I do still think that, like so many political soundbites, his comments were clumsy and heavy-handed. But having reflected for a day or so, I think there is some positivity to be drawn from them.

One thing is for sure – that it’s brought a much needed spotlight to the great contribution that the creative industry (with Film as its biggest component) makes to the British economy. Media coverage is otherwise massively biased toward financial services, which for the attention it gets and the pedestal it is put on would seem to be the only significant UK industry. The reality is that the creative industry contributes perhaps just 2 to 3 percent less to GDP. At the smallest level, I’d argue that simply to hear the Today programme yesterday discussing the Film industry, if only for one day, rather than what has become just a perpetual background drone about financial issues, was refreshing enough to justify the comment.

On a more significant scale though, if, rather than interpreting the PM’s comments as meaning “you must all make studio films” instead as “you must produce films in a more studio-like way”, I think this is no bad thing. Of course, the worry is that funding will be given only to tried and tested ideas, though for the imaginative filmmaker wanting to create original cinema, is there an opportunity here to force them to consider who their audience are and engage with them at an earlier stage?

Sadly, my experience of the UK independent industry, aside from a few notable exceptions, is that considering who may actually watch their film is not something a filmmaker sullies themselves with. The production of a film and the marketing of it are completely separate. Perhaps as much as a few years after a film has wrapped, with no access to the production or its assets, a distributor has the almost impossible task of generating an audience from scratch with very little marketing spend in a noisy marketplace in just three to four weeks. Because of the disconnect with the production and the limited timescale, any attempt to reach an audience often ends up shoe-horning the marketing of another genre around it. The result is that there may be a great film with a sizeable potential audience, but for too many films, that audience will never know.

Digital media provides the tools to integrate this process, allowing a filmmaker to reach out and nurture an audience from the start right up to offering a legitimate distribution method at the end. All this comes with a price tag that is affordable. Affordable, but not free. The first thing that must change is that all productions, however small, must consider marketing and audience development as part of their responsibility and allocate budget for it. The next is to embrace the creative side of digital as imaginatively as their own film – it is less marketing, more an extension of the production (amazingly, still the greatest percentage of digital marketing spend in indie films is on banner ads – banner ads are not new media, they are old media masquerading as new).

Was this what Cameron meant? Well, probably not… there’s an implicit and insidious faith in market research, my feelings on which can be summed up by a couple of choice Steve Jobs’ quotes: “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them” and “If you want to know what the future is, invent it”. Every industry needs those figures who can generate paradigm shifts, and those shifts do not come about by asking people what should be made, but from pioneering, visionary voices. The UK film industry has a great history of those pioneers and visionaries, but can we honestly say that we’re representing that talent in the best possible way? Is there scope to direct more of that creative zeal to connecting a film to an audience? Absolutely.

After I graduated, a few days before I left campus, I did a job for the Psychology department. They wanted some help scanning and creating some graphics. They took me to a small room at the top of the department and within it was something that changed my life. It was a Mac.

Roll forward to 2007, when I like many others were frustrated with mobile phones. These were slow, buggy, restrictive and difficult to use devices. People dreamt what Apple could do in that space and how they responded. Personally, I think the paradigm the iPhone started is a far bigger step than the personal computer or even the television.

Arguments that Jobs was merely caught up in inevitable advances in technology or that they existed prior to his involvement is tenuous in the case of the Mac, though ridiculous in the case of the phone, where Apple entered an existing multi-billion dollar market already producing a vast array of albeit mediocre devices, all very different in form and function. Several global hardwire and software companies and service providers could not after years of trying get even close to what Apple unveiled on that day. Now every smart phone, give or take a fiddly plastic keyboard, largely owes its design to the iPhone.

But to limit Steve Jobs’s influence and vision to technical achievements is short sighted.

One of the most significant revolutions with the iPhone was smashing the cartel mobile providers had on the Internet. Prior to the iPhone, we saw a stunted Internet. Mobile companies sought to create walled gardens, where you could only see the the content they wanted. On top of their high pay-as-you-go data charges, you were often expected to pay for content as well.

It was a pattern Steve Jobs repeated frequently, targeting stagnant, inward-looking industries who had become lazy, greedy and had almost forgotten why they existed. The foundation was to produce a game-changing, technically brilliant device but equally brilliant were his techniques and the sheer brute force to break through all the false barriers involved in bringing that product to market.

In music, the fact that we can now at the touch of a button cheaply and legally buy virtually any piece of published music to a device in the palm of your hand is not just about vision, but also the sheer bloody-mindedness of one man who needed to dismantle an entire established industry to make it happen.

In retail, customer service is on a comeback. Banished are the High Street box shifters, such as Curries and Dixons, whilst other shops as diverse as cosmetics, coffee and clothing these days all feel strangely reminiscent of an Apple Store.

In software, the App store has ensued the return of the age of the small, creative independent software developer, with a platform that makes it possible to create and sell niche, lightweight apps that break the tyranny of the culture of a handful of giants producing monolithic, overpriced bloatware.

No matter how well Apple may maintain its culture and innovation after Steve Jobs, it is this ability to turn entire industries upside down that we will sadly miss.

One battle that he lost, however, was against the Film industry.

Like my university Unix workstation or my old, chunky Nokia phone, there’s something just not right about the Film industry. Audiences prepared to pay money can’t watch the films they want to see or choose where and when they get to see them. Filmmakers (coincidentally, empowered by Apple technology to make low budget films in the first place) can’t get their films to audiences. Online, a fraction of the films I want to see are available. Some I can buy but not rent, others I can rent but not buy. A stagnant, inward looking industry, determined to steam the meat off the carcass of the DVD industry and breath life into the stillborn Blue Ray format stubbornly resists to give an audience what they want, and the audience in turn are forced to piracy.

The Film industry is broken.

Sounds like a job for Super Steve.

But, with the studios forewarned and forearmed after the loss of control their sister divisions yielded to the iTunes Store, they gave up little. It was to be a longer battle, and tragically, time has run out.

Perhaps, one day, through a steady process of evolution, we will get there, though the world has lost the only man capable of achieving this by revolution.

Imagine an Oscar-nominated director was taking an ensemble of Hollywood A-list stars on location and creating not only a 90 minute feature but also an online experience going live day by day during shooting.

In the age of social media, there’s no doubt you would have heard about such a project, right?

Yet this project did happen.

Exactly ten years ago I was approached by Film director Mike Figgis to build an online accompaniment to his planned feature Hotel. It was to follow the style of his previous feature, Time Code, notable for being a single take of 90 minutes, largely improvised and shot from four perspectives, shown simultaneously on a single screen split into quadrangles.

Mike had always been keen to explore wider outputs of a Film production than the film itself, such as books, photography exhibitions and of course digital. We’d tried with Time Code, but as it was a studio film, we ran into a complete wall. Their people in LA would handle the web presence and in form as typical then as now, they produced something that amounted to little more than an animating billboard. With Hotel, though, it was to be different. There was no studio involved meaning Mike was free to pick and chose his collaborators. Additionally, Channel 4 and FilmFour (still in its first incarnation), saw the web project’s experimental combination of film and online as the perfect opportunity to launch their portal FilmFour.com.

Alongside myself as technical director our team included designer Franki Goodwin, who subsequently became my business partner when we founded Franki&Jonny a couple of years hence and Damien O’Donnell, BAFTA-winning director of East is East. His interest was fired by the challenge of shooting, editing and putting live a short film daily during the production.

From the outset, we collectively knew what we were trying to achieve. This was not a piece of online film marketing. It was not to be just another flashy-Flash animated billboard. Neither was it simply a behind-the-scenes documentary put online, a kind of digital EPK if you like. This was a destination in its own right. Whilst we hoped for a certain cross over of audience, either to or from the film, the experience did not depend on it. We wanted to extend the world of the film; to create an immersive and entertaining experience, only one that would be viewed on a computer screen rather than a cinema screen or television. In today’s vernacular, we certainly created a transmedia project.

During pre-production, precisely what this meant we weren’t sure. We were to have complete, unfettered access to the production and intended to utilise that to the full in the web content. Yet in the spirit of the production, which had no script, we too would improvise and create our content daily.

In order to inform our thinking a little more and to give the whole project coherence, we set up a kind of Dogme-style manifesto for our content:

1. All material on the website had to be sourced by us on location, be it video footage, stills or audio.
2. All content had to relate to the story of the film, the techniques of filming or the location.
3. All actors had to appear in character.
4. We were to avoid text wherever other material could tell the story.

We set ourselves the goal of uploading four pieces of content a day. We designed a basic interface to hold this, laid out to replicate the quadrangle screen Mike had used in Time Code, plus a simple navigation to move between days. Beyond that, the heavy symbiosis with the unplanned and unscripted main feature meant nothing existed prior to shooting.

Now, unsurprisingly, Channel 4 were initially reluctant to release what was then their largest single online spend on a project plan that at that point consisted solely of a simple interface design, but it was the coup of Damien’s involvement, director of what is still one of FilmFour’s highest grossing films of all time, that encouraged them to overlook the impudent web developer sitting next to him waving pictures of a black screen.

There was, however, a caveat. The new FilmFour.com, of which this project was to play a starring role, was not due to launch until May 2001. Filming was in February so we agreed that we would build the content and put it live during production, on another URL, but not tell anyone about it.

So, against all odds, in February 2001, we set off to Venice. It was my first involvement in a film shoot though from experience since I know what a special time this was and that I will unlikely ever encounter the same again. Cast and crew ate, slept and worked together in a small hotel on Venice’s Lido. Despite the names involved; Salma Hayek, David Schwimmer, Burt Reynolds, John Malkovich and Rhys Ifans to name but a few; there were no entourages, no paparazzi, no agents, no lawyers, no PR and no egos.

It more had the feeling of a small theatre troupe and the actors were incredibly giving of their time. For them, it was an opportunity to workshop their characters and seeing the finished shorts just hours later was as beneficial as viewing dailies. They also contributed to the spontaneity by not demanding any clearance – something normally unheard of. Aside from the shorts, we created interactive pieces, animations, slideshows and other bits of video ephemera inspired by Venice in full Carnival swing and the weird and wonderful techniques Mike was pioneering to facilitate the making of a multi-view DV feature.

For five weeks we were ensconced in a derelict attic room of the hotel creating in total 96 pieces of content (those with good mental arithmetic will recognise we didn’t quite hit our goal of four a day, though rules are there to be broken) ranging from a short featuring Rhys Ifans “inventing” the Dogme rules whilst on the toilet to an animation extolling the virtue of gaffa tape.

And we told not a soul about it…

The site was officially launched at Cannes in May 2001 as part of the new FilmFour.com. It was acclaimed critically, gaining a BAFTA Interactive nomination the same year but, even when allowed to shout about it, traffic numbers remained small. A celluloid-centric Film press struggled with the notion of the format (and probably still would), the film itself got just a 2 week run at the ICA in the UK and in an age before YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, it was difficult to spread the word to the digital community.

The site suffered a slow and ignominious demise. It sunk to the depths of FilmFour.com at the end of virtually impenetrable navigation, to a point where it had a URL but no direct way of navigating at all. Then one day, all the video disappeared leaving only the same simple, skeletal framework that we had initially presented to Channel 4.

Tantalisingly, one clip remains online, on Mike’s own production company site. It neatly sums up a lot of what we were trying to do – fuse actors in character with real life and focus on the film’s technical innovations – and have some fun doing it.

We thought this approach of a major digital output of a film production would become common place. A decade later, under the banner of transmedia, there are certainly signs that it may though despite many attempts, we never managed to create the same circumstances again.

What I’m left with is the memory of five exhilarating weeks that gave birth to a company and gained me a group of friends of life. Though I still feel a twinge of sadness that not more people saw the site or maybe will never have the opportunity to see it again.

It’s a tough world for the indie filmmaker who makes a movie that doesn’t fit a recognised genre. Low budget, experimental films are not appealing fodder for indie distributors though I believe one positive force was the UKFC and their willingness to take risks in the films that they helped release.

With that risk comes the inevitable high percentage of failure, though the concept of micro budget filmmaking embraces this. The box office rewards are potentially so rich that even if your conversion rate is low, spreading the risk across a number of low budget films pays more dividends than putting all your eggs in one basket. The problem is that as a public body, the number of failures makes you a sitting duck for the popular press who ignore the bigger picture.

It’s a situation that is typified up by our first project with them back in 2003. This Is Not A Love Song was a low budget thriller shot on DV directed by Bille Eltringham and written by Simon Beaufoy (known previously for The Full Monty and subsequently for Slumdog Millionaire).

We’d got involved at sales stage, with my business partner Franki devising a Barbara Kruger-inspired print campaign for Cannes and Edinburgh. It was memorable for two reasons; firstly getting to work with and meet artist Dinos Chapman (and in particular one alcohol-fuelled night that randomly involved Uri Geller) and secondly Franki and I having to work through the night hand-finishing 2,000 posters on my kitchen floor (having come up with an ambitious concept way beyond the budget of an indie film) – I remember our ashen faces at the break of dawn, partially due to lack of sleep though mostly down to the large amounts of Spray Mount we’d passively inhaled.

Sadly, the festivals failed to attract a distributor though later in the year the UKFC, who had partially funded the production, hatched an ambitious plan for the film’s distribution. It was to be the World’s first simultaneous online and theatrical release of a film. What better way to put the British Film Industry and this little low budget feature on the map than attempt something that not even Hollywood had done?

Put us on the map it did. And how.

The UKFC acted as the distributors, working with Soda Pictures who managed the theatrical side of the release. We built the website that fronted the download, continuing the style developed for the print campaign (which we still keep online for posterity).

Another company were handling the back end delivery mechanism. In an early meeting with them, they mentioned the decision to offer the download and stream in Windows Media format only. Back then, due to the digital rights management (DRM) that Windows Media offered, it was the only real option. But it restricted who could watch the film. It excluded Mac users who although only accounted for 3% of Internet usage overall, represented a much bigger slice of our target audience (perhaps 20-25%). But, as it turned out, much more damagingly for us, it also restricted Linux users. Although a much smaller percentage again (perhaps less than 1%), it included a number of passionate advocates of open source software who hated the notion of DRM and in particular, Microsoft.

So to the day of release. On Friday September 5 2003 at precisely 6pm the film would be be available to watch online, download or to view at your local arts cinema. The media had loved the story and gave it coverage on a par with a major Hollywood release. The BBC ran the story through the day across their channels (there’s nothing like hourly radio bulletins counting down to motivate you to hit a deadline) and it wasn’t long before international channels starting picking up the story. The film was for UK release only (technically enforced by geo-restricting to UK  IP addresses) but that didn’t matter – it had caught the imagination of the World’s entertainment media.

Alas, it also attracted a less well-meaning audience. In the afternoon, the story appeared on slashdot, a site primarily for the Linux and open source communities. They focused on the fact that the film was not available to Linux users. In fact the hoards who read the story and commented furiously, skimmed over much of the important detail – that it was a UK-only release (so they couldnt have watched it anyway as most were in North America) and that it was a small, low budget British indie movie. In their minds, they assumed only Hollywood could be behind a bold venture of this scale and this was therefore Hollywood and Microsoft in cahoots building the model of all future film release. This was the beginning of a bad new world where all movies released online would be Microsoft DRM-controlled. They had to disrupt this experiment.

Nervously and with huge anticipation, the switch was flicked at 6pm. Almost immediately things started to go wrong. The site stopped responding. The backend guys had been beefing up the architecture through the day due to all the press attention though nothing could have prepared us for what happened. For the next few hours waves of denial of service (DoS) attacks launched from across North America rained down on our little site. It was the beginning of a difficult weekend. The tech guys worked hard to shift the points of attack whilst we helped fend off the press. At one point in the middle of the night I got a call from US news channel CNET who’d tracked me down via the registration of the sites domain asking for details of what had gone wrong. We put up a passionate plea from the producer explaining that this was just a small film, that we weren’t funded by Microsoft or Hollywood and that we didn’t hate Macs or Linux. But it was too late.

The decision was made over the weekend to pull the site whilst the tech guys worked on making the system more robust. Frankly, though, even the might of Google and Microsoft have crumbled when the subject of the zombie hoards of a DoS attack.

When it came back several days later, the hoards had gone, but so too had the audience and the press attention, content with their conclusion that the experiment had failed.

But for one glorious day, leading up to the launch, a film that had been overlooked by distributors was making headlines world wide. Many journalists reviewed the film who otherwise would never have seen it and as a result, opened the film up to an audience.

Seven years on and the launch this week of Google TV and a revised Apple TV endorses that online distribution will become a major, if not the major, distribution channel of film. What no one can take away is that it was a low budget, independent British feature that set a major milestone on that path.

What I want to focus on is the UKFC’s promotion of digital marketing of Film, to highlight the huge importance of digital marketing for the future of independent film and to question the idea that without a body administering the lottery money that this funding will somehow magically work its way into the right places.

For many industries the Internet presents a unique opportunity for the small guys to compete on the same playing field as the big guys. A global company with a multi-million pound turnover can be just a small number of people working from a small office or even virtually. The same is true of film. Whilst traditional outdoor, newspaper and television advertising will always be dominated by the studios, for a fraction of the cost a decent web presence and social media campaign can put a low budget film on an even footing with a Hollywood blockbuster.

Yet there are two reasons this doesn’t happen more regularly.

Firstly, there is still too great a reliance on traditional advertising in independent film marketing. Even a high percentage of an already challengingly small marketing budget is dwarfed by the amounts that studios spend and as a result, the indies are drowned. TV spots in particular are a cripplingly expensive and wasteful form of marketing for an indie film and the web presents a far more efficient and relatively effective spend.

Secondly, to amplify the effectiveness of the Internet in making you appear bigger than you are, you need to present a single, consistent and cohesive identity. In film, this means covering many phases – production, festivals, theatrical release then DVD/TV/online release – which can frequently span 18 month to 2 years.

In the last decade the studios have become extremely adept at this in rolling out well-branded franchises. They can do this because they control all of these phases. At the same time as a script is being developed, marketing teams will be considering their campaigns which will start to trickle out through a film’s production and which will grow in momentum to the final release.

In independent film, this process is incredibly fractured with different companies and personnel taking over at each stage. At production stage, although the Internet may have made potential viewers aware that the film is being made, too frequently there is no official voice to try and tap into this audience. The first official coverage may not come until festivals, though any marketing material generated here is more often than not changed or even discarded by theatrical release. There is absolutely no sense of a targeted and growing campaign here. In fact it’s not uncommon for a film to have several websites, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and blogs by the end of its run. If any one part is successful my experience is commonly that others fail to connect and build on it.

Rather than utilising the power of the Internet to amplify this small voice to a studio-defying roar, the result is several smaller voices saying different things.

Enter the UK Film Council and their Digital Innovation in Distribution fund. Consisting initially of 5 awards of up to £30,000 (again, note relatively that this is not a considerable total), money was specifically to be spent on an innovative online marketing idea, over and above what a distributor normally produced, to be released ahead of the usual marketing window. It demonstrates the UKFC recognising that digital marketing is increasingly important and what’s more, that this is being ignored and needs a kick start. They understand it’s important to close the gap between producer and distributor and to involve the distributor earlier. The distributor in turn gains by building their audience early and then being able to grow their campaign consistently and organically from this platform. It also seeks to give solid evidence to an exhibitor that the audience for the film exists – the kind of evidence only usually seen from a studio touting a franchise.

Where an industry structure did not lend itself to providing this vital marketing foundation, it took a top-level body to produce the initiative, an initiative I can’t see being taken if left to the free market.

Clearly this is more than “admin”; more than a redundant valve in the flow of money from lottery to filmmaker. For Jeremy Hunt’s claim of “admin”, I see “education”. For me, what was equally as important as whether box office was improved by the granting of these awards was the resulting dialogue. For the pitches I was involved with, regardless of being successful or otherwise, was the fact that for the first time we were actually having these kind of discussions with distributors, and what’s more a number of distributors we’d not talked to previously with no great track record in digital marketing.

In my mind there is no doubt that this fund was the catalyst to get distributors thinking about what I see as a vitally important way of countering the studios in marketing terms.

For “education” also read “insurance”, for that is what this fund also offers. If the distributor is taking no risk in dipping a toe in the water to see the likely audience of a film, they surely would. Without this opportunity, the safest option is to go with exactly the same as what’s sold before. Return to the devil you know. Or the vampire you know. Or the pirate you know. Or the super hero you know. Because without a top level incentive to try and diversify, these will likely be the only types of film you ever get to see.

If you’d like to do something to try and help save the UK Film Council, there’s a Facebook group and a petition.

Firstly, those who undertook the superhuman achievement of battling the Pyrenees in the Tour de France. This was made all the more superhuman for the number who were struggling with injury following the treacherous first week stages in the wet of Holland and Belgium and over the cobbles of Northern France (injuries like cracked ribs and elbows that would have been enough to sideline other professional athletes for months), then the debilitating heat of the Tour’s second week in the Alps (as if climbing an Alp was not tough enough without 90 degree temperatures turning road surfaces into tyre-gripping treacle).

Secondly, from the various film industry channels I follow from a professional perspective, it’s been impossible to ignore the incredible density of coverage of super heros of the fictional kind, at this year’s Comic Con in San Diego.

For me, this analogy of real and fake goes deeper in the way Twitter has been used to cover each event. It demonstrates the good and bad of Twitter; the refreshing, open dialogue providing insights not previously possible versus – inevitably perhaps as the corporate voice invades Twitter – a PR steered monologue straight from the dark ages of old media.

First, the Tour. I was first hooked in 1987, the year the race was sensationally won by Irishman Stephen Roche. Back then, coverage was limited. Beyond Channel 4′s excellent though all too brief 30 minute highlight show in the early evening, there was nothing – you could certainly forget any way of getting live information during the actual hours of racing that day. With no web and just four terrestrial channels, there was no way to provide up to the minute coverage of an event that occupied five or six hours a day for three weeks. And yet there was so much going on here; races within races, the politics of team riding, the daily change in backdrop of weather and terrain with the resulting shift in emphasis on riders. This was Shakespearean sport, intriguing stuff and yet a tantalisingly inaccessible world to the public.

The advent of digital television gave a platform for continuous coverage of live events and again this year ITV4 has covered the final two hours of each race live (though given that the rest of the channel’s day time output consists entirely of 1970′s re-runs and police camera shows, perhaps their regular day time viewer would not be too upset if coverage of the whole stage was introduced?). This is topped and tailed by a time-shifted highlights package presented, thankfully, by largely the same team as the early Channel 4 days.

But the real opening up has come about in the last couple of years where Twitter has resulted in every angle of the race being covered, in a way never before possible. ITV can now give daily live coverage to the whole of the race, plus offer a platform for commentators to add their insights, both to the race and behind the scenes. Though more than the media, we hear from the riders and the teams themselves. And this isn’t the bland, cliché-ridden dross of a post-match football interview. These are often frank appraisals¹ that give an insight into the camaraderie (not to mention the feuds) inherent in every Tour. There’s an openness and honesty to this stuff. No doubt this drive for transparency is in part fuelled by a sport trying to overturn an image tarnished by numerous drugs scandals over the last decade, but thankfully at the moment, it’s clearly free of an omnipresent, megalomaniacal PR machine.

This directness, frankness and personal voice is what brought me to Twitter and as it burgeoned, was refreshingly evident in any sector you cared to looked at. But at the same time one could imagine the sharp intake of breath from PR companies around the globe… “talent” talking directly to the great unwashed, the public clustering together spontaneously to have an unfettered discussion about something. God, no, this will never do. And so the same old chain of command has imposed itself on Twitter. Press statements are released, re-tweeted by a traditional industry press eager to justify their role in this strange new order and dutifully re-tweeted verbatim by fans, keen to prove they are “in the know”. Balance is restored.

So to Comic Con. I have a few problems with Comic Con, or rather the attention that surrounds it. Not least that it cannot be good news that the Film industry is so singularly obsessed with making films of one genre. I heard an interesting theory via a candid studio guy that those responsible for commissioning films in Hollywood now are of the generation who didn’t read books growing up. They read comics. And watched TV shows like The ‘A’ Team. Maybe a generalisation, but certainly explains a lot. But equally disturbing has been the gearing of Twitter for the bland, uniform and unsurprising roll out of film after film at Comic Con… the formula: studio PR machine unveils “exclusive” footage of “The Avenging Captain Thor”, the press re-tweets, then a seemingly soporific and subservient fan-base keener really to let people know that they are there than, dare say it, pass a slightly critical view of what’s being crapped out in front of them, re-tweet with an appendix “Can’t wait”/”Looks Awesome” (with an arbitrary number of exclamation marks). Completing the virtuous circle, the studio then re-tweets fan praise, to validate to other fans that they are not doing “The Avenging Captain Thor” wrong. Nothing is out of place, and, oh, by the way, there’s certainly no ad-libbing from the actors on Twitter either who are firmly singing from the same studio hymn sheet.

I’ve no doubt that there is a hardcore and passionate fan-base to some of these comic titles, though Im suspicious of its wider appeal. Is Ryan Reynolds reciting the Green Lantern Oath really a historic moment as he says those magical words that we’ve all been waiting to hear? Obviously to some, though it’s the break-out from this niche that I find interesting – I think quite a different break out than has been seen with the Tour de France. The Tour also has a dedicated and committed fan base, though this year Twitter has shown public interest is actually much bigger than certainly the UK media has given it credit. Read the back pages of any UK paper for the past week and you’d probably still be in the dark as to who Andy Schleck is. Yet the Luxembourg rider who eventually came second in the Tour was regularly trending in Twitter in the last week. This demonstrates another enormous positive and unique feature of Twitter – to highlight stories the public are interested in that are outside of the media narrative. I’m not suggesting conspiracy, but just that the mainstream media did not have their finger on the public pulse here and didn’t gauge the swelling interest in the Tour beyond its normal fan base.

Can the reverse be true? Can Twitter over-emphasis the importance of an event? With Comic Con, it’s certainly in the interests of the studios to do so. Comic adaptations provide a seemingly endless line of ready-made franchises, with what are now established production and marketing processes. They come with a core fan base that alone is not enough – the productions must cross over to the mainstream. But what of the snowballing Twitter coverage given to the conference by actors, producers, press, fans and other film industry figures? Ive been genuinely surprised by the number of people I follow who’ve tweeted Comic Con news whose filmography suggests no interest in the genre. Are we seeing the spontaneous coming out of hitherto clandestine comic fans? Unlike the Tour, I don’t think this is an example of serendipitous expression on Twitter, but another more negative Twitter-created phenomenon where life appears elsewhere. Blasted by the synchronised PR guns of the studios, this is a bandwagon you must be on board – whilst those in San Diego bask in the glory of being at the heart of a media circus and let the world know, those who aren’t need to feel a part of it. This tweet for me sums it up “Wish I could’ve made it to SDCC. Everyone in the world was there!”. No matter what the event is, what is clear is that things aren’t good when life is elsewhere, and Twitter can bridge you from your seeming vacuum to the heart of the action.

In conclusion, what if the Green Lantern goes on to perform well at the box office? Then surely I’m wrong? People did want to see Ryan Reynolds reciting the Lantern corps oath. I’d say what’s more likely been demonstrated is that the studios have successfully added the Twitter cog to an already well-oiled PR machine.

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