Angelie New Media Technologies 08

www.myspace.com/orangesmovies

MySpace is a social networking site, used by people from all over the world. Users can create and personalise their own profiles, chat to their existing friends and make new friends with similar interests. MySpace is one of the most used blogging sites on the internet.
As well as personal profiles, MySpace also has sections which enable music artists/bands, film makers and comedians to creat profiles and upload some of their work.

The Oranges Movies are about a number of talking fruits and vegetables and their adventures. The film makers from Illinois originally started making their films when an art teacher jokingly suggested doing their art project on oranges. From then on, the film makers continued to make short films about oranges and eventually made 2 feature films entitled 'Oranges: The Movie' and 'Oranges: Revenge of the Eggplant'.

The Oranges Movies' MySpace page has been created to promote and give details on the Oranges films. The MySpace page is orange (surprisingly enough) with white text boxes and black text. Next to box containing The Oranges Movies name, profile picture, location etc is the films section. This is where th film makers have uploaded some of their short films and trailers onto MySpace TV.
Details of the history of the films are given in the 'About Me' section. Also in this section, are synopses for the films 'Oranges: Revenge of the Eggplant', 'Oranges: The Movie!' and 'Oranges: Attack of the Nyaagh!'.
The 'Interests' section of the MySpace page consists of the following:

• A form to join the Oranges mailing list. By subscribing, users may receieve an email once or twice a year to notify them when the movie becomes available.
• An embedded YouTube video of clips from 'Oranges: The Movie'
• Contact details
• Character profiles and photos from each of the films

The Oranges Movies have 993 friends and they have a Top 8 friends liston their page. A lot of the page is taken up by the comments that their friends (or sometimes their friends' account hackers) have left them.
Also on the page are pictures. In the pictures section there are pictures of the film's characters and some film stills too.

The main audience for MySpace is generally teenagers and young adults (though there are older users too). MySpace offers a high level of personalisation and users can do as much (or as little) to their page as they want. On their pages, users can put videos, pictures, picture slideshows and basically anything that can be embedded using HTML. Users would like being able to communicate with people all around the world, for free. Since MySpace can be accessed at any time, the audience would also get instant gratification.

The main audience for the Oranges Movies appears to be other independent film makers, since 494 of their 993 friends are other film makers. This seems to be a sort of cross-over between audiences and institutions, since the audience is also a number of different institutions. Through the MySpace page, other film makers can see some clips from the Oranges films. This may help to create symbiotic links between the different film makers if they decide that the Oranges films are just so good that maybe they should team up to make something.

Industries (such as the mainstream film, television and music industry) have realised that MySpace is a great way of promoting their films/shows/bands/artists. For example, Channel 4 has created a 'Skins' MySpace, as well as MySpaces for each of the characters. MySpace can also act as a form of viral marketing. For example, if a new band adds you on MySpace, you might like song of their songs and direct some of your friends to their MySpace, and they might in turn do the same thing. This enables the band to reach extremely wide audiences and huge numbers of people.
MySpace Film has provided new opportunities for independent film makers. It has enabled them to showcase their films, and can also be quite important for networking purposes. MySpace Film provides independent film makers with a relatively quick and easy way to upload their films and share them with their friends.

Key Concepts

1. Personalisation
   MySpace users are able to personalise their pages in any way they want. The Oranges Movies have been able to customise their MySpace in order to reflect their films' indentity.


2. Reach
   On MySpace, there are so many people that could be targeted. There are also large audiences which MySpace advertising would reach.
   
3. Convergence
   MySpace is an example of convergence between blogging, music, video and photography.
   
   
4. Interactivity
   MySpace offers a lot of interactivity by letting users comment on other users pictures, videos and MySpace pages. The Oranges Movies also allows interactivity by offering users the opportunity to subscribe to the mailing list and interact with the film makers via e-mail or AIM.