DVD, Blu-ray and Beyond: Navigating Formats and Platforms within Media Consumption

249 Pages·2017·3.954 MB·English

by  Jonathan Wroot, Andy Willis (eds.)

NAVIGATING FORMATS
AND PLATFORMS WITHIN
MEDIA CONSUMPTION
Edited by Jonathan Wroot & Andy Willis
DVD, Blu-ray and Beyond
“The volume makes a great addition to the important investigation that reveals
how the medium that carries the film to the consumer plays as important a role
as the aesthetic features of the film text.”
—Dina Iordanova FRSA, Professor of Global Cinema and Creative Cultures,
University of St Andrews, Scotland
“As the digital distribution revolution rolls on, it is easy to overlook the impor-
tance of optical disc formats and the role they have played -- and continue to
play -- in media distribution. This thought-provoking collection provides a timely
exploration of the cultural and industrial legacies of the DVD, and the ongoing
interplay between physical and digital media formats. Highly recommended for
anyone interested in the past, present, and future of home entertainment.”
—Ramon Lobato, RMIT University, author of Shadow Economies of Cinema
Jonathan Wroot · Andy Willis
Editors
DVD, Blu-ray and
Beyond
Navigating Formats and Platforms within Media
Consumption
Editors
Jonathan Wroot Andy Willis
University of Greenwich University of Salford
London, UK Salford, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-62757-1 ISBN 978-3-319-62758-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-62758-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951531
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C
ontents
1 Introduction 1
Jonathan Wroot and Andy Willis
Part I The Continuing Significance of Discs in Film Consumption
2 Disneyizing Home Entertainment Distribution 15
Jason Scott
3 ‘Now I Am the Master’: Home Video, Canon, and
Authorship Among George, Lucasfilm, Fox, and Fans 35
Andrew James Myers
4 Combining Nemo: Pixar Home Media and the DVD of
Narrative Integration 53
Christopher Holliday
5 Letting the Fans Be Involved: Third Window’s
Cultivation of an Audience for Disc Releases 73
Jonathan Wroot
v
vi CONTENTS
6 The Education Market for Screen Media: DVD in a Time
of Digital Abundance 93
Ruari Elkington
Part II Contexts: Patterns of Distribution, Exhibition
and Consumption
7 Film Distribution: A Changing Business 115
Roderik Smits
8 The Rise of the Feature Documentary—Fact or Fiction? 135
Shane O’Sullivan
9 Up All Night: The Shifting Roles of Home Media
Formats as Transmedia Storytelling 159
Matthew Freeman and William Proctor
10 Box Sets on the Set-Top Box: The Promotion of on
Demand Television in Britain 177
Sam Ward
11 A Labour of Love: Fantrepreneurship in Home Video
Media Distribution 197
Oliver Carter
12 ‘To Own or not to Own?’ Home Video Devices,
Applications, Formats, and the Family Decision-Making
Process Behind the Viewing Choice 215
Ksenia Frolova
Index 237
e C
ditors and ontributors
About the Editors
Jonathan Wroot is a Lecturer at the University of Greenwich. He
teaches classes within film and media studies. His previous research con-
cerns the distribution and marketing of Japanese cinema and he has pub-
lished numerous journal articles on the topic in Arts and The Market,
The East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Frames, and Participations.
Andy Willis is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Salford, UK,
and Senior Visiting Curator for Film at Home, Manchester, UK. He is
a co-author of The Cinema of Alex de la Iglesia (2007), and the editor
of Film Stars: Hollywood and Beyond (2004). He is also the co-editor
of Defining Cult Movies (2003), Spanish Popular Cinema (2004), East
Asian Film Stars (2014), and Chinese Cinemas: International Perspectives
(2016).
Contributors
Oliver Carter is a senior lecturer in media and cultural theory at the
Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, Birmingham City
University. His research focuses on alternative economies of cultural pro-
duction; forms of industry that are often removed from a formal cultural
industries discourse. He has published work that appears in Murders
and Acquisitions: Representations of the Serial Killer in Popular Culture
vii
viii EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
(A. MacDonald, ed.), The Piracy Effect (R. Braga and G. Caruso, eds.),
Preserving Popular Music Heritage: Do-It-Yourself, Do-It-Together (Sarah
Baker, ed.) and is the author of the forthcoming monograph Making
European Cult Cinema: Fan Enterprise in an Alternative Economy,
published by Amsterdam University Press. He is currently working on
a book about the British adult film industry, this research informing a
forthcoming documentary about the British adult filmmaker Mike
Freeman titled Hardcore Guaranteed (Rose Tinted Productions).
Ruari Elkington is an Associate Lecturer within the school of Creative
Practice at Queensland University of Technology. He completed his
undergraduate degree in Film and TV with First Class Honours at QUT
and received his Ph.D. (The Education Market for Documentary Film:
Digital Shifts in an Age of Content Abundance) through the ARC Centre
of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation. He is strongly
grounded in the industry context of film distribution with a focus on
documentary content. Other research areas include digital screen content
and cineliteracy.
Matthew Freeman is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at
Bath Spa University, and Director of its Media Convergence Research
Centre. He is the author of Historicising Transmedia Storytelling:
Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds (2016), Industrial
Approaches to Media: A Methodological Gateway to Industry Studies
(2016), and the co-author of Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the
Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (2014). His
research examines cultures of production across the borders of media
and history, and he has published in journals such as The International
Journal of Cultural Studies, the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and
Television, and the International Journal of Communication.
Ksenia Frolova is Lecturer in Media, Film and Television at Edge Hill
University. She has recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of
East Anglia. Her doctoral project was an audience study that examined
the use of media technology in the context of contemporary parenting
in the UK. Ksenia’s research interests include digital television, media
audiences, social media, media technology, gender politics and feminist
theory.
Christopher Holliday is Teaching Fellow in Film Studies at King’s
College London specialising in film genre, international film history and
EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS ix
contemporary digital media/animation. He has published several book
chapters and articles on animation, including work that examines child
voice acting in computer-animated films and representations of the ani-
mated house. More recently, he has published articles on contempo-
rary digital animation in Animation Practice, Process & Production and
animation: an interdisciplinary journal. He is currently writing a mon-
ograph on style and genre in the computer-animated film, and is co-edit-
ing a collection of essays that examine the intersection between fantasy
and animation.
Andrew James Myers is a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema and Media
Studies at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic
Arts, where his dissertation focuses on corporate self-reflexivity in the
media industries. He previously served as co-editor-in-chief of the
Mediascape journal, and assisted in the creation of Lantern and the
Media History Digital Library, two award-winning online research tools
for archival media history. His research interests include media industries
and production culture, archival film and television history, new media,
and documentary.
Shane O’Sullivan received his Ph.D. at Roehampton University and
is a Lecturer in Filmmaking at Kingston University, London. His pro-
fessional experience as a documentary filmmaker includes three feature
documentaries (RFK Must Die, Children of the Revolution and Killing
Oswald) exploring political assassination and terrorism, all theatrically
released and broadcast worldwide. He has distributed six documentaries
in UK cinemas through his production company/DVD label E2 Films
and lectured in film distribution at Birmingham City University before
his appointment at Kingston. He also experienced Japanese film distribu-
tion when his film Children of the Revolution was released in thirty cin-
emas there in 2014.
William Proctor is Lecturer in Media Culture and Communication
at Bournemouth University, UK. He is the author of Reboot Culture:
Comics, Film, Transmedia (Palgrave, 2018). William has published arti-
cles and book chapters on popular culture including Batman, James
Bond, The Walking Dead, One Direction fandom, and Star Wars. His
research interests include transmedia storytelling, adaptation, reboot-
ing, franchising, and reception studies. William is currently co-editing
the collections (with Richard McCulloch), Disney’s Star Wars: Forces
x EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
of Production & Promotion and Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Reception
and Participation (University of Iowa Press, 2018); The Scandinavian
Invasion: Critical Perspectives on Nordic Noir (Peter Lang, 2018); and
with Matthew Freeman, Transmedia Earth: Critical Perspectives on
Global Convergence Cultures (Routledge, 2018). William is director of
‘The World Star Wars Project’ and, alongside Matthew Freeman, co-
director of the Transmedia Earth Project.
Jason Scott is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Leeds Trinity
University. His current research focuses on contemporary animation, the
Star Wars franchise, and the Iger-era Disney company more generally.
He is also beginning research on contemporary franchise adaptations in
film and television. The latter relates to his continuing research on the
historical development of the character-oriented franchise in film and
related media.
Roderik Smits is a doctoral candidate in the department of Theatre,
Film, and Television at the University of York. His research focuses
on the changing nature of film distribution. He is a member of the
MeCETES research project (www.mecetes.co.uk), exploring the circula-
tion of contemporary European film and television drama.
Sam Ward is a Senior Analyst at cultural insight consultancy Canopy.
He completed a Ph.D. in the Institute for Screen Industries Research at
the University of Nottingham. His thesis focused on the role of transna-
tional trade in content in the branding of British digital television chan-
nels and technologies. He has also lectured on the media industries at
the universities of Roehampton and Derby.