Who is the director of this movie? Automatic style recognition based on shot features

We show how low-level formal features, such as shot duration, meant as length of camera takes, and shot scale, i.e. the distance between the camera and the subject, are distinctive of a director's style in art movies. So far such features were thought of not having enough varieties to become distinctive of an author. However our investigation on the full filmographies of six different authors (Scorsese, Godard, Tarr, Fellini, Antonioni, and Bergman) for a total number of 120 movies analysed second by second, confirms that these shot-related features do not appear as random patterns in movies from the same director. For feature extraction we adopt methods based on both conventional and deep learning techniques. Our findings suggest that feature sequential patterns, i.e. how features evolve in time, are at least as important as the related feature distributions. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study dealing with automatic attribution of movie authorship, which opens up interesting lines of cross-disciplinary research on the impact of style on the aesthetic and emotional effects on the viewers

E-Motion: being moved by fiction and media? : Notes on fictional worlds, virtual contacts and the reality of emotions

Our response to fictional cues is often as emotional as to occurrences in real life. Such emotional responses do not mean that each time we mistake fiction for reality; rather they are affected by our innate social behaviors and by complex neural structures. Some responses, as for instance fright or pity, take place spontaneously, comparably to a reflex act. Furthermore, emotions can be evoked by means of thoughts: some specific sorts of texts rouse the reader´s ability to share in the emotional experiences of a fictional character. Other emotions can refer to a work of art as a whole or to some implicit components of meaning or allusions to facts of the case external to the text. Further ways of emotional engagement are pleasure and suspense, the affective basic processes of each reception of art or any media.Menschen reagieren auf fiktionale Ereignisse ebenso emotional wie auf das wirkliche Leben. Solche Gefühlsreaktionen bedeuten jedoch keine Verwechslung von Realität und Fiktion, sondern sind ein Produkt angeborener sozialer Verhaltensweisen und komplexer neuronaler Vorgänge. Reaktionen wie Schrecken und Mitleid zum Beispiel geschehen spontan, fast reflexartig. Aber auch über Gedanken lassen sich Emotionen hervorrufen: Bestimmte literarische Textsorten appellieren an das Einfühlungsvermögen des Lesers und lassen ihn an der Gefühlswelt fiktionaler Personen teilhaben. Andere Emotionen können sich auf ein künstlerisches Werk als ganzes oder auf werkexterne Bedeutungskomponenten beziehen. Weitere Formen emotionaler Beteiligung sind Lust und Spannung, die affektiven Basisprozesse jeder Kunst- und Medienrezeption

Spontaneous blink rate as an index of attention and emotion during film clips viewing

Spontaneous blinking is a non-invasive indicator known to reflect dopaminergic influence over frontal cortex and attention allocation in perceptual tasks. 38 participants watched eighteen short film clips (2 min), designed to elicit specific affective states, and arranged in six different emotional categories, while their eye movements were recorded from the vertical electroculogram. The largest blink rate inhibition, reflecting greater attention allocation to the movie, was observed during the presentation of Erotic clips, excerpts on wilderness depicting beautiful landscapes (Scenery), as well as clips showing crying characters (Compassion). Instead, the minimum blink rate inhibition was found for Fear clips, which induced a defensive response with stimulus rejection. Blink rate across time evidenced how Compassion clips elicited early inhibition while Sadness clips induced a slower, later inhibition. Correlation analyses also revealed a negative correlation (r < -0.40) between total blink rate recorded during Erotic and Compassion clips and self-reported interest. Overall, the main variable explaining blink rate was emotional Valence. Results suggest that blink modulation is related with the motivational relevance and biological significance of the stimuli, tracking their differential recruitment of attentional resources. Furthermore, they provide a solid background for studying the emotion-attention patterns and their deficits also in clinical samples (e.g., neurological and psychiatric patients) using spontaneous blinking as a not-interfering psychophysiological measure

Dynamic Facial Expression of Emotion Made Easy

Facial emotion expression for virtual characters is used in a wide variety of areas. Often, the primary reason to use emotion expression is not to study emotion expression generation per se, but to use emotion expression in an application or research project. What is then needed is an easy to use and flexible, but also validated mechanism to do so. In this report we present such a mechanism. It enables developers to build virtual characters with dynamic affective facial expressions. The mechanism is based on Facial Action Coding. It is easy to implement, and code is available for download. To show the validity of the expressions generated with the mechanism we tested the recognition accuracy for 6 basic emotions (joy, anger, sadness, surprise, disgust, fear) and 4 blend emotions (enthusiastic, furious, frustrated, and evil). Additionally we investigated the effect of VC distance (z-coordinate), the effect of the VC's face morphology (male vs. female), the effect of a lateral versus a frontal presentation of the expression, and the effect of intensity of the expression. Participants (n=19, Western and Asian subjects) rated the intensity of each expression for each condition (within subject setup) in a non forced choice manner. All of the basic emotions were uniquely perceived as such. Further, the blends and confusion details of basic emotions are compatible with findings in psychology

Film adaptation for knowing audiences: analysing fan on-line responses to the end of Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (2012)

Critics of film adaptations of literary works have historically evaluated the success or failure of the movie on the grounds of its fidelity to the original book. In contrast popular arguments for medium specificity have questioned whether fidelity is possible when adapting one medium to another. This article follows recent academic work which has focused awareness on the processes of adaptation by examining evidence of reading and viewing experience in online and social media forums.      The broader research project explored the online Twilight fan community as an example of a ‘knowing audience’ acquainted with both novel and film. Here we focus on the strong response within fan forums to the surprise ending of the final film adaptation Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (2012). The research uses the forum, blog and facebook page as sites for evidence of reading experience as defined by the Reading Experience Database (RED). The analysis sheds new light on the tensions that exist between fidelity and deviation and the article positions fan audiences as intensive readers who gained unexpected pleasure from a deviation from a canon. It argues that fans are also collaborators within the adaptation process who respect authorial authority and discuss the author’s, scriptwriter’s and director’s interpretation of the novel for the screen. The research identifies the creative and commercial advantages to be gained from a collaborative and open dialogue between adaptors and fans.  Keywords: Adaptation, fandom, online fan communities, Twilight, reading experience, film, audiences, fidelity, canon, collaboration, screenwriting, franchise, Stephenie Meyer, Melissa Rosenberg, Bill Condo

Automated annotation of multimedia audio data with affective labels for information management

The emergence of digital multimedia systems is creating many new opportunities for rapid access to huge content archives. In order to fully exploit these information sources, the content must be annotated with significant features. An important aspect of human interpretation of multimedia data, which is often overlooked, is the affective dimension. Such information is a potentially useful component for content-based classification and retrieval. Much of the affective information of multimedia content is contained within the audio data stream. Emotional features can be defined in terms of arousal and valence levels. In this study low-level audio features are extracted to calculate arousal and valence levels of multimedia audio streams. These are then mapped onto a set of keywords with predetermined emotional interpretations. Experimental results illustrate the use of this system to assign affective annotation to multimedia data

Tracking the affective state of unseen persons.

Emotion recognition is an essential human ability critical for social functioning. It is widely assumed that identifying facial expression is the key to this, and models of emotion recognition have mainly focused on facial and bodily features in static, unnatural conditions. We developed a method called affective tracking to reveal and quantify the enormous contribution of visual context to affect (valence and arousal) perception. When characters' faces and bodies were masked in silent videos, viewers inferred the affect of the invisible characters successfully and in high agreement based solely on visual context. We further show that the context is not only sufficient but also necessary to accurately perceive human affect over time, as it provides a substantial and unique contribution beyond the information available from face and body. Our method (which we have made publicly available) reveals that emotion recognition is, at its heart, an issue of context as much as it is about faces

Modifications to Aristotle's Poetics

Aristotle's Poetics has been the basis for theories of entertainment for over 2,000 years. But the general approach it uses has led to a number of gaps, contradictions, and difficulties in predicting the success of books, plays, movies, and entertainment as a whole, so much so that sayings like "there are no rules, but you break them at your peril," and "in Hollywood, nobody knows anything" have become widespread and accepted. However, it turns out that a model of entertainment that defines literary conventions by the pleasurable feelings they release in the brain, and then equates them with outside experiences that people subconsciously attach to the literary work, in the same way that we can be conditioned to feel love when we view our wedding rings, can actually resolve almost every seeming contradiction in Aristotle's ideas and traditional theories of storytelling when compared to real-world results. Furthermore, this approach can be extended to the other major forms of art, including painting, music and even video games, leading to a "Non-Aristotelian" theory that modifies the fundamental aspects of each of these fields, but in a natural and necessary way, which strengthens both our understanding and our ability to predict the success or failure of art in the future. My work as a vlogger and writer, mostly done via my Youtube channel "StoryBrain," has been viewed over 6 million times, and written about in MovieMaker magazine, Creative Screenwriting magazine, on the front page of major sites like Reddit, Roger Ebert online, and in international newspapers like the Sydney Morning-Herald in Australia and Fotogramas in Spain. My work is also the subject of a chapter of the currently-in-release book "Neuro-Design," by Kogan Page publishing, called "The Neuro Movie Analyst." This paper is a detailed introduction to the theory of Emotional Indiscretion which I have talked about in my work

The decolonial empathy of two Maya documentaries shown at the XIII CLACPI film festival : FicMayab

In this article, I analyze two short documentaries Kat at Kat’ex? (2017) and Sepur Zarco: la vida después de la sentencia (2018), both directed by the Maya-K’iche-Kaqchikel media maker from Guatemala, Eduardo Say, and shown at the XIII CLACPI Film Festival-FicMayab’. Both movies feature Mayan witnesses to and survivors of the violence of the civil war in Guatemala. They share their stories of loss and pain with the diverse audiences convened by the festival. I argue that these movies, in referring to the past, constitute platforms in which these witnesses enact forms of reproduction of life through embodied social practices and acts of care that, in turn, portray them as agents of the reconstitution of their own present. I contend that these movies extend an invitation to the Western(ized) viewer to relate to the Maya testimonios of pain and realities, both within the films’ frame and outside of it. I use the term “decolonial empathy” to refer to this invitation that considers the Maya peoples’ self-determination in the face of state violence and its legacies.peer-reviewe

Metamorphosis and identity : psychoanalytical notes to Miyazaki’s Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle

Far greater liberties can be taken by animation than by live-action films The possibilities of the narratives are enriched by unrestricted visual images that offer unique means of exploring and portraying states of desire, conscious and unconscious realities, as well as different layers of relationships and experiences. This leads to a fusion of the traditional and modern roles of representation. Anime from acclaimed Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki, particularly the Academy Award winner Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, 2003) and Oscar-nominated Howl’s Moving Castle (Hauru no Ugoku Shiro, 2004), which in recent years have acquired a global cult status, offer new perspectives on human subjectivity. Through their playful use of the motif of transformation, striking similarities in the development of the plots and ambiguous dénouements, the movies problematize the fundamental question of identity, representing a close illustration of some of the core psychoanalytical concepts found in Lacanian theory