From the horizontal integration of multinational corporations, which
guarantees extensive media crossovers, to the digitization of Hollywood, which
has affected the business, production, and marketing of cinema, big-screen films
are indebted to a similar intimate congress among media. (Klinger 2006 p236)
In recent years we have seen many changes in technology. Processing power
has increased, software is getting more and more integrated and complex and the
hardware that is needed to run programs is getting smaller and more
cost-effective. For the film industry this means new editing software, more
powerful digital imaging programs and new formats like digital projection, DVDs
and Blueray. Digital cinema provides a clearer picture, a better cinematographic
experience and faster and easier distribution and is now becoming an industry
standard. (Taylor 2006) DVDs and Blueray have replaced the now-obsolete VCR as
the new home entertainment standard and home cinemas with bigger screens and
better sound have changed the home viewing experience. The media integration and
convergence that new technologies are creating encourages increased franchising
and intertextuality, a lucrative development that production companies are only
too glad to encourage. Now blockbuster films have all sorts of associate
ancillary products, from video games to special edition DVDs to theme park rides
and action figures.
A lucrative franchise is known in the commercially driven film industry
(particularly in Hollywood) as one of the best ways to make money. Hollywood
blockbuster films may cost millions of dollars to make but studios are willing
to put money into them if they expect them to provide a high financial return.
Successful blockbuster films are what fund Hollywood studios. The studios can
afford to take some financial risk in other areas, funding many smaller films
that are not guaranteed to recoup money if they have a couple of blockbusters in
hand. This is because the revenue from blockbusters is not simply dependant on
income from seats sold in theatres. Lucrative sponsorship and product placement
deals as well as the sale of merchandise, like games and special edition DVDs,
supplement this income. These films are known as ‘tentpole pictures’ (Bordwell
2006 p12) because they are the productions that ‘hold up’ the rest of the studio
in the same way as a central pole in a tent keeps the rest of the tent
upright.
Although studios sink huge resources into blockbusters and tentpole pictures,
they can absorb many weak films because income streams in from many other
sources, from ancillary rights and television sales to DVD revenues and assets
arising from large libraries of older films. (Thompson 2007 p258)
A blockbuster is even more valuable if the formula is repeatable – the
release of one or more sequels means more tie-ins and merchandise to sell to a
pre-existing audience. (Wasko and Shanadi 2006) With home cinemas and other
viewing technologies now available in the home, people do not attend the cinema
as much as they once did, many preferring to watch films in the comfort of their
own home instead. Production companies are aware that this loss at the box
office can be recouped in other ways. Cross-media integration also means that
advertising and marketing for games, films and other merchandise all serve to
promote the franchise in general and heighten awareness of the products
associated with it. (Skaggs cited in Thompson 2007) Take New Line Cinema’s proud
claim that they are responsible for one of the most successful franchises in
history – The
Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003). New Line
Cinema noted on their website that
The Lord of the Rings and its
associated merchandise has earned $2.5billion. (Wasko and Shanadi, 2006) With
this sort of money on the line it is no wonder that studios are keen to develop
franchise films.
The Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios
Hollywood
Jurassic Park (1993) is a perfect example of a tentpole film. It
justified its $63 million production budget (The Numbers 2010) through its
ancillary products as much as its box office receipts. The first two films
grossed over $1.5 billion worldwide, but that was a small amount compared with
the estimated $5 billion that Universal Studios had accrued as of 2004 from all
related revenue streams. (Bryman 2004) These included a successful theme park
ride at Universal Studios and merchandise sales of over 1,000 official products
– including toys, video games, t-shirts, toothbrushes and candy – that were
branded with the
Jurassic Park logo featured in the film. Such was the
success of the
Jurassic Park brand that some cynics may argue that this
landmark film may have been created simply as an advertisement for its ancillary
products. Either way it is easy to see how most big budget films produced today
are imagined as the fulcrum in a wheel of associated products.
Game licensing deals can prove particularly lucrative. For instance when EA
Games acquired the film-based game rights for
The Lord of the Rings,
the fee that New Line negotiated was rumoured to be in excess of $10 million – a
fee that was not unique to this franchise – similar amounts had been accrued for
licenses to create games for the
James Bond and
Harry Potter
films. Games companies are also keen to cash in on older, established
franchises, competing with each other to acquire the licenses to adapt older
films, such as
Predator (1987) and
Dirty Harry (1971), which
are no longer being actively promoted. (Thompson, 2007) The immense success of
the video games industry also means that Hollywood Studios are not only selling
the rights for successful films but also buying the rights to successful game
franchises and turning these into big-screen films. The success of the
Tomb
Raider (1996 – 2003) franchise
Tombraider
and the assimilation of the central Lara Croft character into modern culture
is reminiscent of a Hollywood blockbuster film and its stars. Lara Croft, a
virtual character, had websites and magazines devoted to her, and was used in
advertising for many products like Nike and Lucozade. (Grieb 2002) This
character finally came to the big screen in the form of Angelina Jolie in 2001.
Still, with videogame software and hardware sales reached $8.9 billion versus
$7.3 billion for film box-office receipts in 2000 (Wall Street Journal 2000
cited in Poole 2000) it is clear why film executives are looking in the
direction of video games with interest.
Run Lola Run
But video games are contributing more than just revenue and franchise
opportunities to filmmakers. The popularity of video games and the aesthetics
and technological advances associated with them are also changing the way that
films look and feel.
Run Lola Run (1998), directed by Tom Tykwer has
been much written about for its video game aesthetic. (Grieb 2002, Harbord
2002, Wedel 2009) The film’s heroine has many similarities to Lara Croft, and
has been compared to the Tomb Raider character. (Ebert 1999) The film’s
three-part round structure is reminiscent of the three ‘lives’ typically
attributed to an avatar in a video game. The look has also many similarities to
games with its distinctive animated sequences and the camera 360 around Lola as
she makes her decision at the start, which resembles a menu in a computer game.
The feel and pace of the film are also distinctly game-like and this faster pace
evident in many recent films can be partly attributed to digitisation and
database editing, which have simplified the editing process. By 1996 digital
editing accounted for about 80 of the films produced in Hollywood and this
non-linear editing is thought to account for the new aesthetic of faster cutting
and shorter shot lengths that gained popularity at this time. (Bordwell,
2006)
Even more influential in the way films look is the development of digital
imaging technologies, which share many resources and people with video game
development. It is becoming more and more common, for films to rely heavily on
computer-generated imaging (CGI). The course of convergence is advanced by the
swift market growth in the area of video games and the ‘horizontal integration’
of media industries. The financial investments and interest shown in the area of
video game development, by many of the parent companies of film studios is also
increasing the ease with which partnerships are formed between film producers
and video game developers. Similar techniques and technologies are also being
used in the development of video games and this means that these industries are
now in a position to share digital assets. There is also a possibility of
sharing human resources since technicians and digital artists are often equally
qualified to work in either industry. (Elkington 2009) Animation has been one of
the most affected traditions, with the CGI which once supplemented some
hand-drawn techniques now taking over completely (Weihart 2006) in many films,
like
Toy Story (1995) and
Shrek (2001), but many of the
live-action films being made in Hollywood today also have integrated digital
imaging.
It has long been the focus of Hollywood to create realistic characters
through CGI (Manovich 2001). Films like 2001’s
Final Fantasy: The Spirit
Within, 2004’s
Polar Express and 2007’s
Beowulf may have
stepped into the ‘Uncanny Valley’
[i] (Mori 1970) with their depictions of
realistic human characters. The character of Gollum in
The Lord of the
Rings trilogy, on the other hand, is composed entirely of CGI but seems to
avoid the Uncanny Valley. Perhaps this is in part because the character is not
quite as humanoid. Andy Serkis’ performance of Gollum through motion capture has
also attributed to this, and has been widely acclaimed as a breakout role in CGI
characters. Weta Digital created Gollum’s skin texture using a new technique
that won a technical award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
in 2004. This was not the only award-winning development in CGI made by the
team behind
The Lord of the Rings. The
Massive program was
developed by Stephen Regelous specifically for the project.
Massive can
duplicate hundreds of animal or humanoid figures, each with their own basic
artificial intelligence which allows them to move independently, creating a
realistic crowd dimension. (Thompson 2007)
Andy Serkis' performance helped bring the character of
Gollum to life.
This program is very useful in films, games, and virtual worlds, where large
crowds need to be generated. It plays an important part in the ease with which
films now incorporate the spectacle of large, realistic crowds, and what the
1934 president of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, Alfred N. Goldsmith,
called “the production of an acceptable semblance of reality.” (Manovich 2001
p258)
According to Bordwell and Staiger (Manovich 2001) the development of CGI has
not always been linear but there has always been one driving force behind it –
the quest for realism – for masking the artifice of the effects. The position of
theorists such as Kracauer, Bazin and Cavell is that realism is one of the key
defining aspects of cinema. The theory of film realism takes that “photographic
images, unlike paintings or line drawings, are indexical signs: they are
causally or existentially connected to the referents.” (Prince 2002 p116)
Computer-generated imaging displaces the notion that everything we see on the
screen is a record or ‘index’ of a real person or object that has been
photographed. To realists, the emergence of technology that makes films like
Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) possible is troublesome. Jurassic Park
was the first time that CGI was used to create a realistic representation of a
creature. (Bordwell 2006) Animators at ILM created photographic quality images
of living, breathing dinosaurs that the viewer perceived as realistic, despite
knowing that the dinosaurs were not real. To realists this presents a problem
with the fundamental way they read films, however there is another long-held
school of thought subscribed to by many other theorists such as Arnheim, Vertov
and Eisenstein (Prince 2002). This ‘formalist’ outlook has long acknowledged
that cinema is well versed in portraying a false reality.
[ii]
In today’s technology driven world there is a sense that everything is
connected. Convergence and intertextuality are inevitable because the
boundaries between all types of media are breaking down over time. (Elkington
2009) A successfully branded film can spawn hundreds, even thousands of related
products.
No medium, it seems, can now function independently and establish its own
separate and purified space of cultural media. (Bolter and Grusin 2000 p55)
Intertextuality is not a new notion. The writings of Barthes (1977),
Kristeva (1980) and Fiske (1989) in the area of semiotics have always indicated
that intertextuality is a vital part of reading any text, constructing meaning
and sense beyond what is shown in the individual work. Intertextuality allows
for polysemic readings of seemingly straightforward texts. In his book,
Paratexts. Thresholds of interpretation, literary theorist Gerard Genette
defines ‘paratexts’ as
“those liminal devices and conventions, both
within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between
book, author, publisher and reader.” (Genette 1997 pi) Though Genette was
concerned with books the concept is equally valid for films and the various
games, books and DVD features that surround them. The emergence of bonus
material such as cast and crew interviews, commentaries and deleted scenes
enabled by the DVD players entrance to the market in 1997 (Bordwell 2006) can be
seen as another layer of paratext that contributes to or facilitates discussion
of the main text of a film.
Though some predict that film and video games may be in the process of
totally merging (Perron 2008, Straubhaar, LaRose and Davenport 2008) I don’t
believe this is the case. While it is true that the technologies that drive
both film and games have much in common and that both forms benefit from close
working relationships with the other,
[iii] I believe that the types of narrative
required for a satisfying game versus a satisfying film are too different for a
complete and successful convergence to occur. Games are interactive and usually
non-linear by nature. They thrive on multiple possibilities and a user
co-authorship. By contrast films are specifically structured narratives –
usually in a linear form – and the viewer has no authorship control. (Manovich
2001) The viewer interaction with a film text is generally limited to their
analysis of a set piece of narrative. These are two very different user
experiences and I don’t believe that they can both be easily incorporated into
the same single product. This is illustrated by the failure of ‘interactive
movies’ to take off during the 1990s. (Perron 2008) It is also interesting to
take into account that it wasn’t until the third game under
the Lord of the
Rings film franchise produced by Electronic Arts that this game line found
some measure of critical success.
The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age,
released in 2004, had a much more open format than its predecessors and opened
the user experience up to original characters and the larger world of
Middle-earth.
The Third Age was well received in the gaming community
and any criticisms levelled at it were generally in relation to the points in
the game when the narrative of the films impeded the user interactivity.
(Massimilla 2004, Semsey 2004, Elkington 2009)
I believe that film and games can benefit greatly from a close working
relationship. EA executives in 2003 acknowledged that much of the talent
involved is interchangeable, when they moved their base of operations nearer to
Hollywood. EA’s Vice-President at the time also noted however, the fundamental
difference that exists between films and games, when he said that films “create
environments you look at. [Games] create environments you live in.” (Miller
2004 p216) I think it would be equally true to say: film creates narrative; game
creates the possibility of narrative. Despite these fundamental differences, and
perhaps to some extent because of them, there are very real benefits for
convergence in the film and games industries. If well thought out, games
provide a rich paratext, adding depth and variety to the schema of a film.
The perfect video game and film combination has yet to be created and there
are a number of reasons for this. One of the most obvious reasons is a
logistical one: time. It takes an average of 24 months to develop and design a
full-length video game. By comparison the production length for a film is an
average of 6-18 months. This creates an obvious conflict because, in the
interest of taking advantage of the marketing for the film, the studios aim to
release the games shortly before the films.
[iv] Thus the games are rushed through
production, given less time than would usually be allotted to development and
are often tied very tightly to the narrative of the film because of time
restrictions and lack of scripting budget. (Thompson 2007) Where convergence is
useful and productive is in sharing assets, such as designs and 3-D models, and
in getting game designers involved earlier in the pre-production phase of a film
so that they can have longer to develop their game. Sharing personnel is often a
viable option too, for instance when making the
Lord of the Rings games
EA hired many of the mapmakers, motion-capture experts, stunt doubles and actors
that worked on the film to create an air of authenticity about the product.
(Thompson 2007) Convergence can help to reduce the work, and thus the costs, of
producing films and video games. Intertextuality increases brand awareness and
can be used to create layers of meaning in a text. While the production and
political economy ramifications of this are clear, it is less obvious what this
means for the future of film as an art form.
That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the
work of art. (Benjamin 1935 p4)
The Lord of the Rings Special Edition DVDS
Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay,
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, uses the term ‘aura’ to describe the intangible quality that
an original work possesses that is lost or diminished during the act of
reproduction. To Benjamin photography, film and other mechanical copies had no
aura and thus where not true works of art, however Jonathan Gray (2006) argues
that the introduction of paratexts such as DVD extras can be used to instil this
sense of aura into a digital film. The Lord of the Rings special extended
edition DVDs contain many hours of commentary and documentaries about the films
and the filmmaking process. They endeavour to bring the viewer on a journey
through the making of the films, often in a very personal way, conjuring up
layers of pride and nostalgia, which imbue the film texts with significant
meaning. Drawing on the parallels between the making and reception of the films
and the narrative events of the films themselves, the DVDs serve to codify the
text in multiple layers of a ‘mythic resonance’ similar to the awe and reverence
inspiring aura. I agree that there are many ways in which new media can be used
to enrich films, helping to create a vivid semiotic tapestry that can expand and
enhance the viewer experience. As we look to the future of film and the impact
that further technological advances and new media will have on the industry, it
is my hope that this is the area that will see the greatest development.
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[i] The Uncanny Valley
is a hypothesis that helps to explain why audiences can have a negative reaction
to non-human characters that look very close to human.
[ii] “Noel Carroll
has pointed out this bifurcation between the camps of realism and formalism and
linked it to an essentializing tendency within theory, a predilection of
theorists to focus on either the cinema’s capability to photographically copy
physical reality or to stylistically transcend reality.” (Prince 2002 p120)
[iii] “On the one
hand, visual and interactive media show increasing aesthetic and procedural
similarities. Video games have generally become more narrative-based and
increasingly draw upon film-like special effects and celebrity-power to stand
out in the marketplace. Likewise, the technologies used for computer-generated
imagery (CGI) in film are more and more often the same technologies used to
develop video games, to the point that artists and technicians are able to move
between the two industries with increasing fluidity.” (Elkington 2009 p213)
[iv] “A film-based
game aims to come out at about the same time as the move, primarily to take
advantage of the fact that film studios usually have much bigger budgets for
advertising than do game firms. Skaggs calls this double-duty use of publicity
“the whole franchise effect”: :All the marketing and advertising and everything
hits for the films, and people walk into the store, Best Buy or something, and
they go, ‘Oh, look, there’s the thing I just saw advertised a thousand times on
TV or in the movies. Wow, I want it!’” (Thompson 2007 p237)
