Transmedia Directors focuses on artist-practitioners who work across media, platforms and disciplines, including film, television, music video, commercials and the internet. Working in the age of media convergence, today's em/impresarios project a distinctive style that points toward a new contemporary aesthetics. The media they engage with enrich their practices – through film and television (with its potential for world-building and sense of the past and future), music video (with its audiovisual aesthetics and rhythm), commercials (with their ability to project a message quickly) and the internet (with its refreshed concepts of audience and participation), to larger forms like restaurants and amusement parks (with their materiality alongside today's digital aesthetics). These directors encourage us to reassess concepts of authorship, assemblage, transmedia, audiovisual aesthetics and world-building. Providing a vital resource for scholars and practitioners, this collection weaves together insights about artist-practitioners' collaborative processes as well as strategies for composition, representation, subversion and resistance.
Transmedia Directors focuses on artist-practitioners who work across media, platforms and disciplines, including film, television, music video, commercials and the internet. Working in the age of media convergence, today's em/impresarios project a distinctive style that points toward a new contemporary aesthetics. The media they engage with enrich their practices – through film and television (with its potential for world-building and sense of the past and future), music video (with its audiovisual aesthetics and rhythm), commercials (with their ability to project a message quickly) and the internet (with its refreshed concepts of audience and participation), to larger forms like restaurants and amusement parks (with their materiality alongside today's digital aesthetics). These directors encourage us to reassess concepts of authorship, assemblage, transmedia, audiovisual aesthetics and world-building. Providing a vital resource for scholars and practitioners, this collection weaves together insights about artist-practitioners' collaborative processes as well as strategies for composition, representation, subversion and resistance.
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
1. Introduction: Intensified Movements
Carol Vernallis (Stanford University, USA), Holly Rogers
(Goldsmiths, University of London, UK), and Lisa Perrott
(University of Waikato, New Zealand)
PART ONE: Collaborative Authorship: Wes Anderson
2. The Wes Anderson Brand: New Sincerity Across Media
Warren Buckland (Oxford Brooks University, UK)
3. The World of Wes Anderson and Mark Mothersbaugh: Between
Childhood and Adulthood in The Royal Tenenbaums
Theo Cateforis (Syracuse University, USA)
4. Analogue Authenticity and the Sound of Wes Anderson
Ben Winters (Open University, UK)
5. The Instrumentarium of Wes Anderson and Alexandre Desplat
Ewan Clark (Victoria University of Wellington, Australia)
PART TWO: Cross-Medial Assemblage and the Making of the
Director
6. Our Lives in Pink: Sofia Coppola as Transmedia Audiovisual
Stylist
Jeff Smith (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA)
7. Short-form Media as Style Lab: The Education of Michael Bay
Mark Kerins (Southern Methodist University, USA)
PART THREE: Transmedial Relations and Industry
8. Whirled Pieces: Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer and the Components of
Global Transmedia Production
J.D. Connor (School of Cinematic Arts, USA)
9. David Fincher’s Righteous Workflow: Design and the Transmedial
Director
Graig Uhlin (Oklahoma State University, USA)
PART FOUR: Music Video’s Forms, Genres and Surfaces
10. A Conversation with Emil Nava
Carol Vernallis (Stanford University, USA)
11. Risers, Drops and a Fourteen-foot Cube: A Transmedia Analysis
of Emil Nava, Calvin Harris and Rihanna's "This Is What You Came
For"
Brad Osborn (University of Kansas, USA)
12. On Colour Magic: Emil Nava’s 'Feels' and 'Nuh Ready Nuh
Ready'
Jonathan Leal (Stanford University, USA)
PART FIVE: Music Video’s Centrifugal Forces
13. Dave Meyers’s Moment of Audiovisual Bliss
Carol Vernallis (Stanford University, USA)
14. The Alchemical Union of David Bowie and Floria Sigismondi:
'Transmedia Surrealism' and 'Loose Continuity'
Lisa Perrott (University of Waikato, New Zealand)
15. Filmic Resonance and Dispersed Authorship in Sigur Rós’
Transmedial Valtari Mystery Film Experiment
Gareth Schott and Karen Barbour (University of Waikato, New
Zealand)
PART SIX: Audiovisual Emanations: David Lynch
16. The Audiovisual Eerie: Transmediating Thresholds in the Work of
David Lynch
Holly Rogers (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)
17. When Is a Door Not a Door?: Transmedia to the nth Degree in
David Lynch’s Multiverse
Greg Hainge (University of Queensland, Australia)
18. On (vari-)Speed Across David Lynch’s Work
John McGrath (University of Surrey, UK)
19. Journeying into the Land of the Formless Real with Lynch and
Simondon
Elena Del Río (University of Alberta, Canada)
PART SEVEN: Multi-vocality, Synchronicity and Transcendent
Cinematics: Barry Jenkins
20. 'Let Me Show You What That Song Really Is': Nicholas Britell on
the Music of Moonlight
Dale Chapman (Bates College, USA)
21. If Beale Street Could Talk, What’d Be Playing in the
Background?: First Notes on Music, Film, Time and Memory
Kwami Coleman (New York University, USA)
22 The Shot and the Cut: Joi McMillon’s and Barry Jenkins’s
Artistry
Carol Vernallis (Stanford University, USA)
PART EIGHT: Community, Identity and Transmedial Aspirations
across the Web
23. Multimodal and Transmedia Subjectivity in Animated Music Video:
Jess Cope and Steven Wilson’s 'Routine' from Hand. Cannot. Erase.
(2015)
Lori Burns (School of Music, Canada)
24. Jay Versace’s Instagram Empire: Queer Black Youth, Social Media
and New Audiovisual Possibilities
Gabrielle Veronique (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
PART NINE: Diagramatic, Signaletic and Haptic Unfoldings across
Forms and Genres: Lars Von Trier
25. The Demonic Quality of Darkness in The House That Jack Built:
Haptic Transmedial Affects Throughout the Work of Lars von
Trier
Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen (School of Communication and Culture,
Denmark)
26. Diamonds, Wagner, the Gesamtkunstwerk and Lars von Trier’s
Depression Films
Linda Badley (Middle Tennessee State University, USA)
27 Lars von Trier, Brecht and the Baroque Gesture
Donald Greig (University of Nottingham, UK)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A look at the signature styles of well-known film and music video directors such as David Lynch, Wes Anderson, and Baz Luhrmann in their relationship to sound, music, and image.
Carol Vernallis teaches in the music department at
Stanford University, USA. She is the author of Experiencing Music
Video (2004) and Unruly Media (2013) and is co-editor of The Oxford
Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (2013) and The Oxford
Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (2013).
Holly Rogers is Reader in Music at Goldsmiths, University of
London, and author of Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of
Art-Music (2013) and editor of Music and Sound in Documentary Film
(2014) and The Music and Sound of Experimental Film (2017).
Lisa Perrott is Senior Lecturer and Programme Convener of
Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato, New Zealand,
and is co-editor, with Ana Cristina Mendes, of Navigating with the
Blackstar: The Mediality of David Bowie (special issue of Celebrity
Studies, 2019) and David Bowie and Transmedia Stardom (2019).
Vernallis (Stanford), Perrott (Univ. of Waikato, New Zealand), and
Rogers (Univ. of London, UK) have produced a unique collection on
the emergence of transmedia artists/directors, who combine
traditional legacy tech with acclivitous digital, world, and
assemblage narratives … Together these essays serve as an
introductory, thought-provoking compendium of processes/approaches
to post-film intermedia production. Summing Up: Recommended. All
readers.
*CHOICE*
Building upon ground breaking books by two of the editors, this
rich and varied collection threatens to inaugurate a new wave of
scrutiny to address the new modes of electronic audiovisual
aesthetics. Previous writing about 'transmedia' has often been
theoretically limited and deviled by shallow analysis. This book
provides a much needed remedy. Vernallis, Rogers and Perrott have
assembled an essential collection covering the diversity of
contemporary interrelated media fields and creative practices. It
poses acute questions about existing categories of understanding
and analysis while offering new directions for thinking about
current pervasive audiovisual culture.
*K.J. Donnelly, Professor of Film and Film Music, University of
Southampton, UK, and author of Magical Musical Tour: Rock and Pop
in Film Soundtracks (Bloomsbury, 2015)*
Today, we live in a thoroughly transmedia age. Audiovisual
expression extends over movies, television series, music videos and
commercials; not to mention the way it influences such other realms
as designer clothing and toys. This splendid volume takes up the
full range of creativity across media today, ranging from studies
of how commercial pressures shape media products all the way to
celebrations of 'color magic' and 'audiovisual bliss' in new media
productions.
*Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State
University, USA*
How do you create a 'style' when you work across media as
diversified as film, television, fashion design, opera,
commercials, virtual reality and immersive environments? Rather
than transmedial auteurist styles, should we talk of a new,
intensified aesthetics characterizing the whole of transmedial
production today? These are the kind of key questions that this
shimmering volume addresses through a series of incisive,
illuminating texts.
*Martine Beugnet, Professor in Visual Studies, University of Paris
7 Diderot, France*
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