Film Websites: a Transmedia Archaeology
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Film Websites: A Transmedia Archaeology Kim Louise Walden Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Hertfordshire for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy November 2018 Acknowledgements I wish to thank my colleagues and supervisors, Steven Adams and Alan Peacock for their guidance through this research process. Thank you to my principal supervisor, Steven for his direction, and gently reminding me that it was permissible to cite myself as a secondary source. Thank you to my second supervisor, Alan for his open-mindedness, sharp insights and patience as well as innumerable cups of tea and coffee. I would like to thank Marsha Kinder, Dan Koelsch, Ian London, Franziska Nori, Rob Ford, Chris Thilk and Perry Wang for their advice, generously shared in email exchanges. Towards the end of the research, I was introduced to Bettina Sherick, a digital marketing pioneer and veteran from 20th Century Fox, and Founder of Hollywood in Pixels, a non-profit group dedicated to preserving the seminal digital film marketing campaigns. It was so wonderful to meet someone who shares my passion for film websites, so thank you to Bettina for the Skype conversations and emails. During this research process, I took my half-baked ideas to conferences, and benefitted enormously from the discussions that ensued. Subsequently some of this research has been published. So, I would like to thank Sara Pesce and Paolo Noto from the University of Bologna who edited my chapter in The Politics of Ephemeral Digital Media: Permanence and Obsolescence in Paratexts (2016); Likewise, Savatore Scifo, who edited my article for a special edition Interactions: Studies in Communications & Culture on digital archives (2017). My thesis has benefitted immeasurably from these editorial encounters. Finally, I wish to thank my family for their constant encouragement and support. My three daughters, Jemima, Hannah, and Hester who each lent a hand at times. My dogs, Ella, and now Fauzi who have walked me for miles and miles around the Fens, over the years while I figured out what I was doing. And lastly, my husband, Dominic for his endless patience and understanding – I couldn’t have done this without him. 2 Abstract Websites have become a familiar feature of contemporary cinema and they contribute to the overall audience experience. Yet as a hybrid of storytelling and marketing, they have often been seen as little more than promotional ephemera, and they have rarely been critically examined. Film websites are fragile, and their presence as artefacts to study is threatened by a range of commercial and cultural factors. Consequently, film websites have not been well preserved, and many disappear before they have been appraised. Through the development of a transmedia archaeological approach, this thesis establishes that film websites are worthy of consideration as a form of entertainment and as cultural artefacts in their own right. This thesis critically evaluates the film website and its cultural conditions from several perspectives. As a form of transmedia - a term, an academic concept and a production practice that has evolved since the early twentieth century and this thesis sets out a way to understand the development of this important concept and draws on recent scholarship in the field to critically evaluate key ideas. Through media archaeology, which is an emergent historiographical perspective. Some media archaeological propositions are developed into practical tools for the analysis of film websites. Whilst those propositions tend to draw on a tradition of materialist and technological viewpoints, in this thesis they are extended to include approaches that examine the audience experience. As film website design has developed, formats have standardised and one convention to emerge is the in-movie story world website. A particular narrative trope (or, in media archaeological terms, topoi) is the ‘evil corporation’, which is common in science-fiction, western, and social commentary films, but takes on specific significance when the film website enables ludic and interactive forms of what has been described as ‘extended cinema’ (Atkinson, 2014a:16). Using ideas gleaned from world-building the ‘evil corporation’ topoi is analysed in some detail. In archival settings where film websites are preserved, partially held, or lost. Through case studies where archival presence yields insight into the development of the film website form. Online awards provide a case in point as they valorise website design, and through their archives of annual winners, can be understood as a ‘shaper’ of practices, defining what film websites are, and may be in the future. Importantly, it is found that archives don’t simply preserve artefacts. Embedded in film website fan bulletin boards are ‘traces’ of audience encounters with promotional campaigns. Qualitative analysis techniques are used to 'scrape' these locations and interpret the 'conversations' in an analytic manner to examine audience experiences of nostalgia for the future. 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 2 Abstract 3 Table of Contents 4 List of Illustrations 7 Introduction 8 Chapter 1: A Review of Literature 16 1.1 In Search of Transmedia 16 1.2 Transmedia Intertextuality 18 1.3 Transmedia Storytelling 20 1.4 Transmedia Storytelling: Principles and Logics 23 1.5 Transmedia Practices 26 1.6 Transmedia Audiences 29 1.7 Transmedia Memory 31 1.8 Post-Transmedia? 33 1.9 Transmedia Marketing and Promotion 35 1.10 Transmedia Paratextuality 38 1.11 Transmedia Histories & Archaeologies 40 1.12 Taking Stock: Reviewing the Literature Review 44 Chapter 2: Approaches to Media Archaeology 49 2.1 Introduction 49 2.2 Media Archaeology 50 2.3 Foucault and Discourse Principle 52 2.4 Kittler and the Materiality of the Media Principle 54 2.5 The Materiality Principle 56 2.6 The Archival Principle 58 2.7 The Digital Memory Principle 59 2.8 Temporality Principle 59 2.9 The Topos Principle 60 2.10 The Limitations of Media Archaeology 62 2.11 A Cognitive Media Archaeology? 64 2.12 From Principles to Tools 65 2.13 Disciplinarity 67 2.14 Transmedia Archaeology 69 2.15 Conclusions 70 Chapter 3: 404 File Not Found: Where are the Film Websites? 72 3.1 Introduction 72 3.2 Conceptions of Archives 72 3.3 The Conceptual Underpinnings of Archival Investigation 75 3.4 The Technological Underpinnings of Archival Investigation 76 4 3.5 Methodology 79 3.6 Example Archive 1: Web Index Archives –Internet Archive 79 3.7 Example Archive 2: Digital Cultural Heritage Policy– Digitalcraft.org 84 3.8 Example Archive 3: Temporal Web Collections –Webby Awards 87 3.9 Example Archive 4: Web 2.0 Archives - Movie Marketing Madness 92 3.10 Transmedia Archaeology in Practice: Searching for District 9’s Website 95 3.11 Reflections 100 3.12 Conclusions 102 Chapter 4: Don’t Be Evil: An Archaeology of Film’s Online Fictional Worlds 105 4.1 Introduction 105 4.2 Fictional Worlds 105 4.3 Mark Wolf’s Building Imaginary Worlds and Subcreation 108 4.4 The (Evil) Corporation Topos 112 4.5 The List(icle) as a Methodological Approach 115 4.6 The List of Evil Corporation Website Listicles 117 4.7 Case Study Analysis 121 4.8 Lacunainc.com 123 4.9 MNU.com 126 4.10 Weyland Industries.com 130 4.11 Conclusions 135 Chapter 5: An Archaeology of Nostalgia: Audience Experiences of Film Websites 138 5.1 Introduction 138 5.2 The Tron Phenomenon 138 5.3 Tron: Legacy’s Promotional Campaign, Flynn Lives 140 5.4 The Anatomy of Nostalgia 142 5.5 The Flynn Lives Promotional Campaign 144 5.6 Researching Online Audiences 147 5.7 The Flynn Lives Discussion Boards 151 5.8 Research Findings 157 5.9 Games Memory Culture 164 5.10 From the Margins to the Mainstream 165 5.11 Conclusions 167 Chapter 6: Conclusions 169 Bibliography 180 Appendices 210 Appendix 1 Film Website Awards 211 Appendix 2 Webby Award Winners 1997-2017 in the Movie and Film Category 213 Appendix 3 Evil Corporations in Film 1994-2014 222 Appendix 4 Flynn Lives Discussion Board Thread Tables 1-56 226 Appendix 5 Flynn Lives Discussion Board Poster Names & Taglines 288 Appendix 6 A Description of Discussion on the Flynn Lives Boards 289 5 Appendix 7 Thematic Analysis Interpretive Sketches 1-6 294 6 List of Illustrations Figure 1 Google Books NGram Viewer charted appearances of the word ‘transmedia’ in publications, © Google, 2017 p.16 Figure 2 The Research Pyramid, © Jonker and Pennink, 2010 p.66 Figure 3 Wayback Machine search returns delivered in calendar format, ©Internet Archive,2013 p.81 Figures 3-5 Event Horizon’s website, © Golar Productions, 2018 pp.82-3 Figure 6 MNU Community Watch site, District 9 Viral, © Sony Pictures, 2017 p.96 Figure 7 Two entrances to MNU’s site: one for humans and one for aliens District 9 Viral, © Sony Pictures, 2017 p.97 Figure 8 MNU Spreads Lies, District 9 Viral, © Sony Pictures, 2017 p.98 Figure 9 Lacuna Inc. promise ‘Remember with Lacuna, you can forget’, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Viral © Focus Features, 2017 p.125 Figures 10-12 The campaign playfully transgresses the boundaries between primary and secondary worlds to promote the film, District 9 Viral, © Sony Pictures, 2017 p.128 Figure 13 Nested narratives in the Weyland Industries website, 2019 p.133 Figures 14 & 15 Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) introduces himself in a TED-style talk set in the year 2023, Prometheus viral © Twentieth Century Fox, 2019 p.134 Figure 16 Paris’ Tron: Legacy Scavenger Hunt ©Aurore Leblanc, 2013 p.146 Figure 17 Discussion thread 17, 2018 p.153-4 Figure 18 Discussion thread 17 with thematic coding notes, 2018 p.154-5 Figure 19 List of ‘candidate’ themes, 2018 p.155-6 Figure 20 An interpretive sketch of phase 3: Threads 17-26 (28th March-10th April 2010), 2018 p.157 7 Introduction Over the last three decades, a considerable body of research has emerged about transmedia and much of it has focused on its novelty and innovative features.