Cannes Film Festival article in Media Magazine

My latest article for Media Magazine is on my experience at the Cannes Film Festival 2014 which I attended thanks to Tastic Film Magazine. You can subscribe to Media Magazine here and check out my reviews from the Cannes Film Festival here.

Attack the Block article in Media Magazine

An article looking at Attack the Block as a case study of modern British film. You can subscribe to Media Magazine here.

Recent Publications: Gangnam Style and Prison Movies

I've just got copies of two of my articles through today and thought I would share some pictures. First is my article on the phenomenon that is the Gangnam Style music video. This went viral (in case you hadn't heard) and is now the most watched video on YouTube ever. Not bad for a South Korean pop star who isn't really even singing in English.

The issue of Media Magazine that this article is in was called the 'Reading the Media' issue. The brief said to analyse any piece of media we felt could be of interest and I thought Gangnam Style would make an interesting article. You can subscribe to Media Magazine here but unfortunately I don't think you can buy individual copies.

I'm also writing a couple of articles for the next issue which is 'The Gothic Issue'. I'm writing an article on Universal's classic monster movies and their remakes and also hoping to get another written comparing the two big trends in modern horror: torture porn and found footage. Here is a look at the first page of the Gangnam Style article:

The other article I just had published is in the 'Prison Issue' of Splice Cinema Journal. This article and publication is a bit more on the academic side and my article is called Prison and Punishment, Race and Redemption: Comparing Prison Life in The Shawshank Redemption and American History X... phew even the title is a bit of a mouthful. Splice is published by Auteur who are the publishing house that I am currently writing by Blair Witch Project book for. At least with a title that long I think it sums up exactly what the article is about. You can pick up copies of Splice here.

I also just found out that the previous article I had in Splice on Will Ferrell's sports movies got a nice review over at the Media Education Association. The reviewer Steve Murray very kindly wrote:

'Peter Turner’s essay Mockery, Masculinity and Misogyny: The Sports Movies of Will Ferrell offers a rare opportunity to read a considered academic piece about an iconic American comedy actor who is more than likely to engage the interest of the average teenager sitting in our classrooms. The essay looks in detail at representations in Ferrell’s sports films and would be useful both as a teaching resource and as a starting point for a research project for A2 Film Studies coursework; indeed, this essay would provide invaluable help to students choosing to look at Will Ferrell as a star for WJEC’s annotated catalogue and presentation script.'

 All in all, it has been a happy day. I love seeing what designers are going to do when they publish my writing and it never disappoints.

Media Magazine Articles: The Dark Knight and Hollywood's Lack of Original Ideas

The theme for the April edition of Media Magazine was ideas. I decided to try and submit two pieces for this issue and was successful at getting them both in.

The first article is on the simple idea that Hollywood is running out of ideas due to all the endless remakes, reboots, recycling, rehashing and repeating that is going on in modern Hollywood.

The second is on the ideology of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy and whether the films really are as right wing as many have suggested they are.

As usual the design and layout of the articles is gorgeous and I'm very proud to have my writing featured in the magazine. If you want to subscribe to Media Magazine, then please click here.

Personal Highlights of 2012

2012 was an incredible year for me. Basically a big part of starting this blog was to share some of the cool film related things I had been doing. I was desperate to tell anyone and everyone that I got to ask Danny Boyle a question at a 127 Hours screening organised by Lovefilm at the end of 2010. Since then things have gotten better and better and although I may not be getting paid for my efforts yet, I am living the dream of what I have always wanted to do, writing constantly about films!

My 2011 was very exciting filled with highlights like these but 2012 was even better and below are links to posts about some of the highlights of my year. With 2013 starting with having a chat with Denzel Washington and Robert Zemeckis on the red carpet of the Flight premiere for my Filmoria premiere report, I hope that things are going to get even more exciting as the year goes on so please join me on the adventure!

If anyone reading this hates those self-indulgent blog posts where people look at their successes or cannibalize their own work instead of writing something new and original then please look no further. This is as much for me as it is for anyone who reads this. I feel like looking back into the past to see how far I've come this year and this will be my hopefully permanent record of what has been achieved.

Anyway here are the highlights of 2012:

Taking my college media students to New York got me all excited and prompted this post on my favourite New York movies.

Two articles published in Media Magazine.

Made it through my first year of blogging in March.

An independent film called One by One that I worked a lot on got a trailer.

In May I got to sit down and have a chat with legendary Oscar winning production designer of Titanic, Peter Lamont.

Andina at Inspired Ground invited me to write my first ever guest post on her blog. I chose to write about Fight Club as the film that changed my life. 

I finally got the scope and aims of my PhD thesis on found footage horror sorted.

My first ever article for Splice Cinema Journal on Documentaries and star directors was published in June.

Write my first article for Filmoria on the use of The Pixies Where is My Mind? at the end of Fight Club. Here is the full article. Had no idea that Filmoria would provide me with such amazing opportunities in the future!

Director of Storage 24, Johannes Roberts came to my college to give a brilliant talk to our students in June.

David Jackson wrote his first post for this blog on why he loves Aliens, the first time I've had a guest writer!

Wrote my first piece for Boolean Flix on Finding the Fun in Found Footage

In July I got married to the love of my life and went on the best honeymoon to Costa Rica anyone could ever ask for.

Got a letter published in Empire Magazine

Had my first article published on Static Mass Emporium on the director Michael Moore. This was the beginning of another great writing adventure and opportunity to work with more talented writers.

Filmoria sent me to interview the directors of Untouchable, Olivier Nackache and Eric Toledano. I had to rush out and buy a recording device that has become an essential tool in my work for Filmoria! It was a nerve wracking but incredible experience.

Took part in my first of many From the Red Carpet film clubs for the film Premium Rush.

Filmoria sent me to a gala screening of Paranormal Activity 4 where I got to interview actress Katie Featherstone.
 
Got a letter published in the 200th edition of Total Film.

I had my radio debut on Amazing Radio talking movies with Ruth Barnes on her breakfast show in November. You can listen to my second appearance here.

I love stats so was very happy for I Love That Film to hit 100,000 page views in December!

Had my second article on Will Ferrell's sports movies published in Splice Cinema Journal.

I decided to keep a record of all my writing at other sites. So here's links to all my Static Mass Emporium writing, Filmoria news, interviews and reviews.

Finally here are the top ten films I watched in 2012.

This year I intend to continue taking all the opportunities I can get and seeking out more ways to get paid for doing what I love. I hope that you will continue to stick with me.

What were your 2012 highlights?

The Relationship between Film Producers and Audiences: Part 1

There is a two way flow of information between producers of films and the audiences that they target.  Producers gain feedback from audiences about their films through audience research.  This is often done through test screenings but increasingly through internet research to see the responses of bloggers and opinion makers to early marketing and news surrounding the films.  On the other hand producers use a huge range of marketing techniques to deliver information about films to their target audience and beyond.

 Audience Research

Test Screenings are the most common form of audience research used by Hollywood and the film industry as a whole.  Often long in advance of the release of a film, a small audience will be invited to a secret preview.  Effects may not be completed, the soundtrack may be temporary and the film will sometimes have barely left the edit suite before it is screened to a few people to gain feedback from the audience.  Questionnaires or focus groups are used after the film and the audience asked to participate.  The audience will be responsible for giving the filmmakers feedback on what does and doesn’t work and the responses could lead to drastic changes in the film or the marketing strategy before it is finally released.  

Silent film star Harold Lloyd and producer Hal Roach are considered to be the pioneers of test screenings.  The pair would take early cuts of films to a theatre to gauge audience response. Directors (and stars) in the early days of the Hollywood studio system were contracted to work on films the studio wanted them to and almost certainly had no say over the final cut of the films. In the case of Should Sailors Marry? (1925), the ‘director/writer Jess Robbins washed his hands of the picture’ (Sinnott, 2005) after test screenings produced negative responses.  Producer Hal Roach got a replacement director in to re-shoot some scenes and the film was salvaged.

However sometimes it can be the director who wants test screenings and invites feedback from audiences.  Billy Wilder screened an early cut of his classic Sunset Boulevard (1950) for an audience and was told by a woman in attendance that "I never saw such a pile of shit in all my life" (Hennigan, 2003).  After attending this test screening, he chopped the opening and closing scenes due to the audience’s responses.

Test screenings can be responsible for a huge range of changes made to a film from a complete re-shooting of the ending all the way down to just a title change.  For example the title of the Bond film Licence to Kill (1989) ‘was initially… Licence Revoked, but this was changed after test screenings revealed that US crowds associated the term with driving’ (Radford, 2008).

Many films have had drastic changes made to them at huge costs.  Little Shop of Horrors (1986) was test screened in front of an audience of families and as a result had a completely new ending created.  Seven (1995), David Fincher’s bleak serial killer masterpiece, ends with (SPOILER!) the hero’s wife’s severed head delivered to the hero in a box.  The film shows the graphic, gory aftermath of several severely sickening slayings and was tested in front of an audience told they would be seeing the new Brad Pitt/Morgan Freeman movie.  ‘At the time Freeman was best known for being in Driving Miss Daisy and Pitt for Legends of the Fall.  As a result ‘one older woman who walked out halfway through the movie said, "Whoever made this piece of filth should be shot"...directly to David Fincher’ (http://www.everything2.org/index.pl?node_id=1316247).  Fortunately Pitt and Fincher fought for the depressing ending and the studio kept it intact, resulting in the film becoming a classic of the crime genre.  

Bleak, uncertain or open endings are often the casualties of test screenings.  Blade Runner (1982), Fatal Attraction (1987) and Australia (2008) all had different endings to those originally scribbled by the writers and shot by the directors. Monahan (2008) argues the studio executives require directors to shoot new endings so that filmgoers will be left ‘with a collective smile on their faces and therefore, so the logic goes, render the film more lucrative.’

Some films have benefited greatly from test screenings including Paranormal Activity (2007).  The footage from audience test screenings was used in the trailer to show how people were reacting to the film. See below.

Some critics are fearful that test screenings are damaging as they can lead to piracy and leaks. Others are concerned about the demographic that are targeted by the major studios.  ‘‘’Typical'' American moviegoers get to tell the Hollywood bigs how to improve their products before they're released. Test-audience members are often white males, 16 to 32 years old, who are recruited in L.A. suburbs, usually from colleges and shopping malls’ (Vaughn, 1991).  As this demographic is considered to be the biggest cinema-going audience, studios pay more attention to what young white males have to say.  Therefore films aimed at different ethnicities, gender and age groups may be affected by the desire to appeal to the widest audience with the most disposable income.  

Monahan puts his criticisms most bluntly; ‘First, test-audiences are essentially filmmaking-by-committee, and as everyone knows, no committee has ever made anything entirely worthwhile in the history of creation.  Second, when you really think about it, it's the bleakest endings that stick most powerfully in the mind’ (Monahan, 2008).  

So, is it fair that audiences and profit-hungry executives get the final say after filmmakers shed blood, sweat and tears creating the films?  Just remember if you get into a test screening; the power to change the movies could be in your hands.  

An extended version of this article first appeared in MediaMagazine.

Part 2 on Marketing coming soon.

References

Hennigan, 2003 

Monahan, 2008 

Radford, 2008 

Sinnott, 2005 

Vaughn, 1991 

Other

What do you think of test screenings?   Necessary evil, sensible, fair, terrible, cruel and unusual?

Two articles for the price of one!

My ninth and tenth articles are both published in the February issue of the amazing Media Magazine.  You can subscribe to the magazine here.  The magazine and the articles are aimed at A Level and BTEC media students but I'm sure anyone with an interest in film audience research or Kevin Macdonald's recent documentary Life in a Day will find them interesting.  If you have not seen the wonderful Life in a Day yet, I insist you must.  It's online for free and totally legal right here.  

My articles are titled Test Screenings: Exhibition, Participation and Intervention and Life in a Day: Creation through Participation.  The theme of the issue was participation and the media, hence the titles!

The issue also contains an article from the always interesting James Rose on feature films made about participatory TV. 

This follows my articles in previous issues on:

1. Participating in a reality TV show (December 2009)
2. Sacha Baron Cohen's mock-docs (April 2010)
3. Stop-motion animation (September 2010)
4. Michael Moore's Documentaries (December 2010)
5. Ghetto Culture in City of God and La Haine (February 2011)
6. The collaborations of Fincher and Pitt (April 2011)
7. The cinema of 9/11 (September 2011)
8. Documentaries that attack America (December 2011) 

Here is a brief sample of the new articles:

Test Screenings are the most common form of audience research used by Hollywood and the film industry as a whole.  Long in advance of the release of a film, a small audience will be invited to a secret preview.  Effects may not be completed, the soundtrack may be temporary and the film will sometimes have barely left the edit suite before it is screened to a few film fans to gain feedback from the audience.  A questionnaire is generally handed out after the film and the audience asked to complete it.  Questions could be on anything from the opening of the film, to individual characters, to the soundtrack, or even to the ending of the film.  The audience will be responsible for giving the filmmakers feedback on what does and doesn’t work and the responses could lead to drastic changes in the film or the marketing strategy before it is finally released.  Attendees are asked to sign a non-disclosure form so they cannot leak details of the film on their blogs or to the press.  With test screenings becoming increasingly common, the question is; should the artist or the audience get the final cut?

AND

With participants that range from a little boy that shines shoes for a living in Peru to a smug American Lamborghini owner, Life in a Day crosses the globe and brings viewers a taste of a huge range of cultures, from the super rich to those that have nothing.  As a social experiment, not just a feature documentary film, the filmmakers wanted to make this a global project.  No doubt to avoid accusations of ethnocentrism and an attempt to eliminate too great a focus on ‘narcissistic, bedroom-bound western teenagers’ (Macdonald, 2011), the filmmakers wanted to include people from the developing world that don’t traditionally have access to cameras, computers or any means to upload their footage to Youtube.  So Macdonald and his team spent £40,000 on 400 HD cameras and had ‘various aid organisations distribute them among people in remote towns and villages’ (Macdonald, 2011) in around forty different developing countries.  The images and sounds of Angolan women that sing as they work, the men who herd goats and the people who dwell in the rainforests are testament to the films attempt to bring representation of all corners of the globe to the big screen.

 So what are you waiting for?  Go subscribe now here.  And thanks for reading!

A Published Article

My eighth article for the brilliant Media Magazine has just been published in the December 2011 issue.  You can get yourself a copy from here.  It's aimed at A Level and BTEC media students but I'm sure anyone with an interest in documentary (particularly in recent years) could find it interesting.  My article is titled Attacking America: A Decade of Documentary Dissent.  

The issue also contains an article from the always interesting James Rose on the politics of the slasher movie.  


This follows my articles in previous issues on:

1. Participating in a reality TV show (December 2009)
2. Sacha Baron Cohen's mock-docs (April 2010)
3. Stop-motion animation (September 2010)
4. Michael Moore's Documentaries (December 2010)
5. Ghetto Culture in City of God and La Haine (February 2011)
6. The collaborations of Fincher and Pitt (April 2011)
7. The cinema of 9/11 (September 2011)

Here is a brief sample of the new article:

Over the past decade, America, arguably the world’s only remaining superpower, has taken a beating.  September 11^th 2001 brought an unprecedented attack on home soil with economic, political and military targets leading to over 3000 deaths.  Less than a month later, America went to war with Afghanistan and their forces are still there a decade later.  Less forgivably, President Bush and his neo-conservative cronies then set their sights on Iraq in the continuing campaign known as the War on Terror.  Starting an illegal war to find Weapons of Mass Destruction that never materialized, American soldiers found themselves dying for a cause that the folks back home soon stopped supporting.  Hurricane Katrina hit the coast in 2005 and was the costliest natural disaster in the history of the USA.  Two wars costing billions of dollars a year, increasing frequency and costs of natural disasters and a deregulated financial industry ended up feeding into a huge economic crisis that caused a global recession, bank bailouts, a huge rise in unemployment and over a million people losing their houses since 2008.  Documentary makers of the world with their tiny budgets began flinging anything they could at the bullying, greedy and corrupt Goliath that America had become.

 Go get yourself a copy here.

A Decade of Documentary Excellence

Writing my latest article for Media Magazine about the documentaries that have criticised America for so many reasons over the last decade got me thinking about how great these non-fiction films are. The likes of Michael Moore, Alex Gibney, Morgan Spurlock and Charles Ferguson are giving docs a reputable name with many cinema-goers.

Box-office records have been broken, awards have been won (including Cannes' Palme D'Or), critics have drooled and audiences have cued up like never before to see docs on the big screen.

And it's not just muckraking. Yes, many docs have laid into America's foreign policy, illegal and immoral war-mongering, inhumane treatment of prisoners, obesity problems, economic crisis and alleged covering up of the truth of what happened on 9/11, but there have been so many other docs that also deserve a mention for raising issues, confronting the powerful and sometimes just being bloody entertaining.

Michael Moore may have brought non-fiction film to the masses with Bowling for Columbine and Farenheit 9/11, but other filmmakers are working hard to catch some of that box office appeal. Morgan Spurlock with his gimmicky, silly docs for one.





But most interesting is the direction of Kevin Macdonald. With Touching the Void using vivid reconstructions of a mountain top disaster accompanied by interviews with the real-life stars of the story, a documentary became a gripping thriller in the hands of a skilled filmmaker. Following this with a couple of less interesting and significantly less thrilling fiction films (The Last King of Scotland and State of Play), he then returned with this year's brilliant doc Life in a Day. Taking thousands of hours of footage uploaded by ordinary people to You Tube and turning it into something beautiful, mesmerising, depressing, uplifting and life-affirming is one of the greatest achievements in cinema history. (See my review on this blog back in June 2011)





In the Media Magazine article I look at a range of documentaries that have attacked America from Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007) to Inside Job (Charles Ferguson, 2010) but a couple of other docs not mentioned due to their subject matter are Collapse (Chris Smith, 2009) and Waking Life (Richard Linklater, 2001).



Collapse is a terrifying must-see, particularly for anyone who enjoys conspiracy theories or just thinks that civilisation is always on the brink of collapsing. It might be just one guy sitting in a chair but by the end I was quaking in my boots and could not stop thinking about this doc for weeks after.



Waking Life is not generally considered a documentary but, and I quote, 'Waking Life is more a documentary than a work of fiction, because most of the speakers play themselves and talk about their real views' (http://www.aboutfilm.com/movies/w/wakinglife4.htm). This amazing film's use of animation (or more specifically rotoscoping) and its ideas about 'identity, dreams, consciousness, and free will' are mind-boggling and great fun to watch.



So if you don't like documentaries or you think they're boring, next time you start mindlessly watching a piece of reality TV crapola, try finding a classic doc to watch instead. Here's my top 10 in chronological order:

1. Gimme Shelter (Albert and David Maysles, 1970)
2. Waking Life (Richard Linklater, 2001)
3. Bowling for Columbine (Michael Moore, 2002)
4. Touching the Void (Kevin Macdonald, 2003)
5. Farenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, 2004)
6. Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (Robert Greenwald, 2004)
7. Glastonbury (Julien Temple, 2006)
   
8. Taxi to the Darkside (Alex Gibney, 2007)
9. Collapse (Chris Smith, 2009)
10. Life in a Day (Kevin Macdonald, 2011)

Seek them out, engage your brain, laugh, cry, be outraged and never forget! What have I missed? Is there any doc missing from this list that I need to see or include? If you read this, don't be scared to let me know....