Every Succession fan has seen them: the video of the almost full cast singing Weezer's Say It Ain't So, the other video in which Kieran Culkin (Roman) and Sarah Snook (Shiv) shave their brother in the fiction, Jeremy Strong (Kendall), having an egg smashed on the top of his head, Culkin singing a Joy Division song in karaoke, the full cast, including patriarch Brian Cox dancing to the modern classic Call me Maybe with his arms outstretched air and disheveled attitude of the best/worst company dinners.
The end of the Jesse Armstrong series has been accompanied by an avalanche of parallel content that somehow demystifies the coldness and the feeling of moral orphanhood that the series radiates, an enormous amount of videos and home photos that show that the cast , despite the well-known tensions between Brian Cox and Jeremy Strong, had a great time as they played the most unhappily rich family on television.
It remains for the fans to decide which cast messed it up the most, whether that of Succession or that of the second season of The White Lotus, which was filmed in Sicily and also left a trail of photos and videos on social networks and legends on the many podcasts. specific, official and unofficial, that now accompany this type of large-scale products. The cast of the Mike White series also sang karaoke and shared very long tables with lots of Sicilian wine. The images that Aubrey Plaza posted, among others, on her Instagram, in which her colleagues Haley Lu Richardson, Megan Fahy and Adam de Marco were seen eating pasta with hungover glasses or the partying Tik Toks edited by Eleonora Romadini (who plays receptionist Isabella) made it clear that this was a memorable shoot.
This is not new. There have always been movies and series in which it was perceived that there was a lot to tell about what happened behind the scenes. The photos of the party for the end of the filming of Mamma Mia, with an unleashed Meryl Streep and with Amanda Seyfried and Pierce Brosnan giving it their all on the track are a classic on the networks that reemerges from time to time, accompanied by goals-type subtitles (meta ). And from pre-network times it is known that the filming of Mutiny on board, The Blues Brothers and Ocean's Twelve, to name just three films that included real locations and large casts, were not exactly places of gathering.
The difference with the current content that circulates on networks is that now those good vibes, which are perfectly authentic, are packaged, disseminated and distributed through established channels and are part of the marketing of the product. The fun will be spontaneous but its use not so much. And the existence of fan accounts on Instagram, Tik Tok and Twitter (Yes, while The Last of Us was broadcast and became a phenomenon chapter by chapter, we saw viral videos circulate that affected the tender and adorable relationship between its protagonists , Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, it was also because someone decided that this was excellent content, emotional and, here's the key concept, authentic, the word that every brand wants in its description.
“Those videos are part of the marketing content plan, I would put my hand on fire. They may be spontaneous, but their viralization is written in a marketing plan”, says Janira Planes, an expert in digital culture. She is now the communication director of the Wuolah agency but in her previous job, in an agency specialized in Tik Tok, one of her tasks was to make sure that certain songs went viral by collaborating with influencers.
In networks, almost everything that seems organic is not usually, or not so much. For Planes, the triumph of behind the scenes (behind the scenes), which is how this content is usually labeled, is directly related to the tiktokization of cultural consumption. “In Tik Tok everything that is behind the scenes works very well, applied to anything. A year and a half ago there was a trend that was recorded with Taylor Swift's song Love Story. We realized that the videos themselves had 200,000 views, but when we did behind the scenes, it hit 2 million. It is also noticeable in the number of videos of photographers who show how they do sessions at home with few resources but with spectacular results and it is also very common in the world of fashion”. In pop, explains Planes, it is already planned that if a star shoots a video clip, 5 videos are recorded for the making of networks, using a mobile and with a more homemade look.
The analyst compares these materials to what the false takes have always been, which began to be included as extras in the DVD era. "It's related to seeing those actors as people and it gives you more content about your favorite series." The series that have the longest life on Tik Tok are those in which the cast does not stop producing and posting videos about their life on set. The first video of The Bridgertons cast dancing to a pop song in their period costumes might have been semi-spontaneous, but video number 15 clearly isn't. An optimization of these good vibrations in the shooting is taking place to saturate the networks with items related to a franchise and relate them with positivity and fun, although (and precisely) sometimes that goes in the opposite direction to the aesthetics of the series.
The entire advertising campaign related to the Barbie movie, directed by Greta Gerwig, is proving worthy of study. “The film opens in July and we've been talking about it non-stop since November,” says Planes. Actually since before, when each photograph taken on the set became news. In the case of Barbie, photos and videos of the vast cast having fun behind the cameras have not yet been seen – they will arrive – but the advertising department has worked hard to convey that idea of partying and communality.
In a lengthy cover story in the summer issue of US Vogue, the film's star and producer Margot Robbie makes sure it is known that all the Barbies in the film (Issa Rae, Hari Nef, Kate McKinnon and Dua Lipa among others) had a pajama party at Clarides's hotel in London and, while the filming lasted, they went to a cinema in the English capital every Sunday to fulfill what they called “movie mass”, watching musicals. in Technicolor that served as inspiration for the film, titles such as The Red Shoes and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. In addition, the same article explains that Robbie left a pink-wrapped gift for her co-star Ryan Gosling every day of filming.
Selling the chemistry between a leading couple has been a key to the movie business since Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, only now it's a science that includes algorithmic calculations. Nobody wants a situation like the one that took place a few months ago in the promotion of the Netflix romantic comedy En tu casa o en la mía to be repeated, in which it was evident that there was no kind of spark between its protagonists, Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher. I'm sure nobody went to karaoke on that shoot.
