Derek Johnson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814743478
- eISBN:
- 9780814743492
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814743478.003.0007
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This book places the culture of media franchising in terms of a “creative license” and a dynamic of “collaboration” in order to explore both the subjective experiences of collaborative creativity ...
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This book places the culture of media franchising in terms of a “creative license” and a dynamic of “collaboration” in order to explore both the subjective experiences of collaborative creativity within media franchising and the licensing relationships and other hierarchical industrial structures shaping it. Through franchising, the media industries exert a cultural license to shape creative practice. While critiques of franchising like those of The Onion or College Humor often prove quite funny, media franchising is no joke as it has proven to be both an economically significant and culturally meaningful way of life in the media industries. Its significance and complexity as a production logic derives from providing creative resources to a wide range of social actors.Less
This book places the culture of media franchising in terms of a “creative license” and a dynamic of “collaboration” in order to explore both the subjective experiences of collaborative creativity within media franchising and the licensing relationships and other hierarchical industrial structures shaping it. Through franchising, the media industries exert a cultural license to shape creative practice. While critiques of franchising like those of The Onion or College Humor often prove quite funny, media franchising is no joke as it has proven to be both an economically significant and culturally meaningful way of life in the media industries. Its significance and complexity as a production logic derives from providing creative resources to a wide range of social actors.
Derek Johnson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814743478
- eISBN:
- 9780814743492
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814743478.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter argues that media franchising is not just an imperfect vehicle for implementing synergy, but also a set of industrial production relations that emerged outside of its ideals. The ...
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This chapter argues that media franchising is not just an imperfect vehicle for implementing synergy, but also a set of industrial production relations that emerged outside of its ideals. The histories of synergy and franchising are distinct yet overlapping industrial and cultural developments. Institutional developments within and across film, television, comics, video games, and toys in the 1980s sparked the embrace of multiplied production, institutional partnerships, and exchange across institutional networks. The industrial negotiation with franchising can be traced across at least three distinct moments since its cultural and economic logics began: early 1980s, late 1980s, and late 1990s. The chapter explores these three moments in relation to Marvel Entertainment and its attempts to franchise the X-Men comic book property, as evidenced in trade and popular accounts of industry strategy.Less
This chapter argues that media franchising is not just an imperfect vehicle for implementing synergy, but also a set of industrial production relations that emerged outside of its ideals. The histories of synergy and franchising are distinct yet overlapping industrial and cultural developments. Institutional developments within and across film, television, comics, video games, and toys in the 1980s sparked the embrace of multiplied production, institutional partnerships, and exchange across institutional networks. The industrial negotiation with franchising can be traced across at least three distinct moments since its cultural and economic logics began: early 1980s, late 1980s, and late 1990s. The chapter explores these three moments in relation to Marvel Entertainment and its attempts to franchise the X-Men comic book property, as evidenced in trade and popular accounts of industry strategy.
Derek Johnson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814743478
- eISBN:
- 9780814743492
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814743478.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
While immediately recognizable throughout the United States and many other countries, media mainstays like X-Men, Star Trek, and Transformers achieved such familiarity through constant reincarnation. ...
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While immediately recognizable throughout the United States and many other countries, media mainstays like X-Men, Star Trek, and Transformers achieved such familiarity through constant reincarnation. In each case, the initial success of a single product led to a long-term embrace of media franchising—a dynamic process in which media workers from different industrial positions shared in and reproduced familiar culture across television, film, comics, games, and merchandising. This book examines the corporate culture behind these production practices, as well as the collaborative and creative efforts involved in conceiving, sustaining, and sharing intellectual properties in media work worlds. Challenging connotations of homogeneity, the book shows how the cultural and industrial logic of franchising has encouraged media industries to reimagine creativity as an opportunity for exchange among producers, licensees, and even consumers. Drawing on case studies and interviews with media producers, it reveals the meaningful identities, cultural hierarchies, and struggles for distinction that accompany collaboration within these production networks. The book provides a nuanced portrait of the collaborative cultural production embedded in both the media industries and our own daily lives.Less
While immediately recognizable throughout the United States and many other countries, media mainstays like X-Men, Star Trek, and Transformers achieved such familiarity through constant reincarnation. In each case, the initial success of a single product led to a long-term embrace of media franchising—a dynamic process in which media workers from different industrial positions shared in and reproduced familiar culture across television, film, comics, games, and merchandising. This book examines the corporate culture behind these production practices, as well as the collaborative and creative efforts involved in conceiving, sustaining, and sharing intellectual properties in media work worlds. Challenging connotations of homogeneity, the book shows how the cultural and industrial logic of franchising has encouraged media industries to reimagine creativity as an opportunity for exchange among producers, licensees, and even consumers. Drawing on case studies and interviews with media producers, it reveals the meaningful identities, cultural hierarchies, and struggles for distinction that accompany collaboration within these production networks. The book provides a nuanced portrait of the collaborative cultural production embedded in both the media industries and our own daily lives.
Derek Johnson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814743478
- eISBN:
- 9780814743492
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814743478.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter traces how creativity has developed within the history of the media franchise by moving past world-building to conceptualize the franchise in terms of world-sharing among workers and ...
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This chapter traces how creativity has developed within the history of the media franchise by moving past world-building to conceptualize the franchise in terms of world-sharing among workers and communities. It examines the creative strategies used to construct the shared worlds, the practices by which shared creative use has been managed, and how media workers have conceived their own creative labors and production identities in relation to these shared structures. World-sharing calls for a consideration of the claims and discourses of franchise authorship in terms of social relations. In assessing these issues, the chapter looks at the creative management of Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek, two science fiction franchises that have engaged in world-sharing across multiple industrial contexts.Less
This chapter traces how creativity has developed within the history of the media franchise by moving past world-building to conceptualize the franchise in terms of world-sharing among workers and communities. It examines the creative strategies used to construct the shared worlds, the practices by which shared creative use has been managed, and how media workers have conceived their own creative labors and production identities in relation to these shared structures. World-sharing calls for a consideration of the claims and discourses of franchise authorship in terms of social relations. In assessing these issues, the chapter looks at the creative management of Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek, two science fiction franchises that have engaged in world-sharing across multiple industrial contexts.
Derek Johnson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814743478
- eISBN:
- 9780814743492
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814743478.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This book offers a theoretical and historical intervention that redefines franchising as a model for conceptualizing collaborative production in media culture, problematizing the tendency to consider ...
More
This book offers a theoretical and historical intervention that redefines franchising as a model for conceptualizing collaborative production in media culture, problematizing the tendency to consider this media production in terms of convergence culture, and challenging the assumption that socialized creative collaboration defies the labor hierarchies and power structures of industry. By directing attention to the history of media franchising, one can situate today's emerging social media within a wider tradition of collaborative and socially networked culture. The study of media franchising also advocates for a wider scope of analysis for the socialized production and consumption of culture beyond digital formations. In recognizing the kinds of collaborations and media productions franchising has sustained over time, it is possible to situate the current age of convergence within a tradition of reproducing culture out of commons exchange.Less
This book offers a theoretical and historical intervention that redefines franchising as a model for conceptualizing collaborative production in media culture, problematizing the tendency to consider this media production in terms of convergence culture, and challenging the assumption that socialized creative collaboration defies the labor hierarchies and power structures of industry. By directing attention to the history of media franchising, one can situate today's emerging social media within a wider tradition of collaborative and socially networked culture. The study of media franchising also advocates for a wider scope of analysis for the socialized production and consumption of culture beyond digital formations. In recognizing the kinds of collaborations and media productions franchising has sustained over time, it is possible to situate the current age of convergence within a tradition of reproducing culture out of commons exchange.
Bob Rehak
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781479813155
- eISBN:
- 9781479897070
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479813155.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Today’s franchises of fantastic media depend on visual effects for their existence, not just in their local textual homes (a feature film, a TV episode, a videogame) but across multiple screens and ...
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Today’s franchises of fantastic media depend on visual effects for their existence, not just in their local textual homes (a feature film, a TV episode, a videogame) but across multiple screens and platforms, working transmedially to build ongoing storyworlds, imbue bodies with evidence of life, and ultimately to travel freely as spectacular subgenres in themselves. In this book’s four case studies, major fantastic franchises of the last half century—Star Trek, Star Wars, the Middle Earth films, and The Matrix—reveal themselves as busy sites of negotiation between the late analog era of the 1960s and 1970s and the digital blockbuster era that followed. Arguing that this colonization took place largely in and through the visual effects design and engineering of high-profile media properties, the chapters explore television series art direction and its relationship to an amateur “blueprint culture,” documenting the contents of media’s imaginary worlds; the previsualization practices through which visual effects rebrand complex webs of creative contributions under the sign of the techno-auteur; the animation traditions that bring special-effects-assisted performances to life; and the role of special effects in larger circuits of visual culture. Approaching special effects both as specific technological practices and discursive performances of behind-the-scenes labor, More Than Meets the Eye plumbs the analog roots of contemporary transmedia franchises to find the unexpected behaviors and impacts of special effects that hide in plain sight, constructing perceptions of narrative worlds and characters as on another level they construct our collective ways of imagining franchise cinema, digital media, and technological change.Less
Today’s franchises of fantastic media depend on visual effects for their existence, not just in their local textual homes (a feature film, a TV episode, a videogame) but across multiple screens and platforms, working transmedially to build ongoing storyworlds, imbue bodies with evidence of life, and ultimately to travel freely as spectacular subgenres in themselves. In this book’s four case studies, major fantastic franchises of the last half century—Star Trek, Star Wars, the Middle Earth films, and The Matrix—reveal themselves as busy sites of negotiation between the late analog era of the 1960s and 1970s and the digital blockbuster era that followed. Arguing that this colonization took place largely in and through the visual effects design and engineering of high-profile media properties, the chapters explore television series art direction and its relationship to an amateur “blueprint culture,” documenting the contents of media’s imaginary worlds; the previsualization practices through which visual effects rebrand complex webs of creative contributions under the sign of the techno-auteur; the animation traditions that bring special-effects-assisted performances to life; and the role of special effects in larger circuits of visual culture. Approaching special effects both as specific technological practices and discursive performances of behind-the-scenes labor, More Than Meets the Eye plumbs the analog roots of contemporary transmedia franchises to find the unexpected behaviors and impacts of special effects that hide in plain sight, constructing perceptions of narrative worlds and characters as on another level they construct our collective ways of imagining franchise cinema, digital media, and technological change.
Bob Rehak
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781479813155
- eISBN:
- 9781479897070
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479813155.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This introduction lays out the case for approaching special effects from a transmedia standpoint, focusing on the unexpected roles they play in building and maintaining the storyworlds of fantastic ...
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This introduction lays out the case for approaching special effects from a transmedia standpoint, focusing on the unexpected roles they play in building and maintaining the storyworlds of fantastic media franchises and redefining traditional notions of media authorship, performance, and genre. Relevant scholarship on spectacle, film technology and narrative, and transmedia storytelling is reviewed, with an emphasis on the gap between studies of special effects and convergence culture, which this book seeks to fill. An extended discussion of preproduction practices in early cinema and Classical Hollywood provides an alternative framework for understanding special effects as designed imagery. Previews of the book’s chapters conclude the introduction.Less
This introduction lays out the case for approaching special effects from a transmedia standpoint, focusing on the unexpected roles they play in building and maintaining the storyworlds of fantastic media franchises and redefining traditional notions of media authorship, performance, and genre. Relevant scholarship on spectacle, film technology and narrative, and transmedia storytelling is reviewed, with an emphasis on the gap between studies of special effects and convergence culture, which this book seeks to fill. An extended discussion of preproduction practices in early cinema and Classical Hollywood provides an alternative framework for understanding special effects as designed imagery. Previews of the book’s chapters conclude the introduction.
