Writing about the business

Working towards the Essay

Several people have flagged up that they would like to write about the business of film, game or animation. In particular as transmedia storytelling evolves, people want to explore how the business itself is changing.
One of the big issues is always how to put in several components into an essay for instance history, factual research into the business as well as theory.
A typical starting point can be something that’s current. For instance, Mark Hall’s obituary was published in the Guardian last week. (See Obituary section Monday 21st November 2011)
Mark Hall was a co-creator of Danger Mouse and worked with Brian Cosgrove to set up Cosgrove Hall Productions. The obituary covers his life and work from public information films in the late 1960s, his first award winning animation Magic Ball 1971/2, and work on Noddy (1975), up to their last announced children’s series HeroGliffix. However their first real international success was with Danger Mouse (1981/92). This was a character with real transmedia potential and the merchandise alone generated millions. This series also spawned Count Duckula (1988/93). However the structure of film companies came under threat in the 1990s. Cosgrove Hall productions used to work for Thames TV, which lost its ITV London broadcasting franchise and therefore they had to move to Angela Television and the distributer ITEL and they therefore rebranded as Cosgrove Hall Films. This allowed them to set up new studios equipped for digital animation. BBC revivals Bill and Ben as well as Andy Pandy were made by the new company (2001 and 2002). In 2003 Cosgrove Hall Films was absorbed into the newly unified ITV which finally closed the business two years ago.
The history of Cosgrove Films mirrors that of the industry as a whole. By looking at this one company in detail you can get a feel for how small animation studios developed, (one or two man businesses) broke into the business (at that time the developing commercial TV sector), had to cope with wider success (marketing internationally, developing merchandise) early games development (see game for Spectrum), changes in the structure of the TV business the development of digital animation etc.





There is a real retro feel to this.

So what other issues could be looked at to flesh out an essay. You could take one of Cosgrave Hall’s characters and examine why it might have been successful. One area we looked at was media specificity. Because a ten minute episode needed 2,000 drawings, as a cost-cutting measure, the cartoons made frequent use of repeated footage and "in the dark" sequences (black with eyeballs visible only, or, in Danger Mouse's case, simply one eyeball). A recurring setting for episodes was "The North Pole" - so chosen because the white, snow-covered backgrounds would require minimal painting and colouring. Other studios working at the time were too concerned with ‘quality’ and not enough with storytelling and character development, thus being unable to bring in products within target budgets. So one area of media specificity is to do with speed and ease of production and how to increase production rates using the implications of the media being worked with.
Another issue is character type and recognition. The eye patch is a classic easy to recognise format (see my earlier blogs on Indiana Jones’ hat) and the secret agent character is another (James Bond etc.) This can lead us to the fact that there are only 7 great stories and that the plot of Dr No echoes that of Gilgamesh etc etc. which can then open out into a whole section on ‘spy fiction. See how TV programmes such as Danger Man (1960–68) The Man from U.N.C.L.E (1964–68) and I Spy (1965–68) influenced the ideas behind Danger Mouse.
As you can see the starting point isn’t that important. By working around any start we can find several layers of information that may become sections in our essay.



Lego gets in on the Danger Mouse action

Phenomenology as an approach to film and game theory.

Above: A collage of images from the shower scene in Psycho

Many writers on film and game concentrate on the intellectual aspects of theory. However my experience of watching film or playing games is much more physical. I start with a feeling and this usually resides in my bodily reactions. I’m not the only one who feels this.

Vivian Sobchack states in : Carnal Thoughts – Embodiment and Moving Image Culture.
“Nearly every time I read a movie review in a newspaper or popular magazine, I am struck by the gap that exists between our actual experience of the cinema and the theory that we academic film scholars construct to explain it – or perhaps, more aptly, to explain it away.” (2004: p.52)

This gap between theory and experience is sometimes where trying to write about film and game becomes unstuck. What we are writing does not seem to match up with experience. I want a way of writing that reflects how film and game experiences move me. In particular at that moment when I want to cry or laugh out loud or get that hand clenching tension as I wait for the monster to reveal itself or find out if the hero survives.
Phenomenology is centred on perception and how our senses make meaning. It is also called embodied thinking. Therefore when trying to analyse responses to a film or game it’s useful to focus on how we are perceiving the world normally and how a construct like a film or game forces us to perceive differently.
Deleuze and Guattari state that the three great domains of human creation are art, philosophy and science. These three different modes of expression are they suggest; perceptual, conceptual and functional. In particular they argue, art relies on the creation of sensuous aggregates. (Rodowick in Furstenau, 2010, p. 31)
The term ‘sensuous aggregate’ is one taken from Husserl who used it to describe a ‘unified intuition’ (Farber, 2006) and is a term used to describe the various feelings and bodily knowledge that come to us through pre-cognitive thought. This ‘sensuous aggregate’ is something that I might also call a ‘feeling tone’ when describing an experience.
These feelings must come from my bodily experience of the real world. For instance at this time of the year when I leave work it’s dark. It’s also dark when I get up. This absence of light definitely makes me feel slightly depressed. This isn’t just my feeling, scientists have now linked depression to an absence of light and seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a recognised medical condition. If I catch movement out of the corner of my eye I’m alerted to something, I therefore switch my attention on and if I can’t spot anything when I do this I become nervous. I’m aware of something that possibly exists but I’m not sure what it is. In a dangerous situation this of course would lead to real fear. In film or game these experiences can be triggered by the way a film is shot and edited or a game constructed and lighting levels decided upon.
The theoretical concept, ‘the abject’ is according to Kristeva (1982) situated outside our normal symbolic order, therefore being forced to face it is a traumatic experience. The usual examples used for this are being faced with a corpse, death, excrement and rot etc. However it could also be argued that these are simply learned responses to colour and textures that we associate with disease, food rotting, meat going off etc. and are bodily warnings to stay away from potentially dangerous situations. In art, in particular in film and game we can be made to experience these feelings through colour selection, (for instance food may be photographed when lit under a blue light) or texture (slimed surfaces etc) purposely developed to create revulsion.
In Psycho the scene when Janet Leigh is having a shower is a classic piece of phenomenological editing. We are drawn in to believe she is relaxing and oblivious to the world whilst she showers, this being something everyone of us can bodily feel. We all escape momentarily from the world in a shower’s warm jet of water. Then suddenly a shadow appears outside the curtain. That mind- shrieking violin music starts up and then the knife plunges into her naked back again, and again. The physicality of each blow is felt by us with even more force because we have been drawn into that feeling of being warm and naked in the shower. We have unconsciously achieved a bodily empathy with Janet and therefore feel the blows that much more deeply. The ripping of the shower curtain as she falls, and the cut to the blood swirling down the drain all add to the sense of bodily disruption because of the rapidly changing camera angles. We associate these changes in viewpoint with moments we have experienced such as falls and accidents, when we are violently forced to see the world from low and difficult angles. Hitchcock knows how to get us to engage with his film, in particular he is controlling our ‘sensuous aggregate’ by building physical associations with characters and situations and thus subjecting our overall ‘feeling tone’ to a complete filmic makeover. Bernard Hermann's eerie score further reinforces the development of the ‘feeling tone’ of the film. His high-pitched violins encapsulate the whole feeling of the film. Sounds of that tone and pitch being associated with the scraping of metal on metal or that awful screech you get when animals are being killed, again associations that develop through real life experience.
Technically nearly the whole film was shot with 50 mm lenses on 35 mm cameras. This closely mimics normal human vision, which deeply linked the audience’s perceptions of the cinematic world to their own real life experiences.
I could go on but the point of this post was to highlight one of the areas of communication theory and demonstrate how it could be used to look at film or game. I’ve also cited references used, so that those of you starting to develop essay ideas can get used to how citations should appear in a text.

References

Aaltonen, Minna-Ella (2011) Touch, taste & devour: phenomenology of
film and the film experiencer in the cinema of sensations. MPhil(R) thesis. Obtained at: http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2666/01/2011aaltonenmphilr.pdf
accessed on 14. 11. 11

Farber, M (2006) The foundation of phenomenology: Edmund Husserl and the quest for a rigorous science of philosophy London: AldineTransaction

Furstenau, M (2010) The film theory reader London: Routledge

Hitchcock, A (1960) Psycho Paramount Pictures

Kristeva, J (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection New York: Columbia University Press

Partonen, T & Lönnqvist, J (1998) Seasonal affective disorder The Lancet Volume 352, Issue 9137, 24 October, Pages 1369-1374

Sobchack, V., (2004) Carnal Thoughts – Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkley,
Los Angeles, London: Routledge