Kim Walden

As transmedia film franchising developed with its characteristic reboots, sequels, prequels and shared cinematic universes, promotion costs rose in an increasingly crowded and competitive marketplace.  As a consequence, film marketeers have devised correspondingly creative approaches to promotion using the online environment and social media. This chapter considers the evolution of online film marketing, as blockbusters transformed into transmedia franchises expanding their storytelling across media platforms. Through an examination of the award-winning promotional campaigns for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017), the chapter will consider how transmedia film marketing campaigns have grown to include fictional evil corporate website worlds, ‘exclusive’ events at media conventions (cons), personalized advertising, experiential advertising like VR simulations and franchise universe sites. This investigation concludes that the reason Alien’s transmedia marketing is so compelling lies in its close proximity to the film’s production. As a consequence, these marketing campaigns are arguably becoming as entertaining as the films themselves. So, one of Alien’s legacies is that ‘its ‘advertising is part of the picture’(Gomez and Pullman, 2012).

Following its predecessors, cinema, television and computers, the last decade has seen the emergence of the ‘fourth screen’ and today watching films on laptops, tablets and mobile phones has become an ordinary part of everyday life. Over this time there have been all kinds of initiatives to develop mobile film and whilst much of this material looks quite archaic now, it could be argued that these early prototypes should not just be consigned to media history as they were the incunabula of new kinds of film. This chapter undertakes an archaeology of 3G phones using the Nokia ‘N’ series 70 model as a case study of technical affordances for both film making and film viewing and then turns its attention to the first generation of film made for the ‘fourth screen’. Funded by the UK’s NESTA (National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts), Blink Media workshop commissioned film makers to  make Pocket Shorts and developed a distribution system called Bluevend – a wall mounted Bluetooth vending machine to reach their audience. The chapter contends that such experiments with mobile film can illuminate the genealogy of compact cinematic forms which have become so prevalent today.

Like many film franchises, TRON has been nourished by a steady flow of spin-offs, adaptations, special editions and re-releases on every conceivable format from Betamax to Blu-ray. But what distinguishes TRON from others of its kind is the time which has passed between the original film release in 1982 and the production of its sequel TRON: Legacy in 2010, nearly thirty years later. 
When it came to marketing the long anticipated sequel, a promotional campaign was designed by the award winning company 42 Entertainment which had established a reputation for producing the multi-platform interactive campaign for The Dark Knight in 2008. This article explores the ways that narrative ‘work’ was undertaken by the Flynn Lives campaign to bridge the temporal gap between the two films and effectively reconditions the story for the next instalment of the franchise. It shows how the film’s canonisation was cultivated, traditions were invented and nostalgic sensibilities were nurtured for a film not yet seen.
The campaign created an entertainment, arguably as absorbing as the film it sought to promote, but the success of the paratext was not entirely in its hands. The reasons why TRON captured the imagination of a generation are considered here as well as how the excitement generated by TRON’s vision of a digital future transformed into nostalgia. Drawing on writings in the field of Memory studies, this article argues that the campaign was able to capitalise on the nostalgia which had grown up around the original film and in the emergent game culture.

This chapter will undertake archaeology of the first generation of film made for the ‘fourth screen’ by looking at a project set up by Blink in 2005. It will consider the project’s prototype film distribution system, the Bluvend (a splice of Bluetooth and a vending machine) and the series of commissioned films known as Pocket Shorts. In the light of this, the chapter will contend that mobile telephony’s technical affordances played a part in shaping a new generation of short form. While Bluvend turned spectatorship into a social experience and was a forerunner of social media engagement with film today

Film marketing materials such as trailers and posters are regarded as ephemeral, but as they have migrated online, they have become increasingly pervasive and intriguing forms, colonizing the spaces before, between and beyond the film itself. The distinctions between promotion and content have become blurred, and arguably, some marketing campaigns have become as entertaining as the films they promote, which raises questions about the cultural value of these ephemera. In setting out to investigate what film websites contribute to the narrative ecology of the film, the award-winning promotional website for Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009) promised to be a good starting point. However, the research did not get off to an auspicious start because shortly after it began, the site disappeared. The article gives an account of a media archaeological excavation undertaken to search for D-9.com. A search led to encounters with a wide range of digital archives including the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine, the Webby awards as well the ‘new’ generation of Web 2.0 archives such as blogs, YouTube and social media sites. In the light of this journey, the article will reflect on digital archives from what media theorist Wolfgang Ernst referred to as the ‘machine perspective’ and how the mechanisms of the digital archives condition the way we know things about the recent digital past. It will conclude by suggesting that these archival encounters in this project revealed as much about the nature of digital archives as online film marketing and promotion. 'Archives of the Digital' : a themed issue of Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture, Volume 8, Issue 1 online.

Over recent decades ‘transmedia story telling’ has become an established feature of contemporary film culture from The Blair Witch Project (1999) to Batman’s ‘Why so Serious?’(2008). In Convergence Culture Henry Jenkins defined these new stories by the way they ‘unfold across multiple media platforms with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole’(Jenkins: 2006), and they come in many guises from Tumblr pages to blogs, ARGs (alternative reality games) and full blown web based story worlds. My research project seeks to undertake an archaeological survey of these stories which are ‘out there’ on the web, to understand what factors are shaping their evolution and to diachronically map the development of this nascent narrative form. In the design of this project I have encountered three very different digital archives: Internet Archive (Wayback Machine), Digital Craft.org (based in Frankfurt ,Germany) and Movie Marketing Madness. This paper will provide an account of this experience and the questions it has thrown up about the preservation of this ‘enduring ephemeral’ (Chun:2011), material conservation and the implications of working with personal archives on the web. Lastly, in the light of this experience, the paper will raise some ontological concerns about the interactive in the digital archive.Non peer reviewe

... instruction, Pecorari supports “learning by doing” (p. 50), ie apprentice-type arrangements through which novices ... reporting of content from a source without distortion; (4) the effectiveness of using sources for ... to be called plagiarism, but any of the texts in this corpus could have ...

In recent years there has been a marked change in our cultural relationship with information which has implications for our teaching and learning practices. Current concerns about the identification of, and responses to, plagiarism are grounded in that process of change. In this paper we take the position that it is better to address and respond to the causes of

The 18th Century epistolary mode has often been regarded as a forerunner to the novel. However whilst this fictional style form waned in popularity, it did not disappear and has since found expression in the contemporary fiction of such notable authors as Doris Lessing and Vladimir Nabokov. By the 1980s when Margaret Atwood published A Handmaiden’s Tale, the epistolary form had undergone some modernisation. Letter writing had been superseded by media technologies and the heroine of this novel records her memories on audio tape. This paper will assert that epistolarity has manifested itself once again in cinema’s recent transmedia productions on the web. Described as ‘narrative extensions’ of cinema today, the web sites which accompany films provide audiences with narrative forms which extend the stories of their filmic counterparts through the ‘digital vernacular’ of videos diaries and vlogs as well as, social networking and fake web sites. Drawing on the work of new media theorists including Manowich, Bolter and Grusin, this paper will investigate this form of storytelling in web sites for films like Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009) and Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield ( 2008) Authorship has often been a question for consideration in Film Studies. The aim of this paper will be to examine the operations of authorship in the ‘expanded texts’ of contemporary film web sites in the light of the epistolary tradition and reflect on what this tells us about how the concept of ‘authorship’ is being reconfigured in a digital cinema culture.

The representation of story worlds has changed a great deal since Tolkien described Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings. Today they are more likely to take the form of a company web site than an idyllic village in the Shire. This paper will examine the rise of a narrative trope which has become prevalent in transmediations of film: the fake corporate web site. From ‘Lacuna Inc’ in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) to ‘MNU’ in District 9 (2009) it will examine factors which have shaped the emergence of this feature including sci-fi narrative characterisations of the corporate, the cultural impact of the techno-economy, and games design, drawing on theories from new media, games and accounts of production from designers themselves. The paper proposes that these new story worlds reflect ways in which relations between production and consumption are being reconfigured in a digital film culture.

Awards, honours and prizes: a ‘cultural value stock exchange’ for media producers and audiences. In The Field of Cultural of Production, Pierre Bourdieu asserts that a work is not made once, or twice, but by everybody who is interested in it and this would certainly seem to be true of awards, honours and prizes.(1993:111) In a culture which values prestige so highly, awards have become an increasingly prominent cultural practice as well as a nexus for producers and audiences interests to interact. Over the last twenty years a number of awards have sprung up to recognise the emergence of transmedia, from the Prix Ars Electronica and the Flash film festival to the Webby and Movie Viral Awards. These awards reflect the interests of a diverse range of stakeholders including professional academies, agencies and associations for advertising, promotion and entertainment, as well as media technology-sponsored awards, Net art events, web design sites , film festivals and fan communities. And all, in one way or another, are interested in ‘speaking’ about this developing cultural form, articulating what it is and what it can be. Awards play their part in shaping and asserting the value and, therefore, the meaning of these emergent media forms in a number of key ways: • as a channel of communication, both inwards and outwards for the industry and its institutions; • as a form of short-hand communication that audiences use to inform their media consumption ; and • as a measure of cultural impact and as a form of cultural ‘consecration’.(1993:38) Drawing on both field work and interviews, this paper aims to investigate how transmedia awards, honours and prizes broker the relationship between producers and audiences. It will examine their origins, their underlying rationale as well as how they operate in relation to one another. The paper will suggest that the work of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu can be usefully applied in analysing the dynamics of this ‘cultural value stock exchange’ (Bourdieu, 1993:137)

This paper asserts that the process of information gathering and handling has shifted in a digital information environment. These shifts pose new challenges for students in evaluating and using information, which has implications for the way these skills are taught and assessed. In turn, this has triggered a critique of the conventional academic essay for its exclusively written form, which focuses on a narrow range of communication skills and disadvantages some students. Given these concerns, this paper reports a new approach to assessment developed in the Faculty of Art and Design called the i-map (short for information map), which can be used in conjunction with the essay to document the enquiry process. Its key features are described and survey findings are considered. These include the need for information literacy skills in the curriculum, the i-map’s use in counteracting plagiarism, and how it enables a fairer assessment of some students’ learning experience and capabilities....

Film marketing materials such as trailers and posters are regarded as ephemeral, but as they have migrated online, they have become increasingly pervasive and intriguing forms, colonizing the spaces before, between and beyond the film itself. The distinctions between promotion and content have become blurred, and arguably, some marketing campaigns have become as entertaining as the films they promote, which raises questions about the cultural value of these ephemera. In setting out to investigate what film websites contribute to the narrative ecology of the film, the award-winning promotional website for Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009) promised to be a good starting point. However, the research did not get off to an auspicious start because shortly after it began, the site disappeared. The article gives an account of a media archaeological excavation undertaken to search for D-9.com. A search led to encounters with a wide range of digital archives including the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine, the Webby awards as well the ‘new’ generation of Web 2.0 archives such as blogs, YouTube and social media sites. In the light of this journey, the article will reflect on digital archives from what media theorist Wolfgang Ernst referred to as the ‘machine perspective’ and how the mechanisms of the digital archives condition the way we know things about the recent digital past. It will conclude by suggesting that these archival encounters in this project revealed as much about the nature of digital archives as online film marketing and promotion.


'Archives of the Digital' : a themed issue of Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture, Volume 8, Issue 1 online.

In 1915 the Fleischer brothers, Max and Dave, developed a device known as the “rotoscope” which allowed the artist to trace over the original film footage frame by frame to make a more life-like rendition for animation. Rotoscoping’s digital descendent, known as “Rotoshop” was used to style Richard Linklater’s animations Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, but whilst rotoscoping may originally have been developed to help animators achieve a greater sense of realism, it has never just been about verisimilitude. Drawing on the theories of such diverse commentators as Bertolt Brecht, Roland Barthes and Robert Bresson, the paper will consider two central questions: What have been the consequences of this digital animation technique for screen performance, and what spectatorial pleasures does this means of storytelling afford its audience?

... But there are more pragmatic reasons for recording net art's history. Tilman Bc~umgartel's contextualising essay is illuminating when he traces the net art's genealogy back to practices such as telecommunications art of the 197 ...

The impact of film marketing campaigns has conventionally been inferred from box office figures (Johnson, 2008:2). But since campaigns have moved online, things have begun to change. Discussion boards, forums and communities have become a standard feature of film franchise websites providing a space where fans can post messages and participate in exchanges about their shared interest. However it is argued that the most revolutionary aspect of these social media locations is that audiences leave ‘traces’ of themselves that remain long after the film theatrical release is over (Mathieu et al., 2016:295). In this paper I propose that these sites constitute a new kind of archive. Not an archive in the usual sense of a place that preserves historical artefacts, but an archive of audiences’ engagement. Moreover these ‘traces’ are the material remains of audience experiences of film marketing campaigns and can provide insight into the 21st century film experience.
This paper will give an account of the investigation of the award-winning Tron: Legacy marketing campaign website over a two year period running up until the film’s release in 2010. Whilst Disney have long since taken down the site, the discussion boards and participant’s posts  have been preserved by the Internet Archive providing direct access to this record of audience responses, reactions, sentiments about the campaign. Adapting a qualitative analytical tool from the field of Social Psychology known as Thematic Analysis, these social media sites were examined and the paper gives an account of this methodology, its application in social media settings, its insights and its limitations. It concludes that by engaging with fans through the discussion boards, marketers were able to cultivate nostalgia for a film, not yet seen, and Tron was effectively reframed as the nascent green shoots of today’s digital culture.

It is not just the Alien films that has left a mark on contemporary media culture, some of their publicity campaigns are worthy of consideration too.  Designed by Ignition Interactive, the award-winning promotional campaign for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012) took a transmedia form: from the trailer that premiered at the 2012 WonderCon in Anaheim, California, where Weyland business cards were distributed, to the TED-style video introducing the character of Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce). But at the heart of this campaign was its in-fiction corporate website which provided an entry point to the fictional world of Alien.
This paper will consider how Weylandindustries.com creates a fictional world backdrop in the shape of the evil corporation’s website, a widely used topoi in contemporary promotional media culture. As well as world building, the film’s website was also used to manage the increasing complexity of the film series’ chronology. For while in 2012, Prometheus was the latest in the series, narratively speaking it preceded all the previous films, and so had to operate within the future narrative logic of the Alien canon.
What was particularly distinctive about the Prometheus campaign was the way in which it brought together what Tolkien described as the ‘secondary’ fictional world with the ‘primary’ real world (1939:140). Over a period of four months the professional network, LinkedIn, YouTube and other online iterations were incorporated into the campaign, so that audiences experienced a sense of immersion in the fictional world, in much the same way they encounter the world in their own lives, mediated through screens.
In sum, this paper will demonstrate how, when  promotional costs can match or even exceeding film production budgets, the result is diminishing distinctions between film content and creative promotion summed up in a headline in Advertising Age,  ‘In Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, the advertising is part of the picture’(2012).

Searching for District 9 in the archives: An archaeology of a film transmedia campaign

Film marketing materials have conventionally been regarded as both ephemera and ephemeral but in a digital environment they have become increasingly significant colonising the spaces before, between and beyond the film itself. Indeed the distinctions between promotion and content have become so blurred that, arguably, marketing campaigns have become as entertaining as the films they promote, raising questions about the cultural value of such ephemera.
This project set out to examine what transmedia contributes to the narrative ecology of the film  and took the award winning campaign designed by the marketing agency, Trigger for Neil Blomkamp’s  District 9 (2009) as a starting point. But the research did not get off to an auspicious start because shortly after the project began, the site disappeared.
This paper will give an account of a media archaeological excavation to find for District 9’s web campaign. During the search archival sites encountered included institutions set up with the aim of preservation such as the Internet Archive, the Webby awards archive as well the ‘new’ generation of web 2.0 archives – a personal blog, YouTube and social media sites. 
In the light of this, the paper will then reflect on what the German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst referred to as the ‘machine perspective’ and how the mechanisms of the digital archives condition the way we know things about  the recent digital past. It will conclude by suggesting that these archival encounters in this project revealed as much about the nature of digital archives as the film transmediation.

In the light of changes to film reception with the advent of small screens, solitary viewings and online story worlds, this paper looks at the phenomena of  Secret Cinema that turns films into ‘live’ events  at ‘secret’ locations across London. Focussing on a recent Secret Cinema event in the suburb of West Croydon in which a vacant 13 storey office block was transformed into the story world of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), this paper considers the consequences of the spatialisation of the film experience for the spectator. To investigate the experience, three key strategies deployed by Secret Cinema will be explored: scaled up film props, in-event screenings and sound scapes.
The paper will suggest that the literary theories of Roland Barthes’ in The Pleasure in the Text (1973) and Espen Aarseth’s in Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997), can both be usefully deployed to understand the audience experience of these events. 
Aarseth suggests these new narrative forms are as much ideological as technical, constructed through their difference (and presumed superiority) to prior media experiences  but this paper will conclude that secret cinema’s film event creates a sense of tmesis and disorientation for their audiences which is a far cry from Barthes‘ promise of ‘textual bliss’.

The 18th Century epistolary mode has often been regarded as a forerunner to the novel. However whilst this fictional style form waned in popularity, it did not disappear and has since found expression in the contemporary fiction of such notable authors as Doris Lessing and Vladimir Nabokov. By the 1980s when Margaret Atwood published A Handmaiden’s Tale, the epistolary form had undergone some modernisation. Letter writing had been superseded by media technologies and the heroine of this novel records her memories on audio tape.
This paper will assert that epistolarity has manifested itself once again in cinema’s recent transmedia productions on the web. Described as ‘narrative extensions’ of cinema today, the web sites which accompany films provide audiences with narrative forms which extend the stories of their filmic counterparts through the ‘digital vernacular’ of videos diaries and vlogs as well as, social networking and fake web sites.  Drawing on the work of new media theorists including Manowich, Bolter and Grusin,  this paper will investigate  this form of storytelling in web sites for films like Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009)  and Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield ( 2008)
Authorship has often been a question for consideration in Film Studies. The aim of this paper will be to examine the operations of authorship in the ‘expanded texts’ of contemporary film web sites in the light of the epistolary tradition and reflect on what this tells us about how the concept of ‘authorship’ is being reconfigured in a digital cinema culture.

On its release in 1982 Disney’s sci-fi adventure TRON (Steven Lisberger) may have been considered a flop but over time it has entered into folk culture for a whole number of reasons: it was the first commercial film to include computer generated sequences; it presented one of the first cinematic mappings of cyberspace and perhaps most importantly, it lauded the nascent video game culture which was beginning to establish itself.

Thirty years on the film’s sequel TRON: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski) sought to capitalise on the cult reputation which had grown up around the original film. But whilst this film met a similar poor reception from critics, like its predecessor, it has already been acknowledged for other attributes. Most notably its transmedia promotional campaign Flynn Lives, designed by 42 Entertainment, which has won numerous awards for its innovative approach to film marketing.

Flynn Lives takes the form of a ‘campaign’ to search for the film’s central character Kevin Flynn who has mysteriously disappeared. The paratexual event was rolled out over a period of months before the film’s release creating what Genette referred to as a ‘threshold’ encounter arguably larger than the film itself.

This paper will investigate what operations and functions such a paratexts fulfils within the film franchise and, building on recent scholarship on franchise adaptation, identify what logics are deployed in it (Parody, 2011). The paper will consider:

• the temporal and circulatory regime of the paratext including its duration and patterns of transmission within the media’s circulatory networks(Grainge,2011)

• how the paratext provided a bridge  ‘de-gapping’  the distance between the two films in the franchise as well as the generations of the film’s audience

• the harnessing of  games culture’s ‘nostalgic attitude’ (Koivuven,2001) 

• the mythologization of TRON by inserting it ‘Zelig’ style into the history of digital culture

Clearly paratextual film sites are no longer just static ‘destinations’ on the web. TRON has been adapted and reworked in this promotional campaign to generate a whole range of experiences beyond the film’s narrative. By the conclusion, a few days before the film’s theatrical release, it becomes clear that Flynn Lives was not just about TRON but about TRON audiences and that this points to the way in which the relationship between industry and audiences are being reconfigured in a digital film culture.

Digital zombies, cultural cryogenics and troubles with malware: an archaeological adventure in the archives
Over recent decades ‘transmedia story telling’ has become an established feature of contemporary film culture from The Blair Witch Project (1999) to Batman’s ‘Why so Serious?’(2008). In Convergence Culture  Henry Jenkins defined these new stories by the way they ‘unfold across multiple media platforms with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole’(Jenkins: 2006),  and they come in many guises from Tumblr pages to blogs, ARGs (alternative reality games) and full blown web based story worlds.
My research project seeks to undertake an archaeological survey of these stories which are ‘out there’ on the web, to understand what factors are shaping their evolution and to diachronically map the development of this nascent narrative form.
In the design of this project I have encountered three very different digital archives: Internet Archive (Wayback Machine), Digital Craft.org (based in Frankfurt ,Germany) and Movie Marketing Madness. This paper will provide an account of this experience and the questions it has thrown up about the preservation of this ‘enduring ephemeral’ (Chun: 2011), material conservation and the implications of working with personal archives on the web. Lastly, in the light of this experience, the paper will raise some ontological concerns about the interactive in the digital archive.

Awards, honours and prizes:  a ‘cultural value stock exchange’ for media producers and audiences.
In The Field of Cultural of Production, Pierre Bourdieu asserts that a work is not made once, or twice, but by everybody who is interested in it and this would certainly seem to be true of awards, honours and prizes.(1993:111)
In a culture which values prestige so highly, awards have become an increasingly prominent cultural practice as well as a nexus for producers and audiences interests to interact. Over the last twenty years a number of awards have sprung up to recognise the emergence of transmedia, from the Prix Ars Electronica and the Flash film festival to the Webby and Movie Viral Awards. These awards reflect the interests of a diverse range of stakeholders including professional academies, agencies and associations for advertising, promotion and entertainment, as well as media technology-sponsored awards, Net art events, web design sites , film festivals and fan communities. And all, in one way or another, are interested in ‘speaking’ about this developing cultural form, articulating what it is and what it can be.
Awards play their part in shaping and asserting the value and, therefore, the meaning of these emergent media forms in a number of key ways:
• as a channel of communication, both inwards and outwards for the industry and its institutions; 
• as a form of short-hand communication that audiences use to inform their media consumption ; and
• as a measure of cultural impact and as a form of cultural ‘consecration’.(1993:38)
Drawing on both field work and interviews, this paper aims to investigate how transmedia awards, honours and prizes broker the relationship between producers and audiences. It will examine their origins, their underlying rationale as well as how they operate in relation to one another. The paper will suggest that the work of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu can be usefully applied in analysing the dynamics of this ‘cultural value stock exchange’ (Bourdieu, 1993:137)

Site Excavations: Archaeology of Film Transmedia Award Archives
What has been described as the ‘burgeoning past and vanishing present’ of our rapidly changing digital media culture has thrown into question conventional approaches to archive [1]. Over the last twenty years transmedia has become an established practice in film production but to investigate its development alternative approaches were needed.
Awards have become increasingly prominent in our ‘culture of prestige’ and a number have sprung up to recognise transmedia practices from the Prix Ars Electronica to the Webbys. What they have in common is that they are all interested in ‘speaking’ about transmedia, articulating what it is and what it can be.
This paper asserts that awards are significant to historical media studies because they valorise certain practices over others and therefore can shape what happens next. By adopting a Foucaudian approach to this enquiry, this paper will suggest that awards can be regarded as archives providing a rich site for media archaeological excavation.
[1] This phrase is borrowed from the title of a session at the Society for Historical Archaeology conference in 2008 ‘The Archaeology of ten Minutes Ago: Material Histories of the Burgeoning Past and Vanishing Present. (Holtorf & Piccini 2011:9-10)
Bibliography
Bourdieu, P. (1993). The Field of Cultural production. Cambridge, Polity Press.
English, J. F. (2005). The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press.

Foucault, M. (2002). The Archaeology of Knowledge. Abingdon, Routledge.

The representation of story worlds has changed a great deal since Tolkien described Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings. Today they are more likely to take the form of a company web site than an idyllic village in the Shire.

This paper will examine the rise of a narrative trope which has become prevalent in transmediations of film: the fake corporate web site. From ‘Lacuna Inc’ in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) to ‘MNU’ in District 9 (2009) it will examine factors which have shaped the emergence of this feature including sci-fi narrative characterisations of the corporate, the cultural impact of the techno-economy, and games design, drawing on theories from new media, games and accounts of production from designers themselves.

The paper proposes that these new story worlds reflect ways in which relations between production and consumption are being reconfigured in a digital film culture.