Category Archives: The Mediascape

2019 Internet Trends Report released

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In June at the Code Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, Mary Meeker delivered the 2019 instalment of her Internet Trends Report:

There are lots of insights here. Some to note, courtesy of CMF Trends:

The Internet’s penetration rate is now 51% of the world’s population. The two countries with the largest untapped markets are India followed by China. Nevertheless, one third of users live in those two countries.

Use is growing. Average daily online use has passed 6 hours for the first time. Moreover, mobile use has surpassed TV viewing this year.

Here’s the full slide deck or PDF.

My take: one takeaway for me is that the freemium model is alive and well. Unfortunately, two of my favourite tools did not figure this out (never having had paid levels) and have disappeared: Toonlet and Ujam Studio. 8- I wonder how the freemium model could be adapted to fiction films. Give away the movie and charge for the (DVD) extras (remember those)?

Inside a Virtual Production

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BBC Click has revealed glimpses of the virtual production techniques Jon Favreau harnessed before the “live action” Lion King was digitally animated.

The discussion of virtual production technology starts at 0:40. Details begin flowing about the Technicolor Virtual Production pipeline at 1:38.

Director Favreau explains further at 8:01 below:

My favourite line is: “We’d move the sun if we had to.”

Here’s Technicolor’s pitch for virtual production:

More here.

My take: Am I the only one that thinks it’s absurd for photo-realistic animals to talk and sing? I can buy the anthropomorphism in most animation, as the techniques they use are suitably abstracted, but this just looks too real. Maybe thought balloons?

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.