Liam Creighton, PhD candidate in Film: Practice as Research in the School of Arts, has won the Postgraduate Research Poster Award at the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) 8th Annual Conference 2020.
The BAFTSS 8th Annual Conference on ‘Rethinking Screen Cultures’ was due to be held at the University of St Andrews this month. Due to COVID-19, the Postgraduate Research Poster Showcase 2020 was moved online. BAFTSS Members and conference 2020 delegates were invited to vote for the Postgraduate Research Poster that they consider most successful. Liam was one of eight researchers whose posters were shortlisted for the BAFTSS award.
Liam’s poster, entitled Cine-Map: The Cinematic United Kingdom, is a map which depicts the settings of 1078 British films released cinematically in the period 2010-2020. By plotting this information, Liam demonstrates which parts of the UK the film industry tends to favour and which are overlooked. Liam created the poster to promote his website which showcases the research.
He says: ‘Whilst much of the data behind the map comes from the British Film Institute (BFI), all the information about settings was collated by me. I have access to the Sight & Sound digital archives (also courtesy of the BFI) but about half the films required me to go beyond the Sight & Sound archive, checking plot synopses on other websites (iMDB, Wikipedia), watching the films’ trailers for clues, and searching out interviews with directors. The poster and the map are the first stage of us working with the data. As we build features into the site, users will be able to see which regions are over- and under-represented compared to a national average, see how effectively different regions have been promoted by films (we will measure ‘reach’ by box office takings) and we are also considering a genre map, which is quite likely to show, for example, a trend of gangster films in set in East London and Essex’.
Find out more about the project on Liam’s website:
www.cine-map.com
All research posters shortlisted for the award can be viewed on the BAFTSS website:
https://www.baftss.org/pg-research-poster-2020-shortlist