The Wonderful World of Heated Film Debate

BCM241 WEEK ONE BLOG POST

When thinking about what media niche I wanted to explore, my mind wandered to a variety of different interests of mine; fashion influencers, RuPaul’s Drag Race, feminist content creators. However, I wanted to branch out into something that I’m interested in in a professional sense, thus I turned to one of the media niches that initially made me interested in studying film at UOW. My interest is in film, more specifically film analysis videos on YouTube. I keep up with several YouTubers who do analytical commentary on film, The Take (1.3M subscribers) and Lessons from the Screenplay (1.38M subscribers) are two of my favourites. The personas of the channels themselves differ between the two YouTube channels, Lessons from the Screenplay discusses a certain film and how the conventions and techniques of the screenplay evoke emotion and appeal to the audience. While The Take discusses a series of films with a common problematic trope and how they are propelled and broken. The comment sections of videos such as those produced by these two channels are full of open discussion and debate between film buffs and cinephiles alike.

The collective persona of this media niche acts within the space of film enthusiasts, each with their own, personal lexicon of film knowledge and individualised opinions. Opinions are further crafted and thought out by debating and discussing conventions of filmmaking. The film media niche extends into other platforms such as Twitter, TikTok, Instagram and Reddit all with content related to film often working within their own, as Massimo Airoldi (2018) refers to as, “meta-field” of content categorised by specific hashtags for example TikTok has a #FilmTok specifically for film enthusiasts to discuss and create content.

Ethnographically, by researching this media niche I might experience how the community functions, what kinds of people engage with these videos if they are scholars or just have an interest in film. As well as exploring where the opinions expressed in the videos have unaligned with the collective persona, due to what videos perform better and which receive backlash. By doing so I may inform others about the human interaction that occurs in this media niche, where the opinions are based from and why certain ones hold merit over others within the community.