Entertainment in the 21st Century: Is an Independent Networked Multimedia Production and Promotion Firm a Viable Business Option in the Modern Entertainment Industry?

“Artists are being stifled by the ‘major label’ stance that exclusively demands what’s ours is ours and can only be handled by us. It should be more about creative freedom” (Monstercat Manifesto). Over the past fifteen years, we have witnessed how the internet has changed how entertainment is distributed and consumed. This has led to a change in behavior from major entertainment production firms, and has given way to the surge of independent labels and production houses. Now, entertainers can lead successful careers by reaching their audience through digital platforms, successfully decreasing production and distribution costs. Consumers can find an unlimited amount of ad-supported content that they can access for free. Understanding these change is vital in finding and solving the problems these changes have produced

Your Boring Life, Now Available Online: Analyzing Google Street View and the Right to Privacy

Courts and legislatures must recognize that Street View\u27s current and future impact goes far beyond a private individual with a camera, and they will have to develop a new way to resolve these kinds of privacy concerns in the era of the omnipresent camera. This Comment will weigh the policies on both sides of the issue and will look at one\u27s expectation of privacy not only as where, location wise, a person expects to be private, but also in what circumstances one expects to be private and the consequences of private camera monitoring and publishing on the internet. If Google is correct, and there is nothing new about taking photographs in public areas, perhaps the massive organization, monitoring, storage, and publication of photographs of citizens, streets, and homes online is the problem. Perhaps courts should give greater scrutiny to massive monitoring endeavors, especially when photos of Americans and their homes serve a limited public interest

Facial Capture Lip-Sync

Facial model lip-sync is a large field of research within the animation industry. The mouth is a complex facial feature to animate, thus multiple techniques have arisen to simplify this process. These techniques, however, can lead to unappealing flat animation that lack full facial expression or eerie over-expressive animations that make the viewer uneasy. This thesis proposes an animation system that produces natural speech movements while conveying facial expression and compares them to previous techniques. This system used a text input of the dialogue to generate a phoneme-to-blend shape map to automate the facial model. An actor was motion captured to record the audio, provide speech motion data, and to directly control the facial expression in the regions of the face other than the mouth. The actor\u27s speech motion and the phoneme-to-blend shape map worked in conjunction to create a final lip-synced animation that viewers compared to phonetic driven animation and animation created with just motion capture. In this comparison, this system\u27s resultant animation was the least favorite, while the dampened motion capture animation gained the most preference

Geochemistry of bottom sediments -- Matagorda Bay system, Texas

UT Librarie

The Gulf shoreline of Texas : processes, characteristics, and factors in use

UT Librarie