Depth-aware neural style transfer for videos

Temporal consistency and content preservation are the prominent challenges in artistic video style transfer. To address these challenges, we present a technique that utilizes depth data and we demonstrate this on real-world videos from the web, as well as on a standard video dataset of three-dimensional computer-generated content. Our algorithm employs an image-transformation network combined with a depth encoder network for stylizing video sequences. For improved global structure preservation and temporal stability, the depth encoder network encodes ground-truth depth information which is fused into the stylization network. To further enforce temporal coherence, we employ ConvLSTM layers in the encoder, and a loss function based on calculated depth information for the output frames is also used. We show that our approach is capable of producing stylized videos with improved temporal consistency compared to state-of-the-art methods whilst also successfully transferring the artistic style of a target painting

Distributed Cinema: Interactive, Networked Spectatorship In The Age Of Digital Media

Digital media has changed much of how people watch, consume and interact with digital media. The loss of indexicality, or the potential infidelity between an image and its source, contributes to a distrust of images. The ubiquity of interactive media changes aesthetics of images, as viewers begin to expect interactivity. Networked media changes not only the ways in which viewers access media, but also how they communicate with each other about this media. The Tulse Luper Suitcases encapsulates all of these phenomena

Aesthetics of destruction in contemporary science fiction cinema

Mass destruction imagery within the science fiction film genre is not a new cinematic development. However, a swell of destruction-centred films has emerged since the proliferation of digital technologies and computer-generated imagery that reflect concerns that extend beyond notions of spectacle. Through illusionistic realism techniques, the aesthetics of mass destruction imagery within science fiction cinema can be seen as appropriating the implied veracity of other film traditions in order to create a baseline of visual credibility, even to the extent of associating its own fantastical fictions with recent historic destruction events. This thesis investigates the representation of mass destruction across the spectrum of contemporary science fiction films emerging from around the world by examining the various methods employed to affect the spectator. The study is divided into four sections: realism, spectacle, sublimity, and correlation. It is structured so as to escalate from the establishment of a baseline of vraisemblance of the spectator’s empirical understanding of the world, to new representations of death and destruction, whereby visual aesthetic correlations emerge between science fiction and historical fact. My study attempts to contribute to the current discourse on science fiction cinema by focusing on the relationship between the aesthetics of realism and spectacle and their impact on spectatorial affect. By re-defining notions of film realism and the cinematic sublime, and through close textual analyses of a number of contemporary science fiction films, the intent of this paper is to present a greater understanding of the complicated inherencies borne by mass destruction spectacle

Gender Games: A Content Analysis Of Gender Portrayals In Modern, Narrative Video Games

Video games are a multi-billion dollar industry; 67% of households in the United States have at least one game player. The considerable reach of this medium makes it crucial to assess the messages that audiences are taking away concerning gender in these games. In this content analysis, I investigate the representation of binary gender in the narratives of modern video games from the perspective of cultivation theory. Ten popular games from 2007 through 2013 are selected for this investigation. The characteristics of each game’s main character are evaluated in the context of the narrative to uncover emergent trends, tropes, and themes over the course of gameplay. Men outnumber women in protagonist roles, and women serve as catalysts for the central conflicts throughout the narrative. Gaming narratives also tend to embody the male power fantasy trope, with both male and female protagonists becoming masculinized through the story’s progression

Photomediations: A Reader

Photomediations: A Reader offers a radically different way of understanding photography. The concept that unites the twenty scholarly and curatorial essays collected here cuts across the traditional classification of photography as suspended between art and social practice to capture the dynamism of the photographic medium today. It also explores photography’s kinship with other media - and with us, humans, as media.The term ‘photomediations’ brings together the hybrid ontology of ‘photomedia’ and the fluid dynamism of ‘mediation’. The framework of photomediations adopts a processual, and time-based, approach to images by tracing the technological, biological, cultural, social and political flows of data that produce photographic objects