Category Archives: The Mediascape

Korean AI can predict your film’s chances

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I would have loved to have been at the 2019 Storytelling Workshop in Florence, Italy, when Koreans You Jin Kim, Yun Gyung Cheong and Jung Hoon Lee presented their paper “Prediction of a Movie’s Success From Plot Summaries Using Deep Learning Models”.

Their idea is to train an AI to read summaries of movies and then pass judgement:

“The primary hypothesis that we attempted to answer is to predict a movie’s success in terms of popularity and artistic quality by analyzing only the textual plot summary.”

It’s all very complicated and, I’ll admit, is on the edge of being incomprehensible to me.

One thing I did gather — their AI seems better at determining which films will NOT be good:

“It seems that predicting ‘not popular’ or ‘not successful’ movies performs better than that of predicting ‘popular’ or ‘successful’ movies.”

My take: Another of the takeaways for me in this paper was this chestnut: “The frequency of sentiment changes may signal the success of films.” Even though they’re talking about summaries of films, I believe this could mean the greater the number of reversals, the greater the success of the film. Could this be true? Maybe. Maybe not. But maybe. No, maybe not. Definitely — maybe.

The Riz Test joins Bechdel

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First there was the Bechdel Test, and now there’s the Riz Test.

Both test representation in media: the first, of women; the second, of Muslims.

Inspired by a speech by Riz Ahmed to the English House of Commons, the Riz Test was devised by Dr. Sadia Habib and Shaf Choudry and asks five questions:

“If the film/show stars at least one character who is identifiably Muslim (by ethnicity, language or clothing) – is the character…

1. Talking about, the victim of, or the perpetrator of terrorism?

2. Presented as irrationally angry?

3. Presented as superstitious, culturally backwards or anti-modern?

4. Presented as a threat to a Western way of life?

5. If the character is male, is he presented as misogynistic? Or if female, is she presented as oppressed by her male counterparts?

If the answer for any of the above is Yes, then the Film/TV Show fails the test.”

See Riz Test tweets.

My take: it’s about time. It would be great if both the Bechdel Test and the Riz Test were added to all movie sites, like IMDB’s Advanced Title Search or AllMovie’s Advanced Search.

The truth about YouTube

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Speaking specifically about YouTube, Rasty Turek of PEX declares, “Not all content is equal,” and then sets out to prove it.

Some facts:

  • YouTube is the most popular and largest video platform
  • YouTube hosts over 5 billion videos and over 1 billion hours of content
  • Over 10 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every second

Some things you might not know about YouTube, according to PEX’s insights:

  • “The length of videos is increasing, driven mostly by long form content, primarily gaming videos and live streaming.”
  • Annual uploads may top out at 1.5 billion in 2020
  • The number of users uploading may top out at 110 million in 2020

This is where it gets interesting.

According to PEX, it seems only the Gaming category is gaining share, and all other categories are on a downward trend:

As to views, only 1 in 156 videos gets more than 100,000 views.

Further, that 0.64% of videos generates 81.6% of all views!

To put it another way, 99.36% of all videos get less than 18.4% of total views, which is less than 100,000 views each. Ouch!

To conclude, Rasty states:

“Music is the only category that consistently attracts hundreds of millions of users to watch the same videos over and over. The first video that ever broke 1B view mark was a music video. The vast majority of videos with over 1B views are music videos.”

Not surprisingly, the most subscribed to channel on YouTube is Hindi music channel T-Series, with over 105 million subscribers.

My take: Who knew? But I wonder if there’s more to this. Fifteen years ago, the revenues of the music, film and video game industries were tied. Now, gaming pulls in more than the other two combined. Hence, the only growing category on YouTube. Could it be that gamers are just listening to YouTube music playlists in the background as they while away the time?

1000 episodes for BBC’s Click

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This week the BBC celebrated the 1000th episode of their technology magazine show Click with an interactive issue.

Access the show and get prepared to click!

One of the pieces that caught my eye was an item in the Tech News section about interactive art, called Mechanical Masterpieces by artist Neil Mendoza.

The exhibit is a mashup of digitized high art and Rube Goldberg-esque analogue controls that let the participants prod and poke the paintings. Very playful! I’ve scoured the web to find some video. This is Neil’s version of American Gothic:

Getting ready for the weekend with another piece from Neil Mendoza’s Mechanical Masterpieces, part of #ToughArt2018. pittsburghkids.org/exhibits/tough-art

Posted by Children's Museum of Pittsburgh on Friday, September 28, 2018

And here is his version of The Laughing Cavalier:

Check out Neil’s latest installation/music video.

My take: I love Click and I love interactive storytelling. But I’m not sure the BBC’s experiment was entirely successful. What I thought was missing was an Index, a way to quickly jump around their show. For instance, it was tortuous trying to find this item in the Tech News section. Of course, Click is in love with their material and expects viewers to patiently lap up every frame, even as they click to choose different paths through the material. But it’s documentary/news content, not narrative fiction, and I found myself wanting to jump ahead or abandon threads. On the other hand, my expectations of a narrative audience looking for A-B interactive entertainment is that they truly are motivated to explore various linear paths through the story. And an Index would reveal too much of what’s up ahead. But I wonder if that’s just me, as a creator, speaking. Perhaps interactive content is relegated to the hypertext/website side of things, versus stories that swallow you up as they twist and turn on their way to revealing their narratives.

Another streamer announced: BET+ joins crowded market

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With the tagline “Stream Black Culture. Anytime. Anywhere. Finally.” BET has announced the launch of its streaming platform BET+ this Fall.

So what’s BET+?

“It’s a new online streaming service. It’s thousands of hours of your favorite black content. It’s the movies that you love. It’s the tv shows you grew up with and new series you can’t live without. And it’s exclusive originals from the best black creators. No commercials. At all.”

Variety has more details and claims Tyler Perry “likely has a stake in the venture as he is contributing his own library, which is a big selling point.”

They quote Perry:

“In our industry, the way people consume content is constantly evolving. I’ve paid attention to my audience and what works for them and, for that reason, I’m very excited not only about the idea of partnering with BET to create new and exciting content, but also about the idea of giving people a personalized experience through the ability to curate the content they love to consume. On a personal level, this will also be the first time I’ll be working in areas like unscripted and variety television, which will afford me the opportunity to work in fresh, creative ways with new voices and to discover new talent.”

My take: Although no pricing has yet been announced, I believe BET+ will be one of the winners in the upcoming streaming sweepstakes. Disney+, AppleTV+, et al, will be going up against these 100+ streaming services.

Half of Canadians have 5 or more connected devices: CIRA

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CIRA, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, has just released Canada’s Internet Factbook 2018.

Blue vivid image of globe and space tin can

With over 2.8 million registered domains, CIRA manages the names of websites ending in .ca . As such, it has its (Canadian) finger on the pulse of the Internet. Some of the insights are very telling:

  • Nearly 90% of Canadians use the internet.
  • 86% of Canadians have a broadband internet connection at home.
  • 72% of Canadians use a mobile device to access the internet.
  • 52% of Canadian households have five or more internet-connected devices.
  • 66% of Canadians spend at least 1 hour online per day watching TV/movies/video.
  • 77% of Canadians use Facebook.
  • 53% of Canadians subscribe to Netflix.
  • 14% of Canadians often/always seek out Canadian content.
  • 79% of Canadians want Canadian internet service providers/online service companies to invest in building up internet infrastructure inside Canada.

See the infographic.

My take: Thank goodness for the Domain Name System because before 1985 servers only had IP addresses; it would be four years before Tim Berners-Lee would create the World Wide Web.

Tips for Indie Film Posters

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John Godfrey, writing on Film Independent, says that indie film posters need to work harder.

You’re going up against every other film, most with budgets many times larger than yours. The key, John says, is your concept:

“The key to a successful poster is the concept behind it…. When you bring a designer on board, give them as much to work with as possible, every available image as well as letting them watch a screener of the film. No amount of synopsis or breakdowns can help a designer understand a film better than watching that film. Film is a visual medium — and so are movie posters. There are many parallels between the two, and there are sometimes iconic graphic devices used within a film that as a filmmaker you might not pick up on, but that a designer’s eye will be drawn instantly to as a subject to expand upon.”

John also reminds you that your poster needs to work in many formats:

“Your traditional 27×40” movie poster is excellent for film festivals and your IMDb page, and is the perfect way to commemorate the countless hours poured into production, with a framed print on your wall. However, that’s only a small portion of the usages your poster will be needed for. Once streaming, your poster will have to be in a horizontal format on many services. A horizontal format would also be useful right off the bat as the poster frame of your trailer on Vimeo and YouTube. A square format is very useful for social media.”

For some recent examples of great concepts, Ethan Anderton posting on /film lists his favourite film posters from 2018.

My take: I’ve mentioned before that I sometimes start with a logo that expresses a project’s identity even before writing the script that gives it a voice. It’s also worthwhile exploring the graphic design requirements of some of the streaming services so you know what they don’t allow (things like titles, laurels, URLs, etc.) so you can make sure to get all your visuals during production. For a compilation of movie poster themes, there’s none better than Christophe Courtois.

Coming soon: fix it in Post with text editing

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Scientists working at Stanford University, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Princeton University and Adobe Research have developed a technique that synthesizes new video frames from an edited interview transcript.

In other words, soon we’ll be able to alter speech in video clips simply by typing in new words:

“Our method automatically annotates an input talking-head video with phonemes, visemes, 3D face pose and geometry, reflectance, expression and scene illumination per frame. To edit a video, the user has to only edit the transcript, and an optimization strategy then chooses segments of the input corpus as base material. The annotated parameters corresponding to the selected segments are seamlessly stitched together and used to produce an intermediate video representation in which the lower half of the face is rendered with a parametric face model. Finally, a recurrent video generation network transforms this representation to a photorealistic video that matches the edited transcript.”

Why do this?

“Our main application is text-based editing of talking-head video. We support moving and deleting phrases, and the more challenging task of adding new unspoken words. Our approach produces photo-realistic results with good audio to video alignment and a photo-realistic mouth interior including highly detailed teeth.”

Read the full research paper.

My take: Yes, this could be handy in the editing suite. But the potential for abuse is very concerning. The ease of creating Deep Fakes by simply typing new words means that we would never be able to trust any video again. No longer will a picture be worth a thousand words; rather, one word will be worth a thousand pixels.

Amazon Prime Video jettisons some Indies

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Natalie Jarvey notes in the Hollywood Reporter that Indie Filmmakers Puzzled As Amazon Prime Drops Some Poorly Viewed Projects.

“Several emerging filmmakers who relied on Amazon Prime to distribute their work report that their movies have disappeared from the platform without warning. They say they were given no warning about the removal and that Amazon informed them those titles will not be accepted for resubmission, essentially killing any chance that audiences will discover them. Their predicament exemplifies the risk of becoming too reliant on a powerful platform whose benevolence can be fleeting.”

To recap, Amazon Prime is the world’s second largest SVOD streaming service, after leader Netflix.

What’s the little-known backdoor to their viewers? Amazon Prime Direct.

“Amazon has touted the way its video platform supports indie creators, previously reporting that, in its first year, Prime Video Direct paid tens of millions to rights holders…. Being cut off from Amazon Prime… has meant a loss of income for… filmmakers, though it’s pennies compared with even a modest VOD release. Prime Video Direct shares between 4 cents and 10 cents for every hour a title is streamed in the U.S.”

The article goes on to quote Linda Nelson, co-founder of the distributor Indie Rights:

“I would never recommend putting all your eggs in one basket. Indie filmmakers need to take this advice to heart and explore as many opportunities as they can to make sure their films get seen.”

My take: I agree; exclusivity should come at a premium. However, the reality is that it’s very difficult to make your own market. For instance, you could sell your film from your own website but that just begs the question, “How will your viewers find your website?” The unblemished truth is that the last fifteen years have seen all manner of new markets appear, with no clear replacement for the orderly windows and territories model of the last millennium. Just as we’ve witnessed an explosion of digital content, marketing options have multiplied likewise. Luckily, the future has yet to be written; nimble filmmakers can still control their destiny (at the cost of time and effort.)

Samsung’s new AI can bring photos to life

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Ivan Mehta reports in The Next Web that Samsung’s new AI can create talking avatars from a single photo.

Egor Zakharov, Aliaksandra Shysheya, Egor Burkov and Victor Lempitsky of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology and the Samsung AI Center, both in Moscow, Russia, envisioned a system that…

“…performs lengthy meta-learning on a large dataset of videos, and after that is able to frame few- and one-shot learning of neural talking head models of previously unseen people as adversarial training problems with high capacity generators and discriminators. Crucially, the system is able to initialize the parameters of both the generator and the discriminator in a person-specific way, so that training can be based on just a few images and done quickly, despite the need to tune tens of millions of parameters.”

But why did the researchers set out to do this?

They wanted to make better avatars for Augmented and Virtual Reality:

“We believe that telepresence technologies in AR, VR and other media are to transform the world in the not-so-distant future. Shifting a part of human life-like communication to the virtual and augmented worlds will have several positive effects. It will lead to a reduction in long-distance travel and short-distance commute. It will democratize education, and improve the quality of life for people with disabilities. It will distribute jobs more fairly and uniformly around the World. It will better connect relatives and friends separated by distance. To achieve all these effects, we need to make human communication in AR and VR as realistic and compelling as possible, and the creation of photorealistic avatars is one (small) step towards this future. In other words, in future telepresence systems, people will need to be represented by the realistic semblances of themselves, and creating such avatars should be easy for the users. This application and scientific curiosity is what drives the research in our group.”

Read their research paper.

My take: surely this only means more Deepfakes? The one aspect of this that I think is fascinating is the potential to bring old paintings and photographs to life. I think this would be a highly creative application of the technology. With which famous portrait would you like to interact?