A Transmedia Archaeology of Film Promotion Online

At a time when more films are released annually than there are days in the year, films must compete for audience attention. As a result, promotional budgets have risen exponentially with online becoming the fastest growing sector. Film websites don’t just promote films, they chronicle backstories, map storyworlds, introduce characters and provide spaces for audiences to congregate. Yet as a hybrid of promotion, storytelling and community hub, these sites are ephemeral, and when the promotional work is done, they are often locked, taken down and disappear without trace. This book considers this emerging form: Where have film websites been collected and archived? What forms do these websites take? And how do audiences engage with film websites? Drawing on media archaeological methods as well as developing new strategies to investigate these intriguing media objects, this book suggests that film websites are worthy of consideration as cultural artefacts in their own right.|In Beyond the Screen (2014), Sarah Atkinson describes film sites as ‘new filmic objects’ and an ‘unparalleled cultural form’. This book makes these ‘new filmic objects’ its focus and sets out to discover more about them. The Producers Guild of America’s definition of transmedia practices extends to ‘narrative commercial and marketing roll outs’, so one way these ‘new filmic objects’ can be understood is as a kind of transmedia marketing. However, while there is no shortage of how-to manuals on transmedia storytelling and transmedia marketing, these practices remain under-theorised in the literature. So, this is what this book sets out to do.