Impact case study database

Caston’s research has fostered new approaches in policy debates, industry creative practice, archival preservation, education, and public engagement with music video, as a result of partnership work with the BFI, the BPI, British Council, and the GRAMMY Museum.

PUBLIC POLICY: Caston’s research has led to a comprehensive change at the BFI, deemed by Royal Charter the organisation responsible for the conservation of British moving image and the formulation and implementation of moving image policy, funding and training. Prior to 2015, the BFI’s work excluded music video, regarding it as an element of the music industry, based on a misunderstanding that music video was part of the advertising and music industries, as the former Head of Research at the BFI has testified [S1]. Given that music video was also excluded from the archival, policy and training activities of the British Phonograph Industry, music video heritage was neither being conserved nor the interests of its industry members represented within the music industry (BPI) or film industry (BFI). The Creative Director of the BFI states that as a result of Caston’s work the BFI now recognises music video as a significant sector of the screen industries and says that music video is now taken into account in policy discussions and decisions about the strategic development of the screen industries in Britain. [S2] It was recognised when, in 2017, Caston, was asked to contribute to the BFI’s Film Policy and Education Roundtable consultation for the BFI’s next five-year strategy - Film Forever 2. Data from her research [R2, R3 and R6] was imported into the BFI’s career tracker database which informs education and training policy (launched officially in 2018).

PUBLIC APPRECIATION & ENGAGEMENT: Caston’s research has created greater access to music video for new audiences and has offered curators a revised paradigm through which to exhibit the work – as shown by her public presentations for Sky, TRT, BFI Southbank, the SoundTrack_Cologne Festival, and the FRAME Dance Festival as well as her public engagements for the DVD [S3]. By the end of 2020, 1,312 copies of the boxset had been purchased on Amazon with an average score of 4.7 out of 5 stars across 90 global ratings and positive reviews by members of the public (S4). Press reviews showed that the box set had been successful in changing people’s mind about the negative gender stereotyping of British music video, partly as a result of the juxtaposition by Caston of videos representing masculinity and femininity. The reviewer for Cubed wrote, “seeing Girls Aloud's Sexy! No No No… framed as a portrait of femininity rather than just a late-noughties girl band video is just one example of how the collection breathes new life into certain long-forgotten releases”. The innovative role of Annie Lennox’s representation of gender was re-examined by Caston for Sky Arts TV series Video Killed the Radio Star in 2018 (audience 25,000 UK only), and the role of The Spice Girls in bringing feminism into popular culture was examined in the same series Sky Arts series later that year (audience 25,000 UK only), paving the way for a revised public appreciation of the contribution of music videos to popular culture. Caston was also invited by Turkish international channel TRT to re-consider the impact of the videos of Janet and Michael Jackson on Black representation in film in 2018. In 2019, she was asked to present Steve Barron’s work to an audience at the BFI Southbank to reconsider his influence as a filmmaker on subsequent Hollywood narrative film.

As a result of screen and panel discussion at the FRAME dance film panel, Caston’s research has also impacted the contemporary dance world. Xxxxxx Xxxxxxxx XXX (choreographer, director, TV presenter) called Caston’s curated dance collection an ‘.amazing catalogue of videos that changes the way we think about dance. Truly fantastic”. The CEO of Sadler’s Wells invited Caston to a discussion of future collaborations with resident choreographers for their third digital space. In August 2018, Caston gave a screening entitled ‘Political Radicalism in British Music Videos’ at the SoundTrack_Cologne Festival in Germany, 22^nd-25^th August 2018 to an audience of 168 journalists, filmmakers and members of the public. The Festival is Europe's leading specialist congress for music and sound in film, games and the media, attended annually by 2,000 plus professionals. The theme of political radicalism was picked up by journalist John Nicolson who interviewed Caston for his Talk Radio show 4/10/2020 regarding videos included on the DVD that the BBC had banned.

The continuation of this public engagement for future generations of the British public is ensured because there is now a national strategy for the collection and conservation of music video as British moving image heritage on which curators and cinemas can draw for public events. Before 2015, much of this heritage was at risk and lost, only partially available on YouTube. None of the publicly funded charitable organisations charged with ‘preserving the nation’s moving image archives’ held catalogued digital collections for public, research or educational access. Now, following Caston’s research, the BFI has an active collecting policy in music video.

In 2018, following their involvement in Caston’s research project, two major British film directors Xxxxx Xxxxxxx and Xxxxx Xxxxxx donated their entire private film collections to the archive. Both donations enabled public engagement events at the BFI Southbank. In 2018 Caston located not only a 35mm but also an original 16mm print of the missing film print of the 1968 Manfred Mann ‘Mighty Quinn’ video, an important landmark in promo editing history. Caston’s AHRC research grant paid to have the 16mm print (the 35mm disintegrated when removed from the can) digitised and colour restored by the UK’s leading colourist with the original film director Xxxx Xxxxx (xx xxx xxx) attending. The original 16mm of Flowered Up’s 1992 ‘Weekender’, a landmark example of a promo / narrative short film was located in the director’s attic and a full digital restoration undertaken with Caston’s research funding.

During lockdown a special BFI promotion of the DVD boxset was run with 120 sold to their members who were unable to visit the closed cinemas at the BFI Southbank for archival screenings. Information about the videos will be publicly accessible from the BFI’s Collections Information Database along with a short history of the British Music Video industry on the BFI’s website by Caston.

The British Library also now has a substantial digital video collection. In 2018, the entire digital music video archive of Warp Records, one of the most influential and prolific producers of innovative music videos through the 1990s and 2000s, was given to the BL as part of a formal donation agreement facilitated by Caston to complement the BL’s audio archive of Warp Records. Furthermore, where previously there had been no ‘template’ in the software databases of the BFI and BL for the multiple authorship of music videos as collaborative audio-visual works combining integrated IP entities (tracks authored by musicians and films authored by writer/ directors), there is now a new template shared by both the BFI and BL, designed by Caston in a consultation with the database managers.

EDUCATION & TRAINING: Since the mid-2000s, Caston’s influence on education and training in the UK screen industries has been delivered through her role as Governor of Film London, the capital’s strategic publicly funded agency for screen. Previously teachers lacked a resource that enabled them to teach music video historically. Caston’s research has resulted in changes to school education through her collaboration with the English and Media Centre, an independent educational charity serving the needs of secondary and FE teachers and students studying music videos for the GCSE and A-Level Media Studies curricula. The Media PGCE Course Leader at Goldsmiths and editor of Media Magazine says, “Not only has my knowledge of the industry improved but also my teaching of the industry units in media and the choice of videos I use has been impacted by Caston and her DVD collection which I use in my teaching” [on the PGCE]. Emily Caston’s expertise and research has had a significant impact on the work we do with Film and Media Studies students completing A level and vocational courses in schools and colleges across the UK”. Caston’s contributions include two talks at the Media Magazine Conference (attended by 400 students & teachers) and writing for the magazine. During the first pandemic lockdown in 2020, Caston’s digital research and DVD were used as a teaching resource (called Leap into Media) for A-Level students unable to attend school. With over 515 institutional digital subscriptions and a circulation of over 800 hard copies, the magazine has considerable reach. [S5] To support the Leap into Media lockdown initiative, Caston secured a discount for all secondary school students to purchase the DVD at the price of £5 (a reduction from £30).

INDUSTRY & ECONOMICS: Throughout the period from 2017 to 2020 there has been high industry engagement as a result of Caston’s influence from her prior industry career as an executive producer (1993-2003) and a founding member of the Music Video Producer’s Association. There were 85 industry practitioners (directors, producers, commissioners and editors) who served as research consultants; the three industry-wide consultations events attracted a total of 373 attendees; a further 198 participated in online research (through the project Facebook page), and 28 participated in focus groups. As a result of their involvement, filmmakers report having become more innovative and challenging in their work. An award-winning director writes that, “.the project has encouraged me to look for opportunities” to use the greater creative freedom offered in music videos than other screen media to explore “.current cultural themes” and “.to be more radical in our representations of gender and ethnicity”. [S6] Editors at the Ibiza International Music Video Festival, the leading international event for the music video industry, at which Caston presented screenings in 2017, 2018 and 2019, talked of pushing their editing styles further and beyond conventional generic expectations as a result of seeing some of the neglected experimental work of the 1960s and 1970s. [S7] More industry practitioners are now voluntarily conserving their work for future audiences. Freelance directors and producers are not only keeping active archives of their work in a way they had not done previously, but also in some cases paying to have their work digitally mastered and upgraded to new formats for archival conservation. [S6] From 1966 to 2016 it was the norm for production companies to destroy their paper business archive on dissolution; following their involvement in our project, several companies have embarked on a process of conserving their data and work on solid-state drive archives for future access.

Several women creatives have come forward to claim authorship of works previously attributed to men in production cultures often steeped in patriarchal and masculine ideologies of authorship. Xxxx Xxxx instated her right to be credited as director of two of the videos in the national collection which were previously attributed in authorship to male directors, and this historic correction has now been made in the national archives. Xxxxxxx Xxxxxx, a pioneering female founder of the one of the leading 1980s companies, having been uncredited as a producer at that time, has had her name re-instated in the credits. Xxxxxx has said that there was a pressure at the time for women to be ‘invisible’. The credits for the landmark collection contain these revisions and were published in R2 and reprinted in R3.

One of the most significant shifts in industry practice occurred in the recording industry’s copyright exploitation and moral rights policy. For fifty years, the music video industry had acted to suppress the identity of the filmmakers responsible for making music videos, in favour of advancing the notion of artist musicians’ as the authors of music videos. This was embedded in legal contracts with filmmakers which denied them the legal right of attribution to their work and to any and all moral rights in the videos, despite the fact that almost all of the original video scripts (treatments) were generated by the directors rather than the musicians. In Britain from 1981 to the early 2000s, this was entrenched further by MTV’s decision in the UK not to credit directors (a different policy to the USA). As a result of these contracts, music video directors and producers have no moral rights to any of their works, have no right to release their videos, and earn no royalties from the commercial exploitation of the videos (e.g., on sales of DVDs and CDS). For the release of the DVD Boxset and as a result of an arrangement Caston secured with the Chair of the BPI, all of the British record labels (with one exception) agreed to reverse this policy and waive the royalties due to them and their artists from commercial sales in order that the boxset could be set at a RRP affordable by students and libraries. The record labels also agreed to undertake all the legal work necessary for these arrangements (individual contracts with each of their recording artists) without payment on a pro bono basis. The eventual DVD, containing newly digitised and mastered works, was promoted by the BPI on their website and marketing materials.

International industry impacts were also seen. In 2019, the GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles decided that British music video should form part of the exhibited history of music video. After taking a digital donation of the British landmark videos, the museum signed a partnership agreement with Caston at UWL to further public engagement in the USA with British music videos since the 1960s. In 2018, following an official reception for Caston’s research team at the British Embassy, (R6, S8), a workshop to mark 40 years of British Council work in Cuba and a talk at the Havana International Film School attended by 120 students from over 40 countries, Cuban practitioners said they would henceforth produce more theoretically critical music videos. At the core of Caston’s work in Cuba was a series of workshops at the Danze Contemporanea de Cuba with a young female Cuban director, recent graduates of the dance school, and Cuban rap artist Telmary. Mentored by Caston and British director WIZ, the Cuban team experimented with the choreographic and cinematographic techniques of British dance videos identified in R4, to create a new music video.