"Academy" of Motion Pictures: Exercises in Film Analysis

This assignment sequence for American Voices: Tomboys in Time, includes preparatory work and three essays. It is designed to develop proficiency in the practice of formal film analysis through a set of tomboy films while posing a series of stylistic challenges. Beginning with a still image and progressing to full sequences and theoretical texts, it asks students to write about film in multiple ways and to construct arguments about the relationship between form and content, foundational texts in gender studies, critical work on tomboys, and various extradiegetic aspects of film

Rhetorical Problems and Cinematic Solutions: The Visual Arguments of the \u27Obama Infomercial\u27

Most Americans remember the outcome of the presidential election on November 2nd, 2008, and the intense media coverage of the entire campaign. Just three nights before Election Day, the Barack Obama campaign purchased primetime air slots on seven major broadcast and cable stations across the country to air a 30-minute \u27infomercial\u27 entitled American Stories: American Solutions. This thesis looks at this television program with a specific focus not on the verbal message of American Stories: American Solutions, but on how this message is framed through cinematography. The thesis first explores research in the fields of rhetoric, film, politics, and race, then using the method of compositional interpretation, outlines what visual arguments are presented through cinematography. Using a formalist approach, Chapter 3 describes how camera movements, framing, and other technical aspects of cinematography organize the rhetorical object of the film in order to make it more persuasive. Chapter 4 emphasizes the rhetorical and ideological aspects of this analysis in addressing how cinematography makes a visual argument in the form of a refutative enthymeme regarding Obama\u27s race

Techniques de mise en scène pour le jeu vidéo et l'animation

Eurographics State of the Art Report (STAR).International audienceOver the last forty years, researchers in computer graphics have proposed a large variety of theoretical models and computer implementations of a virtual film director, capable of creating movies from minimal input such as a screenplay or storyboard. The underlying film directing techniques are also in high demand to assist and automate the generation of movies in computer games and animation. The goal of this survey is to characterize the spectrum of applications that require film directing, to present a historical and up-to-date summary of research in algorithmic film directing, and to identify promising avenues and hot topics for future research.Depuis quarante ans, les chercheurs en informatique graphique ont proposé une grande variété de modèles théoriques et d'implémentations de réalisateurs virtuels, capables de créer des films automatiquement à partir de scénarios ou de storyboards. Les techniques de mise en scène sous-jacentes peuvent également être très utiles pour assister et automatiser la création de films dans le jeu vidéo et l'animation. Le but de cet état de l'art est de caractériser le spectre des applications qui peuvent bénéficier des techniques de mise en scène, de donner un compte rendu historique de la recherche en mise en scène algorithmique, et d'identifier les tendances et perspectives du domaine

Towards a Smart Drone Cinematographer for Filming Human Motion

Affordable consumer drones have made capturing aerial footage more convenient and accessible. However, shooting cinematic motion videos using a drone is challenging because it requires users to analyze dynamic scenarios while operating the controller. In this thesis, our task is to develop an autonomous drone cinematography system to capture cinematic videos of human motion. We understand the system's filming performance to be influenced by three key components: 1) video quality metric, which measures the aesthetic quality -- the angle, the distance, the image composition -- of the captured video, 2) visual feature, which encapsulates the visual elements that influence the filming style, and 3) camera planning, which is a decision-making model that predicts the next best movement. By analyzing these three components, we designed two autonomous drone cinematography systems using both heuristic-based methods and learning-based methods.For the first system, we designed an Autonomous CinemaTography system -- "ACT" by proposing a viewpoint quality metric focusing on the visibility of the 3D human skeleton of the subject. We expanded the application of human motion analysis and simplified manual control by assisting viewpoint selection using a through-the-lens method. For the second system, we designed an imitation-based system that learns the artistic intention of the cameramen through watching professional aerial videos. We designed a camera planner that analyzes the video contents and previous camera motion to predict future camera motion. Furthermore, we propose a planning framework, which can imitate a filming style by ``seeing" only one single demonstration video of such style. We named it ``one-shot imitation filming." To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that extends imitation learning to autonomous filming. Experimental results in both simulation and field test exhibit significant improvements over existing techniques and our approach managed to help inexperienced pilots capture cinematic videos

Pragmatic visionary : the prescriptions of American independent filmmaker John Sayles : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Media Studies at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

This thesis is concerned with the exploration and analysis of the style, themes and issues of American independent filmmaker John Sayles. Up until the time of writing (2001) Sayles has made and released twelve feature length films and from this oeuvre I have chosen eight films for analysis: Baby, It's You (1983); The Brother From Another Planet (1984); Matewan (1987); Eight Men Out (1988); City of Hope (1991); Passion Fish (1992); Lone Star (1996); and Limbo (1999). Having selected these films as the focus of my research I will then ask the following questions: ♦ Are there consistencies in themes, issues and characters in Sayles films? ♦ If the answer to the above is yes: • What are the salient characteristics of these consistent features? and • Do the salient characteristics of these consistent features indicate a particular authorial worldview, if you will, a Sayles' Weltanschauung

Evaluation of deep pose detectors for automatic analysis of film style

International audienceIdentifying human characters and how they are portrayed on-screen is inherently linked to how we perceive and interpretthe story and artistic value of visual media. Building computational models sensible towards story will thus require a formalrepresentation of the character. Yet this kind of data is complex and tedious to annotate on a large scale. Human pose estimation(HPE) can facilitate this task, to identify features such as position, size, and movement that can be transformed into input tomachine learning models, and enable higher artistic and storytelling interpretation. However, current HPE methods operatemainly on non-professional image content, with no comprehensive evaluation of their performance on artistic film.Our goal in this paper is thus to evaluate the performance of HPE methods on artistic film content. We first propose a formalrepresentation of the character based on cinematography theory, then sample and annotate 2700 images from three datasetswith this representation, one of which we introduce to the community. An in-depth analysis is then conducted to measure thegeneral performance of two recent HPE methods on metrics of precision and recall for character detection , and to examinethe impact of cinematographic style. From these findings, we highlight the advantages of HPE for automated film analysis, andpropose future directions to improve their performance on artistic film content

THE CINEMATIC COLLEGE PROFESSOR: CONCEPTIONS AND REPRESENTATIONS

Depictions of college professors in American films are common, and while a number of studies have investigated various aspects of college life in motion pictures, few have focused exclusively on the cinematic professoriate. In addition to being an indelible part of history, cinematic depictions of college professors are part of the national discourse on the role and function of the faculty and university. An investigation of how college professors have been represented in American films, and how these representations are read and created by real-life college professors and filmmakers may provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between popular culture images and academia. This project consists of three sections. The first focuses on the trajectories of negative representations of college professors in popular American films from 1970-2016. The second examines interview responses of film professors to on-screen depictions of college faculty. The third presents a case study of professorial depictions by a group of filmmakers who created a feature length film about a college professor. As various public stakeholders are increasingly questioning the role of the college professor and the institution of higher education, this project seeks to examine the influence of popular professor images and cultural influences on the conceptions of two interpretive communities – one that embodies the professoriate and one that creates images surrounding it. Moreover, this project considers these depictions within film marketplace and popular culture contexts