Media between Media: ‘Making-of’s and the Hidden Faces of Film Adaptation

Abstract

Comparing source and target media products is the main intermedial method for studying adaptations. The inventory of similarities and differences produced by such an endeavour provides evidence for the processes of transfer and transformation that have happened between the two media. But the finished media products are not the only traces of the process of adaptation. In practices of adaptation that happen inside media industries, such as film adaptations, the process is also documented in different forms and for different archival or market-oriented purposes. The process of film adaptation is, for instance, usually captured – although in fragments and in a staged format – by intermediary filmic media products – such as ‘making of’s – that are rarely considered as the main study objects in adaptation studies. As this article argues, such processual ways of looking at adaptations do not undermine the importance of comparative approaches but complicate the grounds for comparison. Suggesting a methodological shift to the process, the article expands this idea through a cross-pollination between adaptation studies and (media) production studies and exemplifies it through discussion of examples and one extended case study.