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"
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).
Reviews for Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics
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 *
