Bee Media)
Victoria Jaye – Industry perspectives (BBC Vision)
Victoria will be providing an industry perspective on how BBC Vision is responding to multiple platforms and emerging audience behaviour in relation to how it commissions, produces and distributes its content.
She will argue broadcasters historically are ephemeral producers, delivering hit, of the moment content in the form of big network TV shows that resonate with mass audiences. With the rise of multiple, 24/7 global platforms however, what was once a passing screen moment can live on and be shared indefinitely and globally by audiences.
Victoria will explore how this landscape presents the BBC with significant challenges, but how these are far outweighed by the creative opportunity for the BBC to deliver to its purposes as never before, and transform from being a public service broadcaster to a public service enabler.
William Uricchio
The recurrent, the recombinatory, and the ephemeral:thoughts on a textual system in transition
The ephemeral texts in question call to mind Baudelaire's notion of modernity as 'the transient, the fleeting, the contingent' - but television brings with it a twist:the recurrent and the recombinatory. A time machine of sorts, television serves as a source of emanations at once live and repeated, endlessly recombined, and increasingly user-controlled. This talk will consider both the strategic and inadvertent deployments of ephemeral and interstitial texts, as historical forms, as responses to television's changing dispositif, and as signs of things to come. Particularly as the contours of third generation television take form, one ephemeral texts may in fact be far more central to the medium's future than to its past.
Paul McDonald
Small Media, Big Film: Micro-Visibility in Event Movie Marketing
One-sheet posters, in-cinema displays, on-set video reports, a YouTube channel, Facebook postings, and mobile wallpapers. These were just some of the media used to advertise and publicize Quantum of Solace prior to its release in 2008. Costing US$230m to make, the film took over US$567m at the global box office. It was, therefore, a very big film. Yet its presence in the marketplace depended on a multitude of small media expressions. Reflecting on this example, the paper will propose the marketing of contemporary event movies paradoxically operates through creating maximum exposure through what will be described as the ‘micro-visibility' of small media.
Mark Gallagher
‘ Guerrilla Hunters: The Precirculation of Soderbergh's Che '
This paper investigates the embryonic life of the prestige independent release Che (2008), promoted unofficially in advance of its release through print periodicals' and online forums' circulation of set photos, frame images, and moving-image teasers, trailers, and video clips. Che 's advance circulation participates in numerous discourses surrounding cinephilia, entertainment and film authorship. The discourses contribute to the maintenance of taste cultures even as they promote online destinations for entertainment news and cinephilic commentary. Through the study of Che 's precirculation, the paper compares the roles of sanctioned and unsanctioned ephemeral video footage in the promotion of prestige film in theatrical exhibition.
http://www.showbizcafe.com/en/news/exclusive-8-never-before-seen-clips-from-che/1338
Martin Barker
The circulation of ‘Gollum': how ancillary materials take on a life of their own.
The figure of ‘Gollum' from the Lord of the Rings was the object of a considerable amount of official publicity during the period of the film trilogy's release. However, he also circulated unofficially, in ways which reveal a great deal about the interface between films and other cultural circuits. My presentation will outline the findings of my research into these phenomena. In particular the research indicates two important features: a ‘liminal' quality to Gollum; and a resultant availability for use in wider debates about politics, class and culture.
Jez Stewart
Branded entertainment onscreen in the 1930s and the 2000s: Historical perspective on a modern phenomenon
The 21 st century has seen a number of advertisers (BMW, Eurostar) look beyond the ailing form of the 30-second commercial. “Branded entertainment” was also a feature of the 1930s, when certain commercial firms (Horlicks, Shell, Cadbury) would spend £10,000 a year on publicity films of varying kinds. Such sponsorship backed the growth of the British documentary. This paper explores the parallels between “branded entertainment” of the 1930s and 2000s, both as films and as advertisements. It looks at the relationship with the mainstream media of each period, and considers the potential for clashes between artistic and brand personality.
http://www.scorsesefilmfreixenet.com/video_eng.htm
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/964488/index.html
http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/organisation/7236?view=credit
Dylan Cave
The hidden film business
As the moving image archives move further into the digital age, the traditional collecting paradigms – authored works, national cinemas, ‘The Canon' – are increasingly outdated. While certain collecting criteria still dominate, the film archives are recognising aspects of their other holdings – trailers, pop videos, screen advertising and other examples of film ephemera – to develop as important strands of their collection. Concentrating on the BFI's cinema trailers collection, this paper will discuss the difficulty of using traditional models to archive trailers - a practical example that opens up wider issues about ephemeral media experiences and their hidden production contexts.
Steve Bryant
TV's Credit Crunch: the slow death of end credits on British television and how some programmes fought back.
This paper will consider the gradual encroachment of promotional material into the space previously occupied only by programming since the early 1990s, as broadcasters adapted to the increased commercialism of the post-Broadcasting Act environment and the coming of multi-channel television. It will trace how end credits became a battleground, from the earliest audio-only invasions to today's caption epidemic and split-screen chaos. It will also demonstrate how some programme makers resisted the invasion and what this meant for programme construction. Illustrated by off-air recordings from the BFI National Archive collection.
Max Dawson
Between Promos and Content: Renegotiating the Television Text
At numerous occasions throughout television's history, the advent of new video technologies has necessitated the renegotiation of agreements governing divisions of labor, risk, and profits between networks, studios, and creative professionals. This presentation explores the short-form television ephemera that populate television networks' websites as venues in which these negotiations currently unfold. Focusing on The Accountants (2006), a short-form web serial based on the NBC series The Office , I highlight the measures producers and distributors take to strategically blur the boundary between promos and content in digital environments, and examine how these strategic obfuscations shape our understandings of the fluid textualities of television's digital extensions.
http://www.nbc.com/Video/library/webisodes/the-office-the-accountants/33180/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6hqP0c0_gw
JP Kelly
Beyond the Broadcast Text: new economies and ephemeralites of online TV
In recent years, online television has become a common distribution practice. The increasing availability of television texts outside of the broadcast spectrum leads to new forms of “ephemeral media”. Shows are frequently reduced to bite-sized segments that operate as discreet promotional units. Conversely, digital distribution enables content to transcend the temporal constraints of the broadcast medium; recently a number of shows have appeared online as “extended versions” with runtimes exceeding their given broadcast slot. By examining the distributional strategies of Hulu.com this paper considers how online TV is altering established industrial practices, blurring the boundaries between promotion and text, and reconfiguring the ephemerality of the television show.
Alessandro Catania
The abridged version: the recap as promotional strategy for serials and brands
By analysing Heroes' recaps on NBC and in the DVD release this paper considers how official recaps participate in complex value exchanges between the narrative universes they rework and the promotional surround. Bridging between textual and paratextual spaces, these recaps mash-up the series' content, anticipate narrative developments and promote ancillary products by borrowing textual strategies from trailers and teasers. While using narrative arcs to brand the show, Heroes' recaps promote the channel's identity by incorporating logos, and graphic elements. Further, even when merged with televisual and filmic thresholds – Spiderman 3 – recaps retain their promotional/narrative function.
Roberta Pearson
Transmedia Storytelling in Historical and Theoretical Perspective
Transmedia storytelling, the simultaneous dispersion of a narrative across several platforms, has become integral to the promotional surround of television programmes, its mobisodes, webisodes and the like luring the devoted viewer ever deeper into the diegetic world. Trans-media storytelling strategies have become central to both the television industry and television studies; indeed it might be seen to define the post-network era. Yet while industry types can implement transmedia storytelling on an ad hoc and pragmatic basis, academics require a robust definition that will stand up to sustained interrogation. This paper looks at academic definitions of transmedia storytelling, principally that of Henry Jenkins, to argue the need for sensitivity to both historical context and theoretical complexities
http://abc.go.com/primetime/lost/missingpieces/index