Beyond the Frame: A Critical Production Case Study of the Advance Party Initiative

This study utilises a variety of research methods in order to investigate aspects often overlooked within Scottish film criticism, and indeed film studies more generally, namely: pre-production, production experiences, marketing and distribution, and reception. To date, Scottish film criticism has exhibited a preoccupation with questions of nation, national identity and national cinema, and overwhelmingly scholars have privileged almost exclusive analysis of the film text. Spurred by Jonathan Murray’s (2007, 2011, 2012) questioning of the continued relevance of the national framework, this thesis goes beyond the frame of the film text in order to consider new ways in which a national framework might be of relevance when analysing Scotland’s cinematic output. Concurrently, the chosen case study is also used as a means of critiquing existing literature on collective identity and national cinema. As the title of this thesis suggests, analysis centres on the Dogma-inspired Advance Party initiative and its resulting films, Red Road (Arnold, 2006) and Donkeys (McKinnon, 2010). Devised by Glasgow-based Sigma Films and Denmark’s Zentropa, the cross border collaborative dimension of the Advance Party framework initially appears to challenge the appropriateness of the national framework. As this thesis demonstrates however, such a simplistic conclusion is reductive and overlooks the complexities of the film industry. Throughout this thesis, questions as to the intended and eventual function of the Advance Party framework arise, and these are revisited by means of the thesis Conclusion

Film music and film genre

This thesis explores the role that film genre plays in the construction of, predominantly, Hollywood movie scores. It begins with the simple assumption that each genre has its own set of musical conventions, its signature "paradigm", with the result that Westerns sound different from Horror films, which sound different from Romantic Melodramas and so on. It demonstrates that while this is broadly speaking so, the true picture is more complex, the essentially hybrid nature of most Hollywood films on a narrative level resulting in scores that are similarly hybrid in nature. To begin with, the various functions of film music are described, and that of generic location is isolated as being of key importance. The concept of film genre is then discussed, with particular reference to the notion of hybridity. The substance and sources of the musical paradigms of the Western, Horror film and Romantic Melodrama are described in depth; specific aspects of the War Film, Gangster, Thriller and Action paradigms are addressed more briefly. The thesis concludes with a cue by cue analysis of John Barry's score for Dances with Wolves (1990), demonstrating that while the dominant paradigm the music draws on is indeed that of the Western, the score also incorporates elements from a variety of other generic paradigms, shifts in musical emphasis that are dictated by the changing requirements of the narrative. Film music is shown to be profoundly influenced by film genre, but that the use of generically specific music is as complex and nuanced as cinema's negotiation of genre at narrative level. While genres do indeed have signature musical paradigms, these do not exist discretely, but in constant tension with and relation to one another

Making Markets for Japanese Cinema: A Study of Distribution Practices for Japanese Films on DVD in the UK from 2008 to 2010

Thanks needed to be expressed to a number of people over the last three years – and I apologise if I forget anyone here. First of all, thank you to Rayna Denison and Keith Johnston for agreeing to oversee this research – which required reining in my enthusiasm as much as attempting to tease it out of me and turn it into coherent writing. Thanks to Mark Jancovich, who helped me get started with the PhD at UEA. A big thank you also to Andrew Kirkham and Adam Torel for doing what they do at 4Digital Asia, Third Window, and their other ventures – if they did not do it, this thesis would not exist. Also, a big thank you to my numerous other friends and family – whose support was invaluable, despite the distance between most of them and Norwich. And finally, the biggest thank you of all goes to Christina, for constantly being there with her support and encouragement

SSFX (Space Sound Effects) Short Film Festival: Using the film festival model to inspire creative art-science and reach new audiences

Geoscience CommunicationThe ultralow frequency analogues of sound waves in Earth's magnetosphere play a crucial role in space weather, however, the public is largely unaware of this risk to our everyday lives and technology. As a way of potentially reaching new audiences, SSFX made 8 years of satellite wave recordings audible to the human ear with the aim of using it to create art. Partnerting with film industry professionals, the standard processes of international film festivals were adopted by the project in order to challenge independent filmmakers to incorporate these sounds into short films in creative ways. Seven films covering a wide array of topics/genres (despite coming from the same sounds) were selected for screening at a special film festival out of 22 submissions. The works have subsequently been shown at numerous established film festivals and screenings internationally. These events have attracted diverse non-science audiences resulting in several unanticipated impacts upon them, thereby demonstrating how working with the art world can open up dialogues with both artists and audiences who would not ordinarily engage with science

BLEU Meets COMET: Combining Lexical and Neural Metrics Towards Robust Machine Translation Evaluation

Although neural-based machine translation evaluation metrics, such as COMET or BLEURT, have achieved strong correlations with human judgements, they are sometimes unreliable in detecting certain phenomena that can be considered as critical errors, such as deviations in entities and numbers. In contrast, traditional evaluation metrics, such as BLEU or chrF, which measure lexical or character overlap between translation hypotheses and human references, have lower correlations with human judgements but are sensitive to such deviations. In this paper, we investigate several ways of combining the two approaches in order to increase robustness of state-of-the-art evaluation methods to translations with critical errors. We show that by using additional information during training, such as sentence-level features and word-level tags, the trained metrics improve their capability to penalize translations with specific troublesome phenomena, which leads to gains in correlation with human judgments and on recent challenge sets on several language pairs.Comment: Accepted at EAMT 202

Argument as design: a multimodal approach to academic argument in a digital age

Includes bibliographical referencesThis study posits that using a range of modes and genres to construct argument can engender different ways of thinking about argument in the academic context. It investigates the potentials and constraints of adopting a multimodal approach to constructing academic argument. The research is situated within a seminar, in a second year Media course. Within this context, the study identifies the semiotic resources that students draw on and examines how they are employed to construct academic argument in three digital domains, namely video, comics and PowerPoint. Grounded in a theory of multimodal social semiotics, this study posits that argument is a product of design, motivated by the rhetor's interest in communicating a particular message, in a particular environment, and shaped by the available resources in the given environment. It proposes that argument is a cultural text form for bringing about difference (Kress 1989). This view of argument recognises that argument occurs in relation to mode, genre, discourse and medium. The study illustrates how each of these social categories shapes argument through textual analysis. A framework based on Halliday's metafunctional principle is proposed to analyse argument in multimodal texts. The framework combines theories from rhetoric and social semiotics. It offers analysis of ideational content, the ways social relations are established, and how organising principles assist in establishing coherence in argument. The analysis of the data (video, comics and PowerPoint presentations) demonstrates that the framework can be applied across genres and media. The significance of the study is threefold. Theoretically, it contributes towards theorising a theory of argument from a multimodal perspective. Methodologically, it puts forward a framework for analysing multimodal arguments. Pedagogically, it contributes towards developing and interrogating a pedagogy of academic argument that is relevant to contemporary communication practices

Dubbing Wordplay in Children’s Programmes from English into Thai

This doctoral research aims to investigate the most prevalent translation techniques adopted by Thai dubbing translators when transferring English-language idioms found in animated films into a lesser-known language such as Thai. To achieve this purpose, the methodological approach combines a quantitative phase, which has the benefit of revealing certain tendencies, with a qualitative phase that investigates the data in greater depth. Wordplay instances can be grouped into two main categories according to their presentation nature: media-based and rhetoric-based. In the case of the media-based category, the types of wordplay instances uncovered in the analysis are audio-verbal, audio-visual-verbal and visual-verbal, while, based in the rhetoric-based category, they are homonymy, homophony, paraphony, hahaphony and allusion types. In an attempt to render ST puns into the TT, the following seven dubbing techniques have been activated by Thai translators: loan, literal translation, explicitation, substitution, recreation, combination and non-translation. Close examination of the data reveals that, despite the translators’ best effort to transfer the semantic ambiguity and humorous effect embedded in the English wordplay into the Thai dialogue, PUN>NON-PUN is the translation outcome with the highest occurrence. This results in the inevitable loss of semantic ambiguity and humour in the TT wordplay, as well as other pedagogical objectives intended by the film’s producers such as a language learning facilitator for young viewers