Automated generation of movie tributes

O objetivo desta tese é gerar um tributo a um filme sob a forma de videoclip, considerando como entrada um filme e um segmento musical coerente. Um tributo é considerado um vídeo que contém os clips mais significativos de um filme, reproduzidos sequencialmente, enquanto uma música toca. Nesta proposta, os clips a constar do tributo final são o resultado da sumarização das legendas do filme com um algoritmo de sumarização genérico. É importante que o artefacto seja coerente e fluido, pelo que há a necessidade de haver um equilíbrio entre a seleção de conteúdo importante e a seleção de conteúdo que esteja em harmonia com a música. Para tal, os clips são filtrados de forma a garantir que apenas aqueles que contêm a mesma emoção da música aparecem no vídeo final. Tal é feito através da extração de vetores de características áudio relacionadas com emoções das cenas às quais os clips pertencem e da música, e, de seguida, da sua comparação por meio do cálculo de uma medida de distância. Por fim, os clips filtrados preenchem a música cronologicamente. Os resultados foram positivos: em média, os tributos produzidos obtiveram 7 pontos, numa escala de 0 a 10, em critérios como seleção de conteúdo e coerência emocional, fruto de avaliação humana.This thesis’ purpose is to generate a movie tribute in the form of a videoclip for a given movie and music. A tribute is considered to be a video containing meaningful clips from the movie playing along with a cohesive music piece. In this work, we collect the clips by summarizing the movie subtitles with a generic summarization algorithm. It is important that the artifact is coherent and fluid, hence there is the need to balance between the selection of important content and the selection of content that is in harmony with the music. To achieve so, clips are filtered so as to ensure that only those that contain the same emotion as the music are chosen to appear in the final video. This is made by extracting vectors of emotion-related audio features from the scenes they belong to and from the music, and then comparing them with a distance measure. Finally, filtered clips fill the music length in a chronological order. Results were positive: on average, the produced tributes obtained scores of 7, on a scale from 0 to 10, on content selection, and emotional coherence criteria, from human evaluation

User Information Needs for Environmental Opinion-forming and Decision-making in Link-enriched Video

Link-enriched video can support users in informative processes of environmental opinion-forming and decision-making. To enable this, we need to specify the information that should be captured in an annotation schema for describing the video. We conducted expert interviews to elicit users’ potential information needs. We carried out a user survey to assess the relevance of t

Can't read my broker face?—Tracing a motif and metaphor of expert knowledge through audiovisual images of the financial crisis

Based on the question of the representability of economy and economics in audiovisual media, developments on the financial markets have often been discussed as a depiction problem. The abstractness and complexity of economic interrelations seem to defy classical modes of storytelling and dramatization. Nevertheless, public opinion about economic changes and dependencies crucially relies on audiovisual media. But how can the public communicate in images, sounds, and words about forces that are out of sight and out of reach, and can supposedly only be adequately grasped by experts? In a case study on audiovisual images of the global financial crisis (2007–), this paper tracks and analyzes a recurring motif: the staging of expert knowledge as close-ups of expressive faces vis-à-vis computer screens in television news, documentaries, as well as feature films. It draws on the use of digital tools for corpus exploration (reverse image search) and the visualization of video annotations. By relating and comparing different staging strategies by which these “broker faces” become embodiments of turbulent market dynamics, the paper proposes to not regard them as repeated instantiations of the same metaphor, but as a developing web of cinematic metaphors. Different perspectives (news of market developments or historical accounts of crisis developments) and affective stances toward the global financial crisis are expressed in these variations of the face-screen constellation. The paper thus presents a selection of different appearances of “broker faces” as a medium for an audiovisual discourse of the global financial crisis. A concluding analysis of a scene from Margin Call focuses on its specific intertwining of expert and screen as an ambivalent movement figuration of staging insight. Between the feeling of discovery (of a potential future threat) and the sense of being haunted (by a menacing force), the film stages the emergence of a “broker face” in an atmospheric tension between suspense and melancholy. We argue that the film thereby reframes the motif and poses questions of agency, temporality, and expert knowledge

The documentary mind: In the subject of a practitioner’s perspective on changes in documentary concept and production

This autoethnographic study examines the influences of recent digital technology upon the practice and philosophy of documentary filmmaking. To assess the impact of new digital methodology on the film production process, The Musicians, a wholly-digital, 55-minute documentary film, was produced as an example. This music-based subject was chosen to specifically demonstrate the potential advantages of lightweight digital equipment and its extended recording capacity in orchestral documentation. The capability of non-linear digital editing to process large amounts of imagery, together with its ability to manage multiple image and audio streams concurrently, was also examined. This exegesis also reviews the impact of recently-emerged digital multimedia and multi-platform formats on perceptions of the more standard linear documentary format, all of which have been incorporated into a single documentary category by some researchers. For a traditional documentary such as The Musicians to be categorised with open-ended, multimedia constructions seems somewhat anomalous

Audio-Visual scientific popularisation. Theoretical analysis and critical realisation

La tesi analizza e propone un nuovo modello di divulgazione scientifica attraverso l\u2019utilizzo dell\u2019audiovisivo. Stabilito il quadro di riferimento, entro al quale diverse forme di audiovisivo si sono sviluppate e sono diventate protagoniste della divulgazione scientifica, la seconda dell\u2019elaborato si concentra direttamente sui passaggi necessari per la creazione di un audiovisivo scientifico arrivando alla creazione di un modello originale per la trasmissione scientific

THE IDEOLOGIZATION OF THE MILLENNIAL DREAM IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL CHALLENGES

This work connects two explanations of the notion of millennial dream: one based on Paul Smith’s thoughts in Millennial Dreams – Contemporary Culture and Capital in the North from 1997 which are placed in juxtaposition with the views of Gregg Hemmings offered in his documentary film The Millennial Dream from 2016. The argument states that American self-definition has undergone a notable change at the contemporary level of globalization and the notion of local has gained on importance and transformed into a political catchword. Politicizing of culture has long been reflected in the documentary film genre and the present analysis aims at demonstrating how political indoctrination reshapes documentary films. Global challenges before and after the turn of the century placed the USA in a novel position in which the pressure of strengthening global compe-tition in a seemingly unilateral world has mixed with conflicting ideologies which have been competing for the right to (re-)define postmillennial Americanness.A second objective is to demonstrate that cultural discourse has shifted towards a more left-wing-type interpretation of American identity as laissez-faire capitalism have been struggling with providing comparable life-chances for the Y and Z generations of Ameri-cans with the consequence that these cohorts have serious problems in maintaining life standards comparable with the standard of living of their parents and grandparents. The argument states that the transformation of the American dream into a Millennial dream is one effort to maintain continuity of American cultural evolution. Recent political conflict, the result of which is a greatly divided America writhing between antithetical interpreta-tions of reality, is just one symptom of redefining Americanness for and by the millenni-als

The Spontaneous Video and its Impact on the Digital Press

Most of us now have instant access mobile phones with integrated cameras so we are able to record an unplanned video at any time and place within a matter of seconds. Modern technology has provided us with the ability to create spontaneous videos. Spontaneous videos are a new way of portraying our society and communicating events and, by means of the internet and web 2.0 applications, they have the potential to reach every corner of the globe, form an integral part of mass media news reports, and influence public opinion. This study establishes the basis for identifying and understanding the spontaneous video, analysing its application in video activism and citizen journalism, and investigating its impact on the digital press. To this end, we have analysed spontaneous videos created and shared online by IES Lluís Vives students in Valencia on the 15th of February, 2012. Students held a protest on this date against education cuts carried out by the Valencian Community government in Spain. The resulting spontaneous videos had a great impact on the media and were reported by Spanish digital newspapers including El País, El Mundo, La Razón, ABC and Público.El hecho de transportar continuamente un teléfono móvil con cámara de vídeo integrada ofrece la posibilidad de grabar en vídeo de forma espontánea, en pocos segundos, sin planificación previa, en todo momento y lugar, cualquier acontecimiento. El vídeo espontáneo se muestra como una nueva forma de retratar nuestra sociedad y comunicar un suceso que, a través de Internet y la Web 2.0, se puede distribuir por cualquier rincón del planeta, puede llegar a formar parte de una noticia de medios de comunicación convencionales e influir en la opinión pública. Este trabajo establece las bases para identificar y comprender el vídeo espontáneo, trata su aplicación en el videoactivismo y el periodismo ciudadano, y estudia su impacto en la prensa digital. Para ello, se analizaron los vídeos espontáneos creados y difundidos en Internet por estudiantes del IES Lluís Vives de Valencia, el 15 de febrero de 2012, que se manifestaron en contra de los recortes en educación realizados por el gobierno de la Comunidad Valenciana (España). Los vídeos espontáneos resultantes generaron un importante impacto mediático y algunos de ellos formaron parte de noticias digitales de periódicos españoles como El País, El Mundo, La Razón, ABC y Público