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Swimming Upstream is an original work written, directed, and designed by Ilana Marks. The script tells the story of a gay sperm on a journey through the female body. A fully produced workshop performance occurred in the Oscar Brockett Theatre as part of The University Co-op Presents the Cohen New Works Festival. The performance of an excerpt from the script incorporated live actors, puppetry, multimedia, and music, and transformed the audience members into sperm involved in the ultimate game of chance. The purpose of this work was to explore and develop a personal creative process of storytelling. This thesis documents the process that Ilana employed to create Swimming Upstream. She focuses on the incorporation of audience interaction into performance, looking to the work of performance artists, such as Julian Beck and Richard Schechner. In addition, she addresses the variation between the process and the final product, and the factors of the process that cultivated the disparity between the two. / text

Product placement is now a US$7.76 billion industry, flourishing as advertisers attempt to combat audience sophistication, zipping, zapping, muting of commercials, TiVo, media multi-tasking, the Internet and digital television, all of which may signal the death knell of the interruptive commercial model. Yet whilst research on product placement is growing, it has not kept pace with the practice, and many findings do not converge across studies. This is likely the case because parameters remain undefined and there is no operational framework to describe how product placements are processed, and no agreement as to what effects are possible or how they should be examined. Most effects-based research has focussed on executional factors and what the product placement does to the audience member. This assumes that the recipient is a passive participant. However this thesis argues that the audience member is actually an active processor who should be the focus of research. This research distinguishes product placement from related activities and develops a new conceptual model of product placement processing. It puts a strong focus on the role of the audience member, stating that their level of familiarity of the placed brands, and their level of engrossment with the entertainment story will impact their recognition of product placements in that story. Applying Rasch Measurement Theory, an Audience Engrossment scale is developed and refined over four stages of data collection, with 1360 respondents across seven films, to capture the quality of people??s interaction with a film. The result is a scale comprising 19 feeling items, 10 arousal items, 6 appraisal items and 7 cognitive effort items. The scale was then tested as part of the conceptual model, with 191 participants watching The Island and completing questionnaires after the film relating to their recognition of brands within the film and their level of engrossment. Brand familiarity information was collected four weeks earlier. Onset prominence, high plot connection, dual modality and use by star were found to have the strongest direct effects on recognition, with brand familiarity and the four audience engrossment dimensions generally found to interact with the product placement characteristics as hypothesised.

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