In Anthony Trollope's minor novel about trade and advertising, The Struggles of Brown, Jones & Robinson (1862), three business partners express attitudes and notions about truth, representation and consumer expectation echoed in our own contemporary research among movie trailer audiences.  In the sophistication, cynicism and naivete of the various protagonists’ remarks about marketing, you can read the same skepticism,  confusion and plain ignorance regarding a mode of communication that is only more ubiquitous and compelling today

‘"But, George," said Mr. Brown, "I should like to have one of these bills [advertising notices] true, if only that one might show it as a sample when the people talk to one."

"True!" said Robinson, again. "You wish that it should be true! In the first place, did you ever see an advertisement that contained the truth? If it were as true as heaven, would any one believe it? Was it ever supposed that any man believed an advertisement? Sit down and write the truth, and see what it will be! The statement will show itself of such a nature that you will not dare to publish it. There is the paper, and there the pen. Take them, and see what you can make of it."
"I do think that somebody should be made to believe it," said Jones.
[Jones, the other partner, is vain, venal and dull-witted]

"You do!" and Robinson, as he spoke, turned angrily at the other. "Did you ever believe an advertisement?" Jones, in self-defence, protested that he never had. "And why should others be more simple than you? No man,—no woman believes them. They are not lies; for it is not intended that they should obtain credit. I should despise the man who attempted to base his advertisements on a system of facts, as I would the builder who lays his foundation upon the sand. The groundwork of advertising is romance. It is poetry in its very essence. Is Hamlet true?"

"I really do not know," said Mr. Brown.
"There is no man, to my thinking, so false," continued Robinson, "as he who in trade professes to be true. He deceives, or endeavours to do so. I do not. No one will believe that we have fifteen hundred dozen of Balbriggan." [A kind of stockings.]
"Nobody will," said Mr. Brown.
"But yet that statement will have its effect. It will produce custom, and bring grist to our mill without any dishonesty on our part. Advertisements are profitable, not because they are believed, but because they are attractive. Once understand that, and you will cease to ask for truth." Then he turned himself again to his work and finished his task without further interruption.’
{Emphases and interpolated notes are mine; Text courtesy of Project Gutenberg}

150 years ago, Trollope (and we presume, some of his audience) disdained the truth claims of advertising, recognizing their near irrelevance to the communicational activity afoot. At the same time, he acknowledges the power of their aesthetic and emotional appeals. But while the fictional Robinson is incipiently post-modern in his conception of marketing communications and wicked in his satire, contemporary audiences appear to have regressed relative to Victorian counterpart in their critical evaluation of advertising.

(Editors note: Below Harry Furniss' famous 'I used your soap' cartoon, an illustration of the cynicism surrounding 19th Century Ads - this somewhat ironically, became used by a soap company.)

This fortnight's post comes from Sam Ward, talking about netflix, Spoofs and consumer culture, welcome!
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As a scholar of television’s promotional discourse, whose relationship with film is limited to that of a consumer, I have followed the Watching the Trailer project with admiring interest, but also a question: how might we account for the television trailer as distinct from the film trailer? Recent developments in the trailing of television content have raised a range of textual, industrial and even ethical questions. Trailers for big budget or ‘event’ television now routinely borrow stylistic tropes from movie trailers (for a randomly selected example see here), sometimes to the extent of playfully undercutting generic expectations. Indeed, cinema-goers increasingly find TV shows being advertised before the feature film alongside the usual upcoming cinematic releases. Just in the UK, we’ve had trailers for TV dramas disguised as spots for consumer products, unseasonably premature teasers (almost to rival Star Wars VII, as discussed in a previous WtT blog post), as well as more and more innovative transmedia tie-ins.

Here, though, I want to focus specifically on ‘trailers’ for the televisual experience itself. As my scare quotes indicate, whether or not the term fits here is open to debate, but I suggest that that debate is a complex one given the dense linking and overlapping of content, brands and technologies that such ‘trailers’ produce. Of course, the technology, channels and broadcasters that deliver content have all occasionally been the subject of promotion throughout TV’s history. But the intense competition in the UK between television service providers like Sky and Freeview, not to mention new web-based rivals like Netflix, has made selling the televisual experience a central and ubiquitous part of the contemporary industry’s make-up. This has given rise to a new kind of promotional text that ‘trails’ television – not simply as content, but as a technological object and a consumer experience.

Over the last couple of years, actor Idris Elba has appeared as the promotional face of Sky, Britain’s leading pay-TV provider. He has featured in several on-air adverts that focus on Sky’s On Demand service. They continue  in a long-standing style for Sky adverts, casting a television celebrity as the projected viewer, who is found in a pristine white space (in the video below it’s a library, in others it’s an art gallery or a stylish, minimialist living room), framing the Sky service as a rarefied, individualised and vaguely futuristic experience.

Like many other trailers for service providers, this spot perfectly encapsulates James Bennett’s characterisation of television’s shift to digital as dominated by a ‘discourse of choice’. A whole physical library (actually Stuttgart City Library) is seemingly contained within Sky’s set-top box. But can it be called a ‘trailer’ when there is no specific upcoming content being shown on screen? Another way of approaching this question is by thinking about the very complicated relationship that TV viewing now has with temporality. The ‘temporal subordination’ that the WtT team observe in previous accounts of film trailers (that is, the assumption that the trailer comes first, then the film itself) becomes problematic in a slightly different sense when we consider the unmooring of television content from the fixed schedule. None of the content that Elba namedrops is ‘coming soon’, or even particularly current. In fact, the idea that the content being trailed may have already been seen by others is used as a central selling point of the service (comparable to the ‘audience reaction’ featured in some film trailers).

However, the name dropping of several shows in Elba’s speech and the knowing nod to his own appearance in The Wire, as well as the prominent placement of certain DVD box sets, makes clear how the future-oriented promise of viewing content remains inseparable from the sale of Sky’s pay-TV subscriptions. Of course, on a basic level this expresses a re-elaboration of the old TV industry adage that people watch programmes, not channels (or, indeed, services or technologies). More complex forms of intertextual layering emerge, though, where we find flagship shows being trailed more overtly, and in the process being made to stand for the brand of a particular platform or service.

Take the advert for Netflix below, which appeared on British television in 2014. Here again a well-known television personality demonstrates the viewing experience offered by the platform. However, here he is actually transported onto the sets of some of Netflix’s most successful dramas. We might call this a kind of spoof or mash-up trailer, playing on Gervais’s trademark awkwardness as the Brit failing to ‘make it’ in the various narrative worlds (before finally being seen in his own sitcom Derek, for which Netflix has the second-run rights).

This comical deconstruction of the usual function of trailers has become a regular feature of adverts for television services. To take a final example, Elba’s predecessor as the face of Sky was veteran comedy actor Joanna Lumley. As with Gervais’s travels through Netflix’s shows, Lumley appeared in several fake trailers, spoofing characters from some of the series available on demand. 

Lumley’s cult-like indulgence, poking fun at the fan practice of ‘cos-play’, ironically reinforces the perception of this content as ‘quality’ (that is, compared to Lumley’s fake beards and hammy acting) that warrant devoted viewership. Meanwhile the service is given ultimate prominence as her punchline – ‘Watch the real Game of Thrones with Sky On Demand’ – bestows ownership on Sky as a whole. The comedy also plays on the shows’ American-ness, of course, against which Lumley’s well-spoken English accent serves to heighten the incongruity (although she also does Bear Grylls).

If, as the WtT team report, a common complaint with film trailers is that they mis-represent the film in question, it is interesting that it is precisely this tendency for discrepancy that provides the joke from which Lumley’s sketches derive their promotional effect. While most (official) film trailers at least claim to provide a taste of ‘the real thing’, ‘trailers’ for the digital televisual experience produce texts that are more taxonomically ambiguous, presenting a multi-purpose – and often ironic – mode of address. As television functions more explicitly than ever as a service as much as a textual form, analysing how that service is promoted to the consumer presents valuable questions – only some of which I’ve briefly raised here – about the relationship between content and technology.

Sam Ward has recently submitted his PhD thesis at the University of Nottingham. His research focuses on the place of imported drama in the promotional discourse surrounding digital television. He has also worked as a Lecturer at the University of Roehampton.

If you believe the directors of two of this summer’s big blockbusters, the trailers’ “spoiler-laden” reputation has been ratcheted up another notch.

Colin Trevorrow and Alan Taylor are the directors of two huge 2015 franchise entries, Jurassic World and Terminator: Genisys respectively. Both have recently derided the marketing decisions made on behalf of their films: namely the inclusion of specific scenes in the trailers that gave away a key narrative moment or surprise.

Here's a quick reminder of the trailers in question...

 
Trevorrow has said that trailer producers “have shown far more… than I would ever have wanted”, claiming the trailer betrayed the “new rules” his film was creating, and (allegedly) making it more challenging for the audience. 

Meanwhile, Alan Taylor had “unpleasant conversations” about the inclusion of a scene in one of the Terminator: Genisys trailers that gave away a significant plot twist. Taylor admitted that the initial negative publicity meant that marketing “had to do something game-changing in how the film was being perceived” but was still not pleased by the decision. You can read the interview transcription via Uproxx

Now, this is an old and much debated topic, and not one we’re going to solve anytime soon. My last post for this site, about the history of ‘trailer talk’, demonstrated that we tend to circle the same debates every time trailers are discussed. While the specific “spoiler” tag may be new, the theme of over-revelatory trailers is not. But if Trevorrow and Taylor are making a case that such revelations are not in the audience’s best interest, then surely we have to ask whether such spoilers helped make Jurassic World the fifth biggest box-office performer of all time, and why they didn’t do the same for Terminator: Genisys. If the trailer “spoiler” is such a problem, and so significant it has to be rejected by the film’s directors, then is there a reason why audiences don’t always react in the same way? Could it be that audiences don’t actually object to spoilers, because they reveal interesting narrative or visual evidence that draws some viewers in?

Posts on media websites about trailers often repeat the adage that you can ‘tell’ where a trailer sequence will sit in the film, and can therefore figure out the ending. Yet the Jurassic World example surely suggests that the general audience might not mind: indeed, the director of another big summer film Ant-Man revealed that you have to balance an audience’s ‘sense of discovery’ with giving them ‘every reason in the world to go see the movie’ – including, in this case, revealing the appearance of another Marvel hero in a trailer for the film.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. And let’s not pretend this is new: go and watch the Casablanca trailer, which includes the final Rick-Strasse confrontation at the airport; or The Empire Strikes Back trailers that feature brief shots of ‘twist’ moments, including the Luke-Darth Vader lightsaber battle. Trailers have always shown events out of sequence, constructing their own narrative, hoping (in part) to encourage people to go back to the cinema. If we look to the results of our first audience survey, only 47 respondents (out of 525) made a specific reference to the trailer as a “spoiler” when asked about the trailer-film relationship, although there was plenty of related talk around the trailer as over-revelatory, inaccurate or featuring the best bits. Yet it seems clear from the sources cited above, and the discussion that accompanies it on such media sites, that “spoiler” and “trailer” are now closely connected in the minds of part of the audience.

What isn’t clear, and this is something I first discussed in a 2008 Convergence article, is how the rapid growth of online video as a marketing tool has affected the promotional landscape in which the trailer sits. The Casablanca trailer was likely the only footage the potential audience saw, with few additional sources of movie narrative information outside film reviews, radio features, and fan magazines – all of which were non-visual, with no film programmes on television until the late 1940s / early 1950s (for more on these, including the use of the word ‘trailer’ to refer to one longer clip from a movie, I’d recommend Su Holmes’ work). The Empire Strikes Back was part of a more media-saturated world (with TV spots, ‘Making Of’ specials, clips shown on a range of TV shows, tie-in novelisation, sticker books etc.) but the release of film clips was still relatively controlled and discreet.

Since the 1990s, however, and particularly since the advent of decent online video, the increase in pre-release footage is astonishing. Alongside two to three trailers, TV spots, web exclusive clips, and video from special events like the recent Comic-Con, the sheer availability of material available ahead of film viewing is at an all-time high. While this doesn’t explain the recent debate about the “spoiler” trailer, or whether a spoiler is good or bad for business, it does suggest that trailers (likely still the most viewed of those elements, across many audiences) now needs to work harder to stand out among other audio-visual previews…

SCMS15: The ‘Watching the Trailer’ papers

Back in March, the Watching the Trailer team (Fred Greene, Keith M. Johnston, and Ed Vollans) travelled to Montreal for the Society of Cinema & Media Studies (SCMS) annual conference. As well as meeting new and old friends in the trailer/promotional studies scene, we were there to present a series of (inter-related) papers on our ongoing audience research project. 


Given we can’t share the physical presentations with you, here’s the next best thing: the second in our series of blog posts that consider specific aspects of those papers. The second of these is Ed’s consideration of the role of neuroscience in understanding the trailer. 
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This concept is the central point of this blog post, and one to which I’m going to return, but before jumping in to critique what I hope you'll consider a  point very much open to debate, let’s start with a quick overview...

Early academic studies of the trailer-audience interaction focused on audience surveys and questionnaires. Historical and Contemporary industry studies exist but gaining access to these is extremely difficult and such studies tend to be focused on specific movies (e.g. 'did you like this joke here?', or 'what did you think of that character there'). While the available academic work is scattered through a history of scholarly interest in the trailer (as we’ve talked about here), more recent studies of the trailer have begun to explore the physical and biological responses to trailers. 

This new trend, if we can call it that, is typified by the work of Dr Steve Quartz, who has been widely reported (also here, and here) to be ‘optimising’ movie trailers, based on MRI readings of subjects watching trailers. Similarly, work by Iida (2012) and Yanagisawa (2014) has focused on GSR galvanic skin responses (measurements of the chemicals in the skin, often coupled with heart rate monitors) to assess the experience of trailers. Consider some of the broad findings made available by this research*; 

- Iida (2012), authors suggest a specific mode of trailer creation that maximises GRS output. 

- Yanagisawa (2014), authors identified elements of a movie trailer that ‘increased the viewers’ desire to watch the target movie’.
* (These papers are truly fascinating, if you get the chance to read these please do, we'd love to hear your thoughts).

Across these studies then, the issue of ‘optimisation’ is very much present; this notion that certain elements that elicit biological responses in the audience can be collected together to create an improved or 'most appealing' trailer. This concept is fascinating to me purely because of the implications this may have on the creative processes of trailer production, and the kinds of audience reception it may elicit audiences found out they were watching an 'optimal' trailer.  

More importantly (for me at least) there is the issue of reconciling the conscious with the subconscious. Here, the emphasis on subconscious biological responses fails to take into account additional environmental factors. Work by Topolinski (2013) albeit not focused on trailers, has for instance, suggest that eating popcorn and chewing gum reduced the effectiveness of advertising in persuading audiences to purchase products. This kind of environmental factor during viewing is wholly absent from subconscious studies that provide an artificial environment for viewing; putting willing participants in an MRI machine for example is not my average cinema going experience (If this is how you normally watch them, please let us know; here).

What is clear is the difficulty in translating biological responses to stimuli (say, jumping at loud noises, or sweating) to the consumer experience; ‘I really want to go and see that movie’, or ‘I hated that’. We know that for many people a really scary experience can be actively sought, forming a kind of paradox, conveniently illustrated by the audience in this trailer...
 

Certainly such biological data will converge with the viewer experience, but without widespread understanding of the conscious audience experience, such subconscious data has limited transferability. In part because of the limitations of biological assessment in terms of participants and viewing context, and in part because of the absence of co-ordinated research that maps the social and cultural implications of trailer consumption. 

So clearly I’m coming down on the side of conscious responses as a way of gathering data. Considering conscious responses allows for a better understanding of the way in which the trailer experience manifests itself in popular culture: primarily through talk. Yet given the nature of cinema, we can only ever gather that data from audiences after they have experienced it, and so we’re always asking not what you felt or experienced at the time, but instead what do you think or remember you experienced- which isn’t quite the same thing - as anyone who knows of this image will be able to tell you...

Memory and perception (while two different things) can be a tainted or an ‘inaccurate’ representation of the biological experience in some way, creating a gap between the conscious and subconscious data collection. The articulation of conscious responses to trailers can be subject to our own personalities and limitations of the data collection methods, consider the difference between ‘I loved the trailer’ and ‘I adored the trailer’ broadly synonymous sentiments but articulated in a slightly different manner with a different set of associations. 

Consider that of the first WtT survey respondents, the majority either discussed the trailer with friends, or shared the trailer in some way, suggesting that the role of interpersonal communication is still a vital element of it's consumption and one that may impact upon the audience experience. Given that the majority of participants in the first WtT survey suggested they were actively seeking out trailers at some time, rather than being passive recipients, it seems clear to me that before we can start to pull together the conscious with the subconscious we need to use the conscious as a frame of reference. 
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Back in March, the Watching the Trailer team (Fred Greene, Keith M. Johnston, and Ed Vollans) travelled to Montreal for the Society of Cinema & Media Studies (SCMS) annual conference. As well as meeting new and old friends in the trailer / promotional studies scene, we were there to present a series of (inter-related) papers on our ongoing audience research project.

Given we can’t share the physical presentations with you, here’s the next best thing: a series of blog posts that consider specific aspects of those papers. The first of these is Keith’s exploration of how some of the results of our audience research echo historical commentaries on the trailer from the film industry and general press… enjoy!
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In 1954, London’s Evening Standard published a cartoon of a man and woman outside a cinema. One of them (it appears to be the woman) says “It wasn’t as good as the trailer!” That cartoon was then used in an advertisement for British trailer company National Screen Service, as reproduced here.

In 2014, over 50 respondents to our first trailer audience survey made similar comments:

• ‘The [Man of Steel] trailer was fantastic… [it] had a better story, better pacing, better use of music, and stronger emotions than the film did.’ (#143)
• ‘Trailers are often better than the film’ (#308)
• ‘The [Saving Mr Banks] trailer made me happy… [the film had an] overall lack of storytelling in comparison to the trailer’ (#179)

My immediate response upon seeing such overlaps and repetitions of language, particularly across a 60 year span of time, was to delve back into trailer history, to explore whether there were other instances where audience comments from our survey were mirrored by earlier thoughts, ideas and arguments about the place of the trailer. To be clear, I’m not saying that this earlier discourse caused the audience responses we’ve been getting, more that these are early examples of the narrative that tends to emerge whenever you talk to someone about a trailer.


So, let’s look at some specific examples to show you what I’m talking about:

‘Trailers these days show a summary of the absolute entire damn plot.’ (#29)

Ryan Gibley has argued that while they were once ‘a sophisticated tease’, modern trailers are ‘annihilating the expectation of excitement, the bliss of ignorance’ (‘Trailer trash’ New Statesmen 13 March 2006, p.42) – while the language of our survey respondents might be softer, there is a partial comparison here: 47 making direct claims that the trailer revealed too much. However, contrary to Gibley’s other claim, there is little evidence from trailer history that points to any sort of Golden Age of trailer sophistication, or that trailers were ever coy about making such plot revelations.

85 years before Gibley’s article (5-9 years after the film trailer was first used in cinema advertising: the debate about what the first trailer was, or when it was released, is a story for a whole other blog) the tone of such industry talk was – initially – kinder. The U.S. Exhibitors’ Trade Review noted that ‘theatres appreciate the artistic and mechanical efficiency’ of the trailer, while a film producer ‘knows that the public is receiving a true and definite conception of what his pictures stand for”.’ (Nov 5 1921, p1597) The idea of a ‘true… conception’ seems far removed from the experience of at least some of our participants, and the wider online debate around trailers regularly returns to the idea of complaints or frustrations over the ‘spoiler’ text.

Positive talk about trailers did not last very long, however. In the early sound era, The New York Times’ Mordaunt Hall demanded trailers of ‘a more judicious fashion, with a conservative wording and more rational and less sensational selection of the excerpts from the film’ (‘Those Exuberant Screen Barkers’ The New York Times July 28 1929, p.5), while Howard T. Lewis insisted that trailer sequences were ‘not always chosen with real appreciation… they do not fairly represent the real character of the play’ (The Motion Picture Industry, New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1933, p. 249). While other opinions were published, they are in a minority: it seems clear that this part of debate around trailer content has been going on for decades, with no end in sight. While I’m not attempting to answer why this recurs so frequently, it is one of the lines of enquiry we hope to pursue in the next phase of our audience research.
 

‘Trailers can misrepresent a film as their primary aim is promotion/selling’ (#385)

While this respondent understood why a trailer might misrepresent / mislead, many other participant responses were irate about this perceived trend in trailer production. Through the 1930s, there are regular recurrences of this claim that trailers were too loud, over-revelatory, and inclined to misrepresentation of the film. Film Daily opined that the trailer was ‘too elaborately filled with superlatives’ (May 7 1935, p. 8), ‘annoyingly bombastic’ (May 20 1935, p. 8), going so far as to circulate questionnaires asking if ‘trailers show too much of the coming attractions’ (December 2 1936, p. 6).

This initial burst of critical trailer talk seems to culminate in a 1948 special exhibitor’s committee. It made 15 recommendations to the trailer industry, which they felt had ‘lost track of the basic function of a trailer’ (‘Trailer Improvement Urged in Survey’, Film Daily March 3 1948, p. 6).

Watching the Trailer proudly presents: another guest blog post, this fortnight by Dr Kathleen Williams; welcome, thanks for joining us!
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Thousands of recut trailers have been uploaded to YouTube since its launch in 2005. Recut trailers typically involve the splicing together of footage from one or more filmic sources to create a trailer for a film – of a version of a film – that will not exist. They vary from the very popular (such as Scary Mary with over 14 million views), to those uploaded as part of an assignment that will not have an audience past their university professor (…and myself). There are technical tropes that recut creators use to classify their video as a trailer rather than a montage: voiceover, a classification screen (typically the Motion Picture Association of America), use of text, anticipatory language (‘coming soon’, ‘this summer’), and music. This campy 70s treatment of disaster film 2012 is a great example of these tropes in action:

Recuts involve a kind of looking forward and looking back, a willingness to engage in anticipation for a future that can’t be obtained while also drawing upon cinematic memory and a general sense of pastness. In this post, I’m going to look at how trailers can act as a conduit for cinematic memory, a networked object through which to play with recollections of our past media consumption.
 
A great number of recut trailers are focused on altering our memories of a specific feature film. Ferris Club recuts footage from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Rather than being centred on extroverted Ferris’ antics, the trailer plays on the subtleties of Ferris’ best friend, Cameron. By reordering footage from the film, and amplifying certain elements, this recut uncovers the latent storyline of Ferris being a figment of Cameron’s imagination. It, of course, also places Ferris Bueller’s Day Off into the same narrative world as Fight Club.

humour and success of these trailers lies in upending the role of genre as a classifier; with some editing, children’s films can become the thing of nightmares, thrillers can be diluted into plane-friendly romps, and the sea cannot come between true love.

frames of the montage. By taking the misleading characteristics of trailers to their illogical excess, recut trailers simultaneously flatten out and accelerate cinematic history, ensuring that any film can be resurrected and made to appear again ‘this summer’.
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Kernan, Lisa 2004, Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Tryon, Chuck 2009, Reinventing cinema: Movies in the age of media convergence. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

 
Dr Kathleen Williams is a lecturer in media studies at the University of Tasmania, Australia. She recently completed her doctoral study on recut film trailers at the University of New South Wales in which she looked at recut trailers in relation to anticipation, nostalgia and networks. Her work on recuts appears in Transformative Works and Cultures, M/C Journal and edited collections. Her research is preoccupied with the ways that media technologies can be co-opted from their intended uses and technological nostalgia.

Watching The Trailer is pleased to welcome guest posts from Chris Archer-Brown and Julia Kampani. A warm welcome to our blogging ranks, and have our heartfelt thanks for contributing.
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UK pop-culture history: the release of The Clash and The Sex Pistols’ first albums heralded a new era for music; and Star Wars IV: A New Hope generated the kind of movie buzz studio bosses dream of.  Media interest was high, but if you wanted to preview the movie, the cinema was the place to go; two trailers were made and were exclusively shown at the start of other movies.  Even 22 years later the trailer for Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace was released on the big screens, with such a hype around it that fans actually paid to see “Meet Joe Black” just to see it.

Flash-forward to today. Over a year before the release of the new Star Wars Episode VII, the first trailer was released on  YouTube. 

Teasers spark online conversations and build tension amongst the fans – just scroll through the top comments on the video for a sense. The second official trailer was released recently and information was leaked in advance about the shots that would be included.  And so – perhaps recognising that buzz about the movie itself is unsustainable for that period – the discussion is focused on the trailer…not the movie.  To the frustration of some.

Recognising how important is online engagement in securing screens for opening weekend and – critically – bums on seats in those screens, the industry has developed interesting tools (e.g. ListenFirst and MoviePilot). Engagement and sentiment data from online sources is gathered and used to predict opening box office.  Since the new trailer’s release, Star Wars has been number 1. 

While the industry is clearly interested in pre-release WOM academics have tended to focus on how audiences have shared their experiences – positively or negatively - after they have seen the movie. We wondered if this was an oversight - after all, marketing folk need to plan campaigns that highlight the positives and suppress the negatives.  

asked people to watch the trailer and tell us how much they felt they understood and how much they might like the movie.  We also asked them whether they’d be likely to share the trailer or tell their friends about it and – crucially – whether they’d pay to see it.  We focused on young adults and made sure they had recently paid to see a movie.  We ended up with roughly 400 observations to play with. What we found was quite
interesting. While no-one wants to feel like they’ve seen a movie when they finished the trailer, a degree of comprehension is important if we’re likely to think we might like it.  These are key factors in online engagement: where understanding and affinity are increased, there’s a statistically significant increase in our likelihood to engage in WOM.  And if all that’s in place, our respondents reported a very significant increase in their intention to pay to see the movie – to be specific 75% of the variance is explained by those factors in combination. Research shows that an advertisement is a lot more effective if it generates word-of-mouth but we think this is the first time it’s been measured in this way with movie trailers.

For us, these are early days, but we have a research direction on how trailers can be designed specifically for the purpose of stimulating engagement during the pre-release period.  By that we do not mean the “drive” period – where intense marketing activities take place two weeks prior to a film’s release - we mean the entire pre-release period, from the first information about an upcoming film hits the web.

The Internet, which makes it so easy for studios to advertise by cleverly leaking information and to monitor audience engagement, is also the reason why box office performance might be disappointing. Often, we see a trailer that we like but then decide to download the movie because it’s a rainy Sunday, or because we’re a bit ‘tight’ with money, or even because everyone else is busy and, who wants to be seen at the cinema alone? So what is it that makes us pay to see a film after all? Is it just the trailer or is it that everyone is talking about it? Or is it Harrison Ford showing up at the end of Star Wars VII #2 trailer saying “Chewie, we’re home” that makes us feel like we have to go watch the movie right now? Multiple times!

[Winner of The Golden Fleece Award at this year's ceremony.]

GTA 16 –  Watching the Trailer with an Audience of Trailermakers

We had the pleasure of attending the 16th Annual Golden Trailer Awards Show in Los Angeles at the Saban Theater, a week ago.  It’s our 3rd time at the event and we have show founder Evelyn Brady-Watters, to thank for including us in the distribution of tickets.       

For years, the Clio Key Art Awards (in partnership with The Hollywood Reporter -- the Oscars of Trailers, celebrating their 44th year in October) had it all to themselves, before Ms. Brady-Watters and sister, Monica, decided the trailer business deserved --and would support-- another celebration of its creative products and personnel.     We’re glad they did. GTA is a perennially entertaining event with ample networking, and gladhanding opportunities.    

While taped and excerpted to YouTube, the event is pitched to its industry audience and it has a decidedly clubby atmosphere. Typically hosted with sass and snark by a famous face, this year TJ Miller, star of Silicon Valley and the voice of several animated blockbusters (Tuffnut from How to Train Your Dragon, among them), did the honors.   Amidst the well-deserved self-congratulation and obligatory shout outs to Studio Clients who “make it all possible,” a steady stream of  ribald, self-conscious, self-deprecating remarks expressed the stress, the stakes, the silliness and the delight mixed with disbelief  common to those whose privilege it is to market the world’s favorite entertainment.

Given our interest in understanding the audience experience of trailers, trailers produced by GTA honorees on behalf of features, documentaries, video games and tv programs, there was an surreal quality to watching this audience respond to trailers they had made to communicate with audiences they had imagined responding in anticipated and appropriate ways.  Although they were not the target audience, they couldn’t help being seduced by their own work, by their own appeals, by the onslaught of image, sound, word and graphic design, so skillfully combined to overwhelm the critical faculties and engage with emotion, sense and the unconscious and autonomous faculties of the body.    

We're here to report that the men and women of the industry don’t just appreciate their craftsmanship and function dispassionately; they respond in anticipated and appropriate ways as well, consuming their products willingly, succumbing to their appeals and experiencing their aural, haptic and visual effects.  And it wasn’t just the consequence of an open and well staffed bar.  While critical judgment was the order of the night---and critical judgment was rendered (by a  panel composed of filmmaking professionals from just outside the immediate industry)—this audience appeared more inclined to root and cheer than analyze or criticize.   We can hardly blame them.  Trailers do that to anyone, no matter how involved you are in their manufacture or study.

Another uncanny, mirror-stage moment (among several) was watching the GTA Event Trailer,  a compilation of excerpts of trailers in competition used to advertise the live show about to commence.  Not surprisingly, the GTA produces a series of short previews of the categories  and contenders for the event which it screens on lobby monitors during the reception and elsewhere.   In such trailers of trailers, the editing (or cutting, as they say) is intense.  There is no classic narrative here, nor that compressed, metonymic mode of storytelling found in trailers, obliging viewers to associate and leap at plot points, albeit with a helping hand from music, dialogue and copy.   And yet, in context, such a  compilation is perfectly intelligible due to the comparison and contrast--a fundamental form of argumentation-- that structures such a "clip show" of trailers.   Presumably, the Judges had access to full trailers when making their decisions. 

Now, while we invite you read about the winning trailers, posters, video-game trailers, tv spots and other kinds or film-promotional efforts awarded Golden Trailer Trophies (76 categories in all, each statuette featuring a gold-plated 1950’s house trailer atop a pedestal) we devote our remaining remarks to the awards that seems most iconic, revelatory and germane to our interest in audiences, their perception of trailers and the film industry’s perception of them:  The Golden Fleece Award & The Trashiest Trailer Award.   

Despite it’s mythological reference, The Golden Fleece Award has nothing to do with sheepskin but everything to do with deception, the fleecing of hard earned entertainment dollars from unwitting filmgoers. This award, one of 18 presented live at the event--a very diplomatic description appears on the FAQ page-- honors the trailer maker that most artfully and effectively dresses the turkey, burnishes the bomb or gilds the turd, as industry players phrase it.  In other words, The Golden Fleece rewards an excellent trailer for a "not so great film." Quick visits to Rotten Tomatos and Box Office Mojo confirm that the four films –The Boy Next Door, The Giver, Lost River & The Pyramid—were critical misses, although The Boy Next Door & The Giver secured 50M and 45M respectively in gross receipts, whereas Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut, Lost River, has made only 45K in the month since its release.  Sadly, at least for its producer and distributor, The Pyramid has recouped a modest 2.7M, which only goes to show that even the most skillful trailer cannot perform miracles.  And yet, to watch each of these trailers is to see turd-gilding at a high level of artistry.    

[nb: I do not think the CLIO/Key Art Awards offers a prize for this category of achievement, so I congratulate GTA for its candor about a central dynamic – an open secret, no less-- of the industry it promotes and celebrates. ]

Of course, members of the trailer industry appreciate that their mission is not only to represent the feature but to represent it in the most appealing light.  Often, these objectives can be pursued simultaneously.  Occasionally, however, they  conflict, and as with so many other institutions subject to dual mandates, money tends to predominate. The commercial imperative to open a film, even when its excellence is dubious, takes priority. This tension and this reality explain why audiences approach trailers with a healthy amount of skepticism. They have been persuaded too many times before to see films that are not (enough or at all) like the film that the trailer presented OR, that are like the film the trailer presents, but also not excellent, or indeed, any good at all.

We, all of us, trailer makers included, have been fooled before, though not every time, just as occasionally, we’re astonished to find that a trailer under-sells the qualities of its feature. The gamble of buying a movie ticket, with its potential for delight or dismay, is perhaps an under-appreciated component of trailer watching. The game they propose, and the emotional payoff they provide when we guess or judge appropriately, is a seductive, possibly an addictive one.    

Watching the Trailer is very excited to welcome Dr Jonathan Wroot, from the University of Worcester for this week's guest blog post. 

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Trailers and DVDs are often seen as promotional extra-texts that exist in relation to a specific film. However, such material is produced by specific industries and institutions. Therefore, should they not be discussed as individual media texts? This was the argument I made in a paper presented at the MeCCSA conference in January 2014 (see here). Evidence was taken from the actions of the UK distributor, Arrow Video, which will be the focus of this blog post. Theoretical concepts and interpretations were debated in the original paper. However, this post will mainly focus on the significant content within the Arrow Video Stories.

The first 'Arrow Video Story': Deadly Blessing

From 2013 onwards, Arrow has posted trailers online that coincided with its latest DVD and Blu-Ray re-releases. The first was for Wes Craven’s Deadly Blessing (1981). These were not just trailers for the films (which range from Black Sabbath (1963) to Blow Out (1981)), as they also detailed the new content on each DVD release (such as the film’s picture quality, packaging for the disc, and newly recorded interviews with the cast and crew). Moreover, the trailers are categorised as part of the “Arrow Video Story”, and so do not simply act as advertising for the latest ancillary products related to specific films. These trailers are emphasised as individual texts to be watched both individually and as part of a particular distributor’s activities. They also emphasise the DVDs as new texts to be enjoyed. Therefore, if distribution companies are treating ancillary material, such as trailers and DVDs, as singular media texts, academic research should do the same.

The majority of Arrow Film’s releases, especially throughout 2013, have been as part of the Arrow Video sub-label. The extent of this section of Arrow’s operations can be seen on its website – where the label's site claims it ‘brings you the best cult films in deluxe editions with newly commissioned artwork, specially curated extras and booklets. Arrow Video editions take in genre staples like Italian horror, grindhouse classics, and much more…’ (take a look here). 

The Arrow Video sub-label page is the only Arrow webpage divided up into genres, as well as certain directors and countries. These releases are also often available on both Blu-Ray and DVD – and each case is elaborately designed, showing that they do not only have a multitude of extras, but also various collectible items and artwork within the packaging. Arrow do not just see these releases as only appealing to a niche market as luxury items. DVDs with a reduced amount of extras and artwork are also as part of another sub-label, ArrowDrome, where titles are allocated colours according to their genre.

Arrow Video markets its releases through its unique trailers which are classified as part of the ‘Arrow Video Story’, and are posted on the Arrow Video YouTube channel shortly before a title’s UK release – as well as through Facebook and Twitter. These sorts of trailers do not exist for other Arrow Films titles or the ArrowDrome re-releases. The Arrow Video Story trailers advertise the film, but only as one ‘chapter’ within its short running time. The second chapter briefly gives an overview of the extra content that the disc includes – which is often newly made or never seen before – whereas the third details the packaging that the disc comes in. Most of the Arrow Video Stories are no longer than 90 seconds, and can all be found on this YouTube playlist.

(Below: Knightriders - The Arrow Video Story)

Here, the DVDs are presented as new editions of the films – in that Arrow Video is presenting these releases as new experiences for consumers to enjoy – and not just a new way of viewing a particular film. There is a bit more going on as well. The trailers are classified as part of the Arrow Video Story – which could mean the label’s overall view of its own actions, but this classification does not feature on the Arrow Video packaging. The phrase Arrow Video Story is only attached to the trailers for the DVD releases that are posted on the distributor’s YouTube channel.

I believe that this phrasing of the Arrow Video trailers shows that the label wants to catalogue its trailers as comprehensively as its DVD collection. In the past, Arrow Video did release extensive catalogues of its releases – and they could be requested by post, or downloaded as a PDF of the website. Now, its website has been radically updated to reflect the categories that were contained in its printed catalogues. In addition, there have been 61 Arrow Video Stories released to date on YouTube.

The trailers are not just being used as a means of promoting these DVD releases, but they are also being made available as a new experience for UK media consumers and web browsers. Just through viewing the Arrow Video stories on YouTube, viewers can get a sense of the film’s history as well as reasoning behind Arrow’s treatment of the film (e.g. this could just be because of a film’s cult status, though allusions are also made to positive critical reception and commercial success, where relevant). For instance, take the Chapter Two section of the Arrow Video Story for Big Trouble In Little China (1986). Many comments from the cast and crew illustrate how they thought the film had a great script, but this feeling was not shared by the studio executives and producers. It is now regarded as a film that was ahead of its time in the use of visual effects, as well as trampolines and wire-work for its stunts.

(Below: Big Trouble in Little China)

Arrow are treating their DVD re-releases of films as separate media experiences compared to whatever has come before. The trailers not only reinforce this, but are an important experience themselves. Arrow wishes to use them to chart its continuing story in the UK home media market. To briefly refer to the full conclusions of my original paper, paratexts and similar terms are useful for categorising promotional and ancillary materials related to film and media. However, the actions of Arrow and other companies can illustrate how these materials can be consumed and interacted with independently of the “central” text. Therefore, it may be more useful to use or adapt conceptual terms such as intertexts. This is in contrast to paratexts, which suggest a certain hierarchy between films and their ancillary materials. Trailers are becoming more prevalent in today’s media culture, and the concepts used to describe their behaviour need to reflect this.

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Jonathan Wroot, University of Worcester

Dr Jonathan Wroot is a Sessional Lecturer at the University of Worcester. He has taught classes on introductory film history and theoretical concepts; audience research; cult cinema; film reviewing; and documentary cinema. His PhD research concerns the distribution and marketing of Japanese films on DVD in the UK. Several articles derived from this work will be appearing throughout 2015. Further to these developments, Jonathan will be editing the intended publication for the collected papers of “Distributors, Discs and Disciples: Exploring the Home Media Renaissance”. Another research project on the Zatoichi film franchise is currently in development. Jonathan has presented at several conferences in London, Bournemouth, Manchester, Coventry, and St Andrews. His research on Arrow Video is also intended to be a subject within a future monograph.

[We're delighted to share a post from our friend and colleague, Dr. Enrica Picarelli, an Italian scholar currently at the Centre for Comparative Studies, Lisbon University. Her blog is Space of Attraction and eminently worth reading. This piece is both longer than our typical post and slightly more theoretical in scope and academic in jargon. The terms haptic/hapticity will be, perhaps, unfamiliar, but they are great words to know, referring as they do to the sense of touch or tactile experience and ways of "feeling" the visual. ]  



Last February, the art collective Nest, based in Nairobi, released To Catch a Dream {click here to see the Vimeo video}, a 13-minute collaborative fashion film featuring Vivienne Westwood’s muse Ajuma Nasenyana and a team of award-winning stylists from Kenya, including Namnyak Odupoy, Ami Doshi, Kepha Maina, Jamil and Azra Walji, Katungulu Mwendwa, Ann McCreath and Adele Dejak. Jim Chuchu, whose work on Kenya’s LGBT community has been screened to acclaim at festivals worldwide (Voulrias 2014), directed; Wangechi Ngugi produced. Because of its high production values and cast of acclaimed artists, the online release of To Catch a Dream was widely anticipated, mentioned, shared, and positively reviewed in lifestyle publications and social media.

To Catch a Dream is an exploration of withdrawal, desire and death focusing on a young widow in mourning, haunted by the memory of her husband. Every night he appears in her dreams, until the exhausted protagonist decides to chase his ghost with a dream-catcher.  Crossing dimensions in her sleep, she travels across the land of the dead for one last encounter with her love and other otherworldly entities. Ultimately, the encounter proves fatal and she is trapped in death’s dreamworld. 

I consider To Catch a Dream in this post because its production values, aim, and effects attest to the transformations of promotional forms in the 2.0 environment and to the difficulties scholars have defining, and therefore delimiting, the scope and properties of discreet advertising formats. In a review, journalist Diana Opoti asks whether to label To Catch a Dream “an ad campaign” or a “fashion film” (2015). Her hesitation stems from the fact that, as happens with many promotional formats, the immediate commercial aim of the feature – the showcasing of apparel by renowned designers – is somehow eschewed. Audiences interested in learning about the garments displayed on screen have either to wait for the credits, scan the promotional poster or rely on external information, such as reviews or the cast’s press statements. The primary goal of the production is, in fact, to engross viewers in an unfolding narrative. Sunny Dolat, stylist and fashion director, notes that the garments “reflect the different phases of the widow’s journey through the dreamworld,” thereby elevating the narrative element above the aestheticized displaying of apparel for commercial purposes (UpNairobi 2015).

This instrumental use of clothes and accessories allows Nest to address place-based and culture-specific issues in a story-driven audiovisual project. Dolat continues:

Ajuma's red, slim cut Dream Country ensemble, with black detailing, detachable leather sleeves and their flowing chiffon extensions was intentionally designed to evoke the memory of bridal wear. Another character, the Air Guide, wears a piece showing strong elemental references. The opulent peacock feather neckpiece and voluminous loops of sheer cloth celebrate desert breezes with each of Air Guide's motions (Opoti 2015) 

Fashion, in this instance, becomes character, contributing to the weaving of a storyworld about “our disquieting modern identities, re-imagining our pasts and inhabiting mythical African futures” (Nest). In concert with the choice to shoot the dreamworld among the iconic landmarks of Magadi and Lake Naivasha and to have the characters speak in local languages (Dholuo, Swahili, Kikamba, Sheng, Tigrinya, Kimeru and Turkana), To Catch a Dream creates an atmospheric spectacle that attracts for a number of reasons. Among these is the intention to root the commercial concerns of the eight stylists in a project devoted to exploring “layers of how Africans are seen and unseen” (Nest). The project’s potential lies as well in its execution, where artistic vision incorporates elements of various genres, including fantasy, gothic, costume photography, and cinematographic teaser/trailers.

To Catch a Dream exemplifies the role of the fashion industry in pushing the boundaries of advertising and commercial formats. Fashion films have more and more become crossbreeds of different promotional genres. They borrow conventions from trailers, documentaries, teasers, video-art, and film proper, while preserving a formal autonomy that makes them a successful means of consumer attraction. Nest co-founder George Gachara explains that To Catch a Dream was developed as an experimental fashion intervention and short film, designed to provide a medium for the creation and sharing of fashion experiences, products and knowledge. It embeds fashion in an evocative spectacle where atmosphere –the lived or screen-mediated experience of a culture and location (East African & Kenya) that are both exotic and uncannily familiar – constitutes the main source of value. 

As in the case studies Marketa Uhlirova analyzes in her work on fashion films, a “synergy” forms between film effect and fashion effect, whereby sensorial persuasion and illusion address the viewer as both spectator and potential buyer (2013:122).  The phenomenological state thus achieved is analogous to the spectatorial pleasures associated with the cinema of attraction, based on the simultaneous experience of defamiliarization and the acquisition of new knowledge. Fashion film “extend[s] the properties of physical garments into new mental spaces where experimental effects of impressionistic and poetic cinema play a significant role – as do the qualities of sound and rhythm,” she proposes. (2013:123). 

Montage is, obviously, the principal mechanism behind the creation of the mental space of illusion and persuasion that entices media users as actual viewers and consumers. Borrowing from Laura Mark’s study, Gary Needham refers to the “haptic” aesthetic of fashion films, where cinematic conventions like close-up and slow motion combine with diegetic and non-diegetic sound editing to deliver the impression of materiality (2013:108). To Catch a Dream follows a cinematic model, investing in soundtrack and narrative rhythm to establish anticipation and induce deferral. These affects mark the escapism of both the filmic and the spectactorial (consumer) experience. 

Consequently, this film oscillates between narrative closure and the postponement of the pleasure of wearing, touching or buying the garments displayed on screen. Indeed, it promotes the imaginative act of coming in contact with the material referents of the filmed objects as well as with the extended narrative universe that we only glimpse in the film.  It is here that To Catch a Dream borrows most notably from the experience of watching a trailer. 

The fashion film, in fact, operates in line with the “anticipatory consciousness” that Lisa Kernan ascribes to trailer spectatorship, whereby “trailers are what we imagine – and hope – the films to become; the films they promote are thus ever richer in the imagined interstices of the paradoxical trailer montage than they can ever be in their narrative ‘fullness’ on the screen” (2004:210). Since trailers “hover in the consciousness of the viewer as incomplete, unformed ‘ideas’”, they can be viewed as a “hopeful beginning” whose success plays on the constant deferral of pleasure (2004:210). Similarly, shorts films that promote fashion garments through audiovisual narrative set in place a universe that demands the viewer’s investment in the fiction, bringing it to life through the literal embodiment of its elements.

To Catch a Dream exemplifies a genre of productions that exploit the style and persuasive power of costume in movement, along with the editing and narrative conventions of mainstream cinema, to redefine our understanding of commercial promotion and artistic practice. This ever-evolving hybrid of aesthetic forms, “sit[ting] somewhere on the margins of conventional advertising” (Uhlirova 2013:121), invites us to consider and systematize how to look at fashion and what to take from this engagement with identification and point of view.   

 

Bibliography

Kernan, L. (2004), Coming attractions: Reading American movie trailers. University of Texas Press.

Needham, G. (2013), ‘The Digital Fashion Film’ in Bruzzi, Stella, and Pamela Church Gibson, eds. Fashion cultures: theories, explorations and analysis. Routledge.

Nest, ‘The Nest’, Nest. http://www.thisisthenest.com/about/ 

Opoti, D. (2015), ‘Kenya: When Fashion Meet Film’, The Star, 20 February http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/where-fashion-meet-film 

 Nest, (2015), ‘To Catch a Dream’, Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/116848487

Uhlirova, M. (2013), ‘The fashion Film Effect’ in Bartlett, Djurdja, Shaun Cole, and Agnès Rocamora, eds. Fashion Media: Past and Present. A&C Black.

UpNairobi (2015), ‘Film Review: To Catch a Dream’, Up Nairobi, 24 February. http://www.upnairobi.com/dt_portfolio/film-review-to-catch-a-dream/  

Voulrias, C. (2014), ‘Kenyan film tells stories of LGBT lives’, Al Jazeera America, 5 September. http://america.aljazeera.com/blogs/scrutineer/2014/9/5/kenyan-film-tellsstoriesoflgbtlives.html