Hardy Ann - University of Waikato (original) (raw)
Papers by Hardy Ann
Tusi Tamasese
Springer eBooks, 2019
Reporting on evangelical Christian protest in the New Zealand media: the case for training in religious journalism
The Australian Journalism Review, Jul 1, 2007
This book traces the nature and evolution of audience receptions of Sir Peter Jackson's blockbust... more This book traces the nature and evolution of audience receptions of Sir Peter Jackson's blockbuster adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's widely read and much-loved fantasy novel, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (1937). Originally written for his children, The Hobbit has never been out of print, has been translated into over 40 different languages and has an enduring legacy within the fantasy canon. The Hobbit films (2012-14) were initially conceived in 2006 as a cinematic adaptation of that comparatively brief novel; given the remarkable popular, critical and financial success of Jackson's earlier Lord of the Rings (LotR) trilogy (Jackson 2001, 2002, 2003), anticipation was heightened among those who longed for a repeat of that extraordinary cultural phenomenon. Yet, as many readers will be keenly aware, the return to Middle-earth on screen was not without controversy, and the Hobbit films were ultimately less successful than their creators and many fans may have hoped-particularly when measured against Jackson's LotR, to which they effectively function as a prequel series. Undoubtedly, the popular success of the LotR trilogy owed much to the enthusiastic and loyal following for Tolkien's novels that had been in existence since the 1960s, including an organised fan community initially based around various Tolkien societies and publications such as Amon Hen and Tolkien Studies, and later online newsgroups and forums such as alt.fan.tolkien and Theonering.net. This established enthusiasm for Tolkien's wider body of work meant there was a substantial pre-existing CHAPTER 1
Conclusion and Methodological Reflections on a Unique Project
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2017
This chapter highlights the wider contributions of the Hobbit Audience Project and relates its ma... more This chapter highlights the wider contributions of the Hobbit Audience Project and relates its major findings to wider processes shaping the conceptualisation and realisation of blockbuster franchise adaptations. The key theoretical insights that can be gleaned from this research are highlighted, along with their relevance to studying receptions of blockbuster adaptations more broadly. The chapter also outlines the project’s wider significance and contribution to audience and reception studies and reflects on the value of the pioneering longitudinal methodological approach used, its strengths and limitations and its possible applications for future research on audiences and media engagement.
The Rise of the Hobbit Critic: From The Desolation of Smaug to The Battle of the Five Armies
This chapter describes the major perspectives identified in post-viewing surveys relating to The ... more This chapter describes the major perspectives identified in post-viewing surveys relating to The Desolation of Smaug, conducted between January and July 2014, and The Battle of the Five Armies, conducted between January and May 2015. The chapter notes the emergence of increasingly critical and indeed polarised perspectives on the cinematic value, quality and impact of Jackson’s second and third Hobbit films. These critiques often expressed a more fundamental concern about the detrimental impact of key creative decisions that were seen to reflect underlying commercial imperatives. The chapter thus documents the crystallisation and intensification of audience ambivalence toward the processes and imperatives governing the cinematic adaptation, serialisation and blockbusterisation of Tolkien’s original novel.
On the Transformation of Meaning and Cinematic Desire
This chapter illustrates The Hobbit’s evolving significance for different kinds of fans, casual v... more This chapter illustrates The Hobbit’s evolving significance for different kinds of fans, casual viewers and critics, and presents a comprehensive understanding of the factors that led to continued engagement versus progressive disenchantment and disaffection among different groups of viewers. Drawing on the project’s unique longitudinal dataset, it shows that an increasingly widely shared sentiment was disappointment at a failed adaptation and at the missed opportunity to replicate the heady success of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Disappointment primarily centred on issues pertaining to the quality of the adaptation and crystallised around the chief controversy surrounding the second and third Hobbit films: the introduction of a non-canon female character and a controversial love triangle. This issue is explored in depth here.
Adaptation, Anticipation and Cinematic Desire: Prefigurative Engagements with a Blockbuster Fantasy Franchise
This chapter explores the ways in which receptions of the Hobbit trilogy were prefigured by Tolki... more This chapter explores the ways in which receptions of the Hobbit trilogy were prefigured by Tolkien’s written works, Jackson’s earlier Lord of the Rings trilogy, and an array of marketing and promotions materials, news coverage, discussion and debate. Drawing on data from an online pre-viewing survey, the chapter outlines the main shared viewpoints of 1000 respondents before The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’s (AUJ) release and documents their prefigurative activities in anticipation of a long-awaited cinematic experience. To further clarify the orientations and expectations of those who later participated in multilingual post-viewing surveys for AUJ, the chapter outlines the specific constellations of meaning, value and affect that pre-viewers were ascribing to The Hobbit in advance of seeing it.
Researching Audience Engagements with the Hobbit Trilogy: A Unique Methodological Approach
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2017
This chapter provides a detailed overview of the unique methodology adopted for the Hobbit Audien... more This chapter provides a detailed overview of the unique methodology adopted for the Hobbit Audience Project. It begins by outlining the key insights from previous research on Tolkien fandom and audiences for Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy that helped inform the project’s core questions and research focus. Then, it explains the rationale for conducting a large-scale longitudinal investigation of transnational receptions of the Hobbit trilogy, focusing in particular on the potential to make contributions to theory-building. To that end, the chapter also outlines the Composite Multi-dimensional Model of Modes of Audience Reception, which provides the theoretical framework for the project, before detailing the specific methods employed to gather data, including Q methodology, conventional questionnaires and interviews.
Pioneering Cinematic Technologies and The Hobbit’s Hyperreality Paradox
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2017
This chapter analyses audience reactions to the Hobbit trilogy’s usual visual aesthetic, produced... more This chapter analyses audience reactions to the Hobbit trilogy’s usual visual aesthetic, produced through the combination of high frame rate, 3D and extensive use of computer-generated imagery. While intended to facilitate and intensify viewers’ experience of pleasurable re-immersion in Middle-earth, the combination of these technologies produced contradictory effects and visual artefacts that some viewers considered jarring and displeasing. The chapter shows that critical reactions to The Hobbit’s visual aesthetic were variously informed by individual commitments to a more traditional cinematic aesthetic, appreciation for The Lord of the Rings’ ‘gritty’ realism and an apparent clash between the technologies themselves, the latter of which generated a hyperreality paradox, disrupting narrative immersion for a small but significant number of respondents.
Making Sense of Difference: How Social Location and Identity Shaped Engagements with the Hobbit Trilogy
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2017
This chapter explores the relationship between audience reception and important aspects of identi... more This chapter explores the relationship between audience reception and important aspects of identity and social location, including nationality, gender, age, education and occupation, political and religious affiliations, and fandom. Drawing on a comparison of responses to multilingual post-viewing surveys for An Unexpected Journey and the larger data corpus, this chapter documents a large number of significant findings and relates these to the wider body of scholarship linking reception to aspects of social location and identity. In so doing, the chapter offers considerable empirical insight into the possible basis for differences and similarities in The Hobbit’s transnational reception within different communities of interest.
The Saga Begins: Mapping Audience Reactions to An Unexpected Journey
This chapter describes and interprets the main perspectives that emerged in surveys of audiences ... more This chapter describes and interprets the main perspectives that emerged in surveys of audiences for An Unexpected Journey conducted between February and June 2013, including those of Enchanted Hobbit Fans, Bored and Disillusioned Hobbit Critics, Disappointed Tolkien Readers, Critics of Technological ‘Enhancements’ and Mildly Entertained Casual Viewers. It notes that critiques of blockbusterisation were somewhat muted at this stage, deferring to concerns about textual fidelity and distracting visual effects. The chapter also draws on longitudinal data to illustrate the transformations that occurred over time, by comparing responses expressed during the pre-viewing period with those articulated post-release. In so doing, it explores whether, and to what extent, prefigurative structures of meaning and emotion came to provide important frameworks for interpretations of the first Hobbit film.
Unexpected Controversies Cast a Shadow Over Middle-Earth
This chapter focuses on a controversy that shaped public discussion and debate around the Hobbit ... more This chapter focuses on a controversy that shaped public discussion and debate around the Hobbit production before the first film’s release. The extended Hobbit union dispute, which threatened to derail the trilogy’s New Zealand production and prompted widely criticised reforms to New Zealand labour law, reveals much about how processes and imperatives of blockbusterisation are reshaping transnational film production. Audience reactions to this issue demonstrate how and why a transnational production such as The Hobbit can have varying degrees of salience for differently located audiences, while also demonstrating the potential for cinematic desire for fetishised cultural commodities to ultimately trump consideration of the conditions under which such commodities are produced.
The Accidental Author: Collaborative and Sequential Authorship in New Zealand Film Production
Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine, 2006
Films that are bidding to be included in the archives of significant national works due to their ... more Films that are bidding to be included in the archives of significant national works due to their popularity with critics and audiences can be rich sites for the investigation of articulations between processes of cultural production and changes in societal attitudes. Employing a materialistic concept of authorship allows a researcher to see the author in a plurality of positions, as a presence diffused across a number of locations in the complex field of elements and forces that constitute a film's production.
This paper analyses the interactive experiences constructed for users of the New Zealand online i... more This paper analyses the interactive experiences constructed for users of the New Zealand online interactive drama Reservoir Hill (2009, 2010), focusing both on the nature and levels of engagement which the series provided to users and the difficulties of audience research into this kind of media content. The series itself provided tightly prescribed forms of interactivity across multiple platforms, allowing forms of engagement that were greatly appreciated by its audience overall but actively explored only by a small proportion of users. The responses from members of the Reservoir Hill audience suggests that online users themselves are still learning the nature of, and constraints on, their engagements with various forms of online interactive media. This paper also engages with issue of how interactivity itself is defined, the difficulties of both connecting with audience members and securing timely access to online data, and the challenges of undertaking collaborative research with media producers in order to gain access to user data.
Material Religion, Jul 27, 2016
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2017
This book is a truly impressive large-scale longitudinal study of the evolution of audience recep... more This book is a truly impressive large-scale longitudinal study of the evolution of audience receptions of the Hobbit film trilogy. Based on rich data collected through a mixed method approach combining qualitative and quantitative methods, the book not only offers stimulating insight into the range of different viewpoints on this three-part 'blockbusterisation' of Tolkien's novel but also new and original methodological and theoretical approaches to audience studies. This is an important study which advances audience research significantly.
Material Culture and Changing Identities
Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review, 2022
This article surveys intersections between art, religion, and society in three periods of the his... more This article surveys intersections between art, religion, and society in three periods of the history of Aotearoa New Zealand: 1) Polynesian settlement, 2) British colonization and 3) a contemporary multicultural society built on a bicultural base. Using a material culture framework which traces changes in the uses and significance of artistic objects as they pass through the hands of members of various religious and secular communities, it illustrates, through a variety of examples from the fields of popular art, fine arts and architecture, that art has, and can, play a large part in negotiations between religious traditions, particularly when they encounter one another in conflict, reconciliation and hybridization.
Beyond Materialism?:Spirituality and Neo-Utopian Sensibility in Recent New Zealand Film
Media International Australia, Nov 1, 2002
Tusi Tamasese
Springer eBooks, 2019
Reporting on evangelical Christian protest in the New Zealand media: the case for training in religious journalism
The Australian Journalism Review, Jul 1, 2007
This book traces the nature and evolution of audience receptions of Sir Peter Jackson's blockbust... more This book traces the nature and evolution of audience receptions of Sir Peter Jackson's blockbuster adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's widely read and much-loved fantasy novel, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (1937). Originally written for his children, The Hobbit has never been out of print, has been translated into over 40 different languages and has an enduring legacy within the fantasy canon. The Hobbit films (2012-14) were initially conceived in 2006 as a cinematic adaptation of that comparatively brief novel; given the remarkable popular, critical and financial success of Jackson's earlier Lord of the Rings (LotR) trilogy (Jackson 2001, 2002, 2003), anticipation was heightened among those who longed for a repeat of that extraordinary cultural phenomenon. Yet, as many readers will be keenly aware, the return to Middle-earth on screen was not without controversy, and the Hobbit films were ultimately less successful than their creators and many fans may have hoped-particularly when measured against Jackson's LotR, to which they effectively function as a prequel series. Undoubtedly, the popular success of the LotR trilogy owed much to the enthusiastic and loyal following for Tolkien's novels that had been in existence since the 1960s, including an organised fan community initially based around various Tolkien societies and publications such as Amon Hen and Tolkien Studies, and later online newsgroups and forums such as alt.fan.tolkien and Theonering.net. This established enthusiasm for Tolkien's wider body of work meant there was a substantial pre-existing CHAPTER 1
Conclusion and Methodological Reflections on a Unique Project
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2017
This chapter highlights the wider contributions of the Hobbit Audience Project and relates its ma... more This chapter highlights the wider contributions of the Hobbit Audience Project and relates its major findings to wider processes shaping the conceptualisation and realisation of blockbuster franchise adaptations. The key theoretical insights that can be gleaned from this research are highlighted, along with their relevance to studying receptions of blockbuster adaptations more broadly. The chapter also outlines the project’s wider significance and contribution to audience and reception studies and reflects on the value of the pioneering longitudinal methodological approach used, its strengths and limitations and its possible applications for future research on audiences and media engagement.
The Rise of the Hobbit Critic: From The Desolation of Smaug to The Battle of the Five Armies
This chapter describes the major perspectives identified in post-viewing surveys relating to The ... more This chapter describes the major perspectives identified in post-viewing surveys relating to The Desolation of Smaug, conducted between January and July 2014, and The Battle of the Five Armies, conducted between January and May 2015. The chapter notes the emergence of increasingly critical and indeed polarised perspectives on the cinematic value, quality and impact of Jackson’s second and third Hobbit films. These critiques often expressed a more fundamental concern about the detrimental impact of key creative decisions that were seen to reflect underlying commercial imperatives. The chapter thus documents the crystallisation and intensification of audience ambivalence toward the processes and imperatives governing the cinematic adaptation, serialisation and blockbusterisation of Tolkien’s original novel.
On the Transformation of Meaning and Cinematic Desire
This chapter illustrates The Hobbit’s evolving significance for different kinds of fans, casual v... more This chapter illustrates The Hobbit’s evolving significance for different kinds of fans, casual viewers and critics, and presents a comprehensive understanding of the factors that led to continued engagement versus progressive disenchantment and disaffection among different groups of viewers. Drawing on the project’s unique longitudinal dataset, it shows that an increasingly widely shared sentiment was disappointment at a failed adaptation and at the missed opportunity to replicate the heady success of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Disappointment primarily centred on issues pertaining to the quality of the adaptation and crystallised around the chief controversy surrounding the second and third Hobbit films: the introduction of a non-canon female character and a controversial love triangle. This issue is explored in depth here.
Adaptation, Anticipation and Cinematic Desire: Prefigurative Engagements with a Blockbuster Fantasy Franchise
This chapter explores the ways in which receptions of the Hobbit trilogy were prefigured by Tolki... more This chapter explores the ways in which receptions of the Hobbit trilogy were prefigured by Tolkien’s written works, Jackson’s earlier Lord of the Rings trilogy, and an array of marketing and promotions materials, news coverage, discussion and debate. Drawing on data from an online pre-viewing survey, the chapter outlines the main shared viewpoints of 1000 respondents before The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’s (AUJ) release and documents their prefigurative activities in anticipation of a long-awaited cinematic experience. To further clarify the orientations and expectations of those who later participated in multilingual post-viewing surveys for AUJ, the chapter outlines the specific constellations of meaning, value and affect that pre-viewers were ascribing to The Hobbit in advance of seeing it.
Researching Audience Engagements with the Hobbit Trilogy: A Unique Methodological Approach
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2017
This chapter provides a detailed overview of the unique methodology adopted for the Hobbit Audien... more This chapter provides a detailed overview of the unique methodology adopted for the Hobbit Audience Project. It begins by outlining the key insights from previous research on Tolkien fandom and audiences for Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy that helped inform the project’s core questions and research focus. Then, it explains the rationale for conducting a large-scale longitudinal investigation of transnational receptions of the Hobbit trilogy, focusing in particular on the potential to make contributions to theory-building. To that end, the chapter also outlines the Composite Multi-dimensional Model of Modes of Audience Reception, which provides the theoretical framework for the project, before detailing the specific methods employed to gather data, including Q methodology, conventional questionnaires and interviews.
Pioneering Cinematic Technologies and The Hobbit’s Hyperreality Paradox
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2017
This chapter analyses audience reactions to the Hobbit trilogy’s usual visual aesthetic, produced... more This chapter analyses audience reactions to the Hobbit trilogy’s usual visual aesthetic, produced through the combination of high frame rate, 3D and extensive use of computer-generated imagery. While intended to facilitate and intensify viewers’ experience of pleasurable re-immersion in Middle-earth, the combination of these technologies produced contradictory effects and visual artefacts that some viewers considered jarring and displeasing. The chapter shows that critical reactions to The Hobbit’s visual aesthetic were variously informed by individual commitments to a more traditional cinematic aesthetic, appreciation for The Lord of the Rings’ ‘gritty’ realism and an apparent clash between the technologies themselves, the latter of which generated a hyperreality paradox, disrupting narrative immersion for a small but significant number of respondents.
Making Sense of Difference: How Social Location and Identity Shaped Engagements with the Hobbit Trilogy
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2017
This chapter explores the relationship between audience reception and important aspects of identi... more This chapter explores the relationship between audience reception and important aspects of identity and social location, including nationality, gender, age, education and occupation, political and religious affiliations, and fandom. Drawing on a comparison of responses to multilingual post-viewing surveys for An Unexpected Journey and the larger data corpus, this chapter documents a large number of significant findings and relates these to the wider body of scholarship linking reception to aspects of social location and identity. In so doing, the chapter offers considerable empirical insight into the possible basis for differences and similarities in The Hobbit’s transnational reception within different communities of interest.
The Saga Begins: Mapping Audience Reactions to An Unexpected Journey
This chapter describes and interprets the main perspectives that emerged in surveys of audiences ... more This chapter describes and interprets the main perspectives that emerged in surveys of audiences for An Unexpected Journey conducted between February and June 2013, including those of Enchanted Hobbit Fans, Bored and Disillusioned Hobbit Critics, Disappointed Tolkien Readers, Critics of Technological ‘Enhancements’ and Mildly Entertained Casual Viewers. It notes that critiques of blockbusterisation were somewhat muted at this stage, deferring to concerns about textual fidelity and distracting visual effects. The chapter also draws on longitudinal data to illustrate the transformations that occurred over time, by comparing responses expressed during the pre-viewing period with those articulated post-release. In so doing, it explores whether, and to what extent, prefigurative structures of meaning and emotion came to provide important frameworks for interpretations of the first Hobbit film.
Unexpected Controversies Cast a Shadow Over Middle-Earth
This chapter focuses on a controversy that shaped public discussion and debate around the Hobbit ... more This chapter focuses on a controversy that shaped public discussion and debate around the Hobbit production before the first film’s release. The extended Hobbit union dispute, which threatened to derail the trilogy’s New Zealand production and prompted widely criticised reforms to New Zealand labour law, reveals much about how processes and imperatives of blockbusterisation are reshaping transnational film production. Audience reactions to this issue demonstrate how and why a transnational production such as The Hobbit can have varying degrees of salience for differently located audiences, while also demonstrating the potential for cinematic desire for fetishised cultural commodities to ultimately trump consideration of the conditions under which such commodities are produced.
The Accidental Author: Collaborative and Sequential Authorship in New Zealand Film Production
Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine, 2006
Films that are bidding to be included in the archives of significant national works due to their ... more Films that are bidding to be included in the archives of significant national works due to their popularity with critics and audiences can be rich sites for the investigation of articulations between processes of cultural production and changes in societal attitudes. Employing a materialistic concept of authorship allows a researcher to see the author in a plurality of positions, as a presence diffused across a number of locations in the complex field of elements and forces that constitute a film's production.
This paper analyses the interactive experiences constructed for users of the New Zealand online i... more This paper analyses the interactive experiences constructed for users of the New Zealand online interactive drama Reservoir Hill (2009, 2010), focusing both on the nature and levels of engagement which the series provided to users and the difficulties of audience research into this kind of media content. The series itself provided tightly prescribed forms of interactivity across multiple platforms, allowing forms of engagement that were greatly appreciated by its audience overall but actively explored only by a small proportion of users. The responses from members of the Reservoir Hill audience suggests that online users themselves are still learning the nature of, and constraints on, their engagements with various forms of online interactive media. This paper also engages with issue of how interactivity itself is defined, the difficulties of both connecting with audience members and securing timely access to online data, and the challenges of undertaking collaborative research with media producers in order to gain access to user data.
Material Religion, Jul 27, 2016
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2017
This book is a truly impressive large-scale longitudinal study of the evolution of audience recep... more This book is a truly impressive large-scale longitudinal study of the evolution of audience receptions of the Hobbit film trilogy. Based on rich data collected through a mixed method approach combining qualitative and quantitative methods, the book not only offers stimulating insight into the range of different viewpoints on this three-part 'blockbusterisation' of Tolkien's novel but also new and original methodological and theoretical approaches to audience studies. This is an important study which advances audience research significantly.
Material Culture and Changing Identities
Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review, 2022
This article surveys intersections between art, religion, and society in three periods of the his... more This article surveys intersections between art, religion, and society in three periods of the history of Aotearoa New Zealand: 1) Polynesian settlement, 2) British colonization and 3) a contemporary multicultural society built on a bicultural base. Using a material culture framework which traces changes in the uses and significance of artistic objects as they pass through the hands of members of various religious and secular communities, it illustrates, through a variety of examples from the fields of popular art, fine arts and architecture, that art has, and can, play a large part in negotiations between religious traditions, particularly when they encounter one another in conflict, reconciliation and hybridization.
Beyond Materialism?:Spirituality and Neo-Utopian Sensibility in Recent New Zealand Film
Media International Australia, Nov 1, 2002
Participations: Journal of Audience and Receptions Studies, 2018
We respond to Martin Barker's critique of our book, Fans, Blockbusterisation, and the Transformat... more We respond to Martin Barker's critique of our book, Fans, Blockbusterisation, and the Transformation of Cinematic Desire: Global Receptions of The Hobbit Film Trilogy.