R. Tam Sessions

Joss Whedon, creator of Firefly, released  a series of videos filling in back story about the mental conditioning of River Tam in the alliance “school”. In the Firefly world, this is a series of excerpts from video interviews with River as she “progressed” in thier program. Simon Tam subsequently rescued her and boarded the firefly class ship Serenity as passengers which is the starting point for the pilot of the series.

This was a series of videos released prior to the movie “Serenity” and was only released to the web, which seems to be Joss’s tool of choice for many projects. I’ve read that this release pattern matches a technique called “viral marketing” in which a snippet of information or visuals is leaked to a public source and spread by word of mouth and growing interest. In this case, the target of the marketing was obviously the movie “Serenity” itself. Joss is a pretty slick business guy. Marketing, shmarketing. Who cares? It’s just plain fun!

Summer Glau reprises her role as River Tam and the interviewer is Joss himself although you never see his face.

Enjoy!