Convergence, Transmedia and Participatory Marketing: Trailers Lead the Way

Posted on June 26, 2012 by Frederick Greene


Mashup using Brave dialogue and Game of Thrones footage: A “pleasant family film for all ages.”

After attending the Transmedia conference recently, at which MIT Media Studies Professor and Media Lab stalwar Henry Jenkins was the keynote speaker (regrettably absent due to food poisoning!), I got a used copy of his 2006 book

, which maps the contemporary media landscape through case studies of popular cultural engagement with mass cultural productions including The Matrix, Harry Potter, Star Wars, American Idol and Survivor, among others.

For an academic work, it’s remarkably accessible and includes a 15 page glossary of all the terms you need to know to understand what’s going on, what’s at stake, and where we might be headed.

While reading, I had the same experience as I did during the Transmedia conference: I knew something about the subject already due to my long immersion in the world of a/v movie marketing, a place where convergence and transmedia have been developed under the guise of opening films and engaging audiences in whatever media available and by whatever means possible.

In this post, I argue that trailers (and TV spots) constitute a set of “social and cultural practices,” or “protocols” whose mastery by audiences allows them to interact with, be inspired by, share and compare, research and explore, repurpose and refashion filmed and digital content, across multiple media platforms in pursuit of the entertainment experiences they want. I call such reactions to and engagement with trailers convergence. Moreover, audiences have been interacting with trailers across multiple platforms since before convergence was coined or widely circulated.

Let’s start with a definition:

“By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want. Convergence is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial, cultural and social changes depending on who’s speaking and what they think they are talking about.” (Jenkins, pp.2-3)

Jenkins’ develops his understanding in the glossary, noting that convergence “pertains to the circulation of media in our culture,” stipulating that it: a) flow across platforms and/or multiple and intersecting media systems; b) entail cooperation between multiple (media) industries; c) inspire migratory behavior by audiences; d) require no fixed relationships; e) be process oriented; and f) presume collective consumption and collaborative activity (Jenkins: 282)

The two video mashups (fan produced parodies) embedded in this post are inspired by Disney/Pixar‘s latest release, Brave, combining the trailer (visuals and/or dialogue and soundscape) with footage from very different TV and feature film entertainments. A fan-trailer or mashup is the sincerest expression of a “lovemark” for a brand or commercial product. It takes time, resources, effort, skill and passion.

In a mashup, the audience member and fan is inspired in his/her creativity by two (or more) commercial products which in unauthorized, but imaginative collision, produce a different, often hilarious and typically unanticipated meaning. Genres are bent; storylines are re-conceived and redrawn. Whether done for the joy of exploring the collision of films and genres, or as a “calling card” on the industry in which the aspiring trailermaker wishes to work, mash-ups have their own sites, fans and formulae.

Trailers are participatory: whether it’s an audience that cheers or jeers, talks over the on-screen presentation, or walks out to the concession area. And, trailers invite verbal comments and post from audiences at trailer sites and blog. As a reaction, perhaps, to their length, their familiarity, their self-conscious and commercial quality, trailers appear to lower the barrier for critical engagement and opinion. Such gratuitous and often generous audience reactions can be, and often are, sifted by marketers in order to assess the effect and success of their a/v marketing efforts. Intense and sustained negative reactions (in testing and after release) can motivate another pass at the brief and another version available online and in theaters.

As for the capacity of convergence to reshape pop culture, trailers offer a compelling demonstration. As one of the most searched subjects/categories on the web, trailers have become an archived, celebrated, film resource and entertainment over the last 20 years. Prior to that they were ephemeral and disposable. Technology and formal innovation in A/V movie marketing has not only changed feature filmmaking and inspired music videos, quick-cut editing and the dense, multi-layered non-linear story telling common to trailers has inflected video games and (TV) series recaps, bumpers and commercial advertising generally.

As an exemplary transmedia artifact, trailers place new and substantial demands on audiences, students and bloggers who now watch them repeatedly and in slow-motion, searching for information (music cues? cast? quality of feature? cool editing and FX? production values?) which they then share, compare, publish and debate.

Because of the marketing function of trailers and tv spots, their IP protections and status is (and has long been) ill-defined. The studios who pay for them, want them to be downloaded, shared, recirculated and quoted, since all of those actions imply fan investment and de facto promotion. Trailers present ideal opportunities for fan cultural production, appropriating and repurposing the content for their own story telling needs and entertainment desires. Although they don’t explicitly exist in the public domain, fair use of trailers is widely assumed and exploited. As marginalia and film paratexts designed for marketing and publicity purposes, the protection and policing of trailers as IP is relaxed.

The community of spoilers that Jenkins describe in his chapter on SURVIVOR, who sought to ferret out confidential information pertaining to that shows contestants and location and competition, etc., has a corollary in the community of trailer buffs, many of whom in their online reactions to a feature and its marketing materials, will use the term “spoilers” to warn readers of content they may not want to know. For those who write about trailers as a window on the feature, trailer analyses are an opportunity to share inside or specialized information, as well as to judge the quality of the coming attractions and to describe or even to reveal surprises in the film.

Relative to multiple and intersecting media systems and devices, let me list some of the media on which trailers and tv spots are exhibited and consumed: movie screens; tv screens; ipods, ipad, and iphones, Smart phones generally, computer screens, game-boys, game-players. As for the media systems and industries involved, I count: theatrical exhibition, commercial (free) tv; cable, telephony and online. Trailers have been made and distributed on film, in videotape and digitally; they’ve been viewed with Quicktime and Real-player, streamed and downloaded.

Books have trailers; TV shows have trailers; video games and feature films have trailers. Even trailers have trailers. On Youtube or at an official film site, you can see teasers, tv spots, official and fan-trailers. Movie posters will often feature a still image that figures prominently in the trailer, as well as copy shared by both. Studios and production companies host trailers; fans host trailer; academics and industry professionals and educational institutions host and archive movie trailers and related materials. Inquiring fans trawl for content wherever and whenever.

Trailers have become “evidence,” data to analyze, and content to collaboratively consume and collectively experience with other audience members. And for audiences enamored by a particular story, but impatient for the studio marketing department to release the official trailers, Fan trailers are the DIY solution. Lovers of the source material can get out in front of the marketing onslaught, demonstrating their emotional investment and engaging with others who feel similar about a book, a comic, characters and their story(ies).


3-way Mashup of Dead Space and Prometheus with Brave

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The Life of Pi Fan-Made Trailers: All Sizzle Without the Steak

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Frederick Greene

I saw the 3D trailer for Life of Pi ahead of Prometheus last week and was eager to write about it since it’s that rare type, the single scene trailer, that’s simple to describe and easy to discuss. Alas, that trailer has yet to be made available online. What did lead the search results were fan-made trailers, one of which I’ve embedded above as an example of what you can do to promote and advertise a coming attraction when you have no access to the finished footage of the feature. (Often, fan trailers are made after the release, when the feature is available for use.)

The trailer above may also be categorized as a sizzle, a term that emerged from the contemporary practice of pitching a tv and movie ideas, that’s been borrowed and redefined by advertisers, publicists and marketers for their own specific needs. Originally, a sizzle was a mocked up visualization of a concept or story idea. As the Producer’s Guild website explains: In the 21st century, “most producers must bring video to an exec to pitch their show, especially reality/non-fiction TV….By seeing a sizzle reel the buyers can better (literally) see the idea in action. They can get a better sense of the look & feel of the show. And finally, they can gauge the producer’s professionalism.” Such sizzles are typically based on footage shot especially for the purposes of exploring and manifesting the concept/premise to be sold.

Trailer boutiques have long been putting out “sizzle” reels (also known as promos or demo reels) to showcase their work and explain their brand. Typically short–about 5 minutes or so–such a “sizzle reel” demonstrates the visual artistry and marketing chops of a given a/v advertising company based on a selection of their “best” or most compelling work.

Lately, the definition of sizzle has been expanded yet again to comprise visualizations of a movie or TV show that has yet to be made using special shoot or borrowed materials. Recently, I’ve done some work for Jijo Reed, a former trailer-making client who’s started a new business devoted to producing professional quality promos and pitch materials for books and scripts that have yet to be developed into moving pictures. It’s called SizzlePitch, and basically what Jijo and his editors and copywriters do is create an “as if” trailer out of stock or borrowed footage. With the professionally produced and visually appealing sales tool that result, aspiring filmmakers can raise money, seek distribution, and attach talent.

The fan-made trailer above is actually a sizzle, since none of its visual, sound, verbal and graphic elements are from the film, scheduled for a December 2012 release. The distributor and production company logos are wrong (WB and Legendary instead of Fox and Rhythm & Hues); the footage is from Titanic, 10,000 BC., Angels and Demons, etc., while the music cue is taken from the trailer (and possibly the soundtrack) of Inception. The copy, though prolix and uneven, seems original.

Regardless of my complaints about the copy, I have to credit the editor for his or her skill in finding relevant and appropriate scenes from other movies and to splicing them together in such a appealing and emotionally affecting manner. Life of Pi is exactly the kind of material to inspire such a labor of love, and possibly a platform for the display of the producer and editor’s talent.


Here’s another fan-made promo/sizzle/trailer that showed up in the top 5 results. It uses still photographs of wildlife and maritime scenes as well as a more restrained copy treatment to tell the story. Thoughtful editing and the zoom feature (pushing in and pulling out of an image) produce the effect of motion. Toward the end, a recording of an especially moving passage from the text (read by?) heralds the incredible and uplifting character of the story, which we can only hope the movie will likewise capture.

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movietrailers101 by Fred Greene is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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The Great Gatsby Trailer: Stars, spectacle, style, budget–this trailer has it all!

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Frederick Greene

Despite some caviling about director Baz Lurhman‘s choice of 3D for his remake of the great American novel, The Great Gatsby, the trailer is breathtaking. Seeing the movie was a foregone conclusion for me, regardless of the trailer, since I’m interested in the story and I admire Lurhman’s visual artistry and moviemaking skill. Nonetheless, the trailer invites critical attention as a demonstration of what you can do when you’ve got the goods (a quality, anticipated release), the stars, the spectacle (cinematic riches, scale, production value), acclaimed directorial and cinematographic flair and a marketing budget big enough to purchase the right music cues from two of the most relevant acts in the business.

At 2:21, the trailer is told through dialogue and scenes, rather than copy or voice over. Gloriously ornate art-deco grill-work designed graphic cards introduce the director and his credits (Romeo & Juliet; Moulin Rouge) as well as the three principle stars (Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby; Tobey Maguire as Nick Carroway; and Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan), the distributor and production company (Warner Bros & Village Roadshow), the title and the release date information. While the quick cutting (app. 1 per second, and much faster than that in the climactic moments of the trailer) provides an abundance of visual information and character detail, story elements are schematic and general rather than particular and specific. Presumably, the marketers are counting on all of us (in America, at least) having read the source material in High School, and remembering at least some of the plot.

The trailermakers avoid the chief danger of marketing a movie with everything going for it and which people are already eager to see: telling too much and thereby competing with the imagination of likely audiences. Impression and emotion, style and visual splendor instead are displayed richly, while the explicit relations that obtain between Nick and Gatsby, Gatsby and Daisy, Daisy and Tom, Hazel and her fate, etc., are thematized rather than elaborated. What is emphasizer, however, are the very strengths of the material: glamor, beauty, privilege and mystery from an idealized moment in American History, the Jazz Age/Roaring 20’s, a time of exuberance and excess, opportunity and license, made all the more poignant by its brevity and catastrophic end.

Briefly, the trailer is articulated thus: to the strains of Jay Z and Kanye West‘s recent collaboration “No Church in the Wild,” we open on NYC in the 1920’s. McGuire intones a description of the time and place in elegant, epigrammatic phrases. We see scenes of merry-making and pleasure, prosperity and opulence, as the name Gatsby passes from mouth to mouth as the owner of enormous wealth, giver of spectacular parties and the object of general curiosity.

Gatsby appears as an inscrutable figure of power and discretion to patronize Nick (his tenant, as I know from the book, not from the trailer) and romance Daisy (a socially prominent neighbor), provoking the anger of her husband, Tom (Edgerton.) As Gatsby becomes known, the dance of society that swirls around him (matched, I may say, by the arcing and circling camera work and the pulsing push, pull and scan of the editing) spins every faster until the centripetal force of its motion proves too much for the center to restrain. In a word, events spin out of control, represented in the trailer by the pace of editing as well as by the violence of action, word and movement that succeeds the choreographed, harmonious scenes of the opening.

In the back end, Jack White‘s cover of the U2 power ballad, “Love is Blindness,” provides the musical cue and narrative commentary for the dissolution, when Gatsby’s mystique is punctured and his composure crumbles. It’s as if, when unknown and unseen he is all-powerful, but when met and revealed, descending from exalted solitude to carnal intimacy with Daisy, he unravels. While I am loath to reduce the theme of the novel or the film to the equation of love with blindness, for the narrative needs of the trailer, it suffices. (On a literary note, it’s a great cue not only for the inimitable Mr. White’s soulful singing, but for its connection to the all-seeing spectacles on the billboard for Dr. TJ. Eckleburg, an image and symbol familiar from student essays on the novel, but all the more relevant in a scopophilic medium like film.)

On the question of visual storytelling, watching the trailer repeatedly without sound, made me reflect on editorial objectives and discrete choices. While many, if not most scenes are chosen to represent and develop plot and character–or to demonstrate the film’s visual artistry–there are shots whose purpose I cannot clearly explain. That is not atypical: the density of images and the speed with which one complex shot gives way to the next, defy easy or immediate assimilation, solely in terms of the visual sense. Dialogue, copy and music/sound cues are needed to organize and explain all the visual “data” the editor has given us to consider.

But what about a shot, say, of men swinging pick-axes (at 1:16), shown in silhouette which lasts for all of a second, squeezed between a shot of two persons entering a party in formal attire and a polo pony and rider approaching a grand mansion via elaborate gardens. Is the contrast between labor and leisure, represented as that between black and white and color, that which is being expressed? If so, it’s an awfully small gesture toward the sweat equity behind all this conspicuous consumption. Or later (at 1:29) a yellow convertible coupe drives through a blasted industrial landscape (the “Valley of Ashes”), en route from Manhattan to the leafy precincts of Gatsby’s North Shore estate. We’ve seen this car speeding and careening through crowded urban streets before. Why now should we see this infernal vision of the car in Queens, apart from its graphic match to the shot preceding it? (Tom, played by Joel Edgerton, blows smoke from his cigar and dissolves into the shot of the car driving right to left, in a smokey haze of pollution.)

As you see, both shots can be explained or justified, albeit by issues the trailer hardly foregrounds (labor) and in relation to purely formal, incidental matters (a graphic match to an earlier shot). Neither moves the ball, in terms of story telling or audience appeal. It is said that every shot in a trailer counts, but the definition of counts is what I’m trying to ascertain. This subject to be continued, elsewhere and with respect to other trailers. For the interim, I’ll presume that such shots–such edits–serve a formal, rhythmic and or visual function, that I don’t yet appreciate.

Apart from the quiet, slow scenes between Daisy and Gatsby, obliquely and quietly indicating their growing involvement, the trailer is thronged with people and motion, event and energy. That’s how we think of the Jazz Age, as a time of tireless merry making and activity, I suppose. But, given how little we learn about the actual plot complications, it’s movement for movement’s sake, spectacle for spectacle’s sake, parties and dinner and nightclubs because silence is terrifying and stillness is death. Of course, if Gatsby felt that 90 years ago, imagine how we feel today, and what movie audiences have come to expect from movies by Mr. Luhrman. It appears, from the trailer that he will reward those who admire his visual virtuosity with yet another splendid spectacle. With how much faith for the beloved novel, I cannot say. His real obligation is to the moviemaking tradition, and this trailer shows the respect he has for that duty.

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