Category Archives: The Mediascape

How to spot deepfakes

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Siwei Lyu writing in The Conversation brings attention to “deepfakes” and offers a simple way to spot them.

What’s a deepfake?

From Wikipdeia:

“Deepfake, a portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake”, is an artificial intelligence-based human image synthesis technique. It is used to combine and superimpose existing images and videos onto source images or videos.”

My favourite technology show, BBC Click, explains it well:

Back to Siwei:

“Because these techniques are so new, people are having trouble telling the difference between real videos and the deepfake videos. My work, with my colleague Ming-Ching Chang and our Ph.D. student Yuezun Li, has found a way to reliably tell real videos from deepfake videos. It’s not a permanent solution, because technology will improve. But it’s a start, and offers hope that computers will be able to help people tell truth from fiction.”

The key?

Blinking.

“Healthy adult humans blink somewhere between every 2 and 10 seconds, and a single blink takes between one-tenth and four-tenths of a second. That’s what would be normal to see in a video of a person talking. But it’s not what happens in many deepfake videos.”

They analyze the rate of blinking to decide the veracity of the video.

“Our work is taking advantage of a flaw in the sort of data available to train deepfake algorithms. To avoid falling prey to a similar flaw, we have trained our system on a large library of images of both open and closed eyes. This method seems to work well, and as a result, we’ve achieved an over 95 percent detection rate.”

My take: Wow! So, basically, now you can no longer believe what you read, hear or see. Interestingly, this means that IRL will take on added value. (Oops, it seems that technology has already moved on: now deepfakes can include blinking.)

The changing media landscape

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Graeme McMillan, writing on The Verge, claims that “Netflix, Amazon Video, and Xfinity are accidentally re-creating cable TV.”

His thesis:

“Since the advent of streaming online video, industry insiders have wondered what impact it would have on the future of television. As more companies move toward launching their own proprietary subscription streaming services, the future hasn’t been entirely decided yet, but new clues are emerging, pointing toward a potentially surprising answer: all this disruptive new media is just gradually re-creating familiar old-media models.”

As evidence, he points to a recent deal by Comcast’s Xfinity X1 digital cable service to carry Amazon Prime Video, alongside Netflix, YouTube, and Pandora.

This highlights a growing problem for viewers:

“The digital landscape is already fragmented, and it’s continually fragmenting further, as content creators choose to become content providers. In the process, it’s beginning to resemble cable television. Each new app or content library looks like a different channel to consider, and each one is essentially a premium cable offering that requires a separate subscription to view. Services that previously acted as content aggregators are losing outside content with the launch of each new service. Instead, they are creating their own content to maintain value in a crowded marketplace.”

Graeme asks:

“If streaming is, indeed, just New Television — or, perhaps more accurately, Old Television Again But Arguably More Expensive And More Complicated — then what benefit does that actually have for the end-user? The material has migrated to platforms where the audience already exists, but in a more unwieldy fashion that all but eliminates the free-view option of broadcast television, limiting its potential audience and penalizing low-income customers.”

He concludes: “Is it possible that, after all of this change and innovation, the future of television is just… television?”

My take: this is to be expected. See this Harvard Business Review article on the Consolidation Curve. Two years ago, there was an inkling already that there were too many “over-the-top streaming live-TV replacement services.” I suspect the only reason people are tolerating the proliferation of streaming services is rampant account sharing, which lowers fees.

A New Release Strategy for your Short Film

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You’re proud of your short film! You want to launch it into the world so you create a release strategy. Typically, it looks like this:

Andrew S. Allen, of Short of the Week, thinks it should look like this:

He’s arguing from a partisan position because he’s part of an online festival that can premiere your short, but I think he make a lot of sense.

He even has survey results and statistics to back up his assertions.

In a nutshell, he suggests:

  1. Create an online + festival strategy. Submit your film to online outlets early.
  2. Secure your premiere with a top tier festival or online site.
  3. Find partners — connect with curators to reach their audiences.
  4. Don’t prioritize money — it’ll likely hurt your exposure.
  5. Don’t sign away exclusivity — hang on to your right to ‘be everywhere’.
  6. Go cross platform and get your film everywhere.
  7. Internationalize your film with subtitles to reach even further.
  8. Compress your release window over days/weeks rather than months/years.
  9. Launch, engage and recalibrate during the week of your release.
  10. Be prepared to pitch your next idea or project.

My take: once upon a time, the mediascape was an orderly grid: on one axis you had ‘windows,’ a hierarchy of platforms (theatrical, pay TV, airlines, free TV, libraries, etc.,) and on the other axis you had ‘territories,’ geographic regions (North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Asia, Africa, etc.) Then along came the Internet that blew away time and space. The ‘Conventional Strategy’ above harkens back to the time of the Old Mediascape. ‘Be Everywhere All at Once’ is firmly rooted in the digital New Mediascape. One great reason to adopt it: you never were making any money from your short, so you might as well get it over with with the BEAAO Strategy and save yourself a couple of years. After all, time is money.

Scientific insights into successful movie making

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Kurt Vonnegut, the American writer, was one of the first to graph the emotional arc of stories.

In this lecture, he laments, “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers; they are beautiful shapes.”

Andrew J. Reagan, et al, did just that in 2016 using the Project Gutenberg fiction collection and concluded there are six main emotional trajectories:

  1. Rags to Riches (rise)
  2. Tragedy/Riches to Rags (fall)
  3. Man in a Hole (fall-rise)
  4. Icarus (rise-fall)
  5. Cinderella (rise-fall-rise)
  6. Oedipus (fall-rise-fall)

Does this hold for movies too?

Marco Del Vecchio, Alexander Kharlamov, Glenn Parry, and Ganna Pogrebna harnessed big data to see. They agree, and conclude:

“One of these trajectories — Man in a Hole — tends to be generally more financially successful than other emotional arcs. Furthermore, this relative success is apparent irrespective of the movie genre and does not dependent on the movie production budget. If we assume that IMDb rating can be used as a proxy of viewer satisfaction, we can also conclude that the Man in a Hole emotional arc tends to succeed not because it generates movies which are most desired by the public (i.e., achieve the highest ratings on IMDb), but because movies with this emotional arc tend to be most unusual and spark debate. In other words, the Man in a Hole emotional arc tends to generate most “talked about” movies and not necessarily “most liked” movies and thereby achieve higher revenues than movies in other categories.”

In addition to the story curve, they also explore budget:

“Man in a Hole is the only emotional trajectory which produces statistically significant results showing that it is more financially successful than any other emotional arc.”

And genre:

“When emotional arcs are combined with different genres and produced in different budget categories any of the 6 emotional arcs may produce financially successful films. Therefore, a careful selection of the script-budget-genre combination will lead to financial success.”

My take: I find this fascinating! See the last page that graphs genres with emotional arcs with success and the second last page that graphs budgets with emotional arcs with success (green is better.) It seems to tell me success is possible with budgets of less than $1 million in these genres: war, drama, mystery, crime and film noir, and using a rise-fall emotional arc.

Independents look to streaming worldwide

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Further evidence of Netflix and Amazon Prime’s global advancement, Lata Jha, writing in LiveMint from New Delhi, India, reports that directors of smaller films are increasingly looking towards streaming platforms and away from the box office for exposure:

“For starters, these small films have always been squeezed for space. The Hindi film industry makes around 2,000 films a year, but there’s space only for 200 to 300 to release in the 9,530 theatres in the country… Smaller films grow only by word of mouth. But, given their limited shelf life, everything depends on the business managed within the first three days, before another film is ready to take over next Friday… That is where the digital platforms come in. Cheaper data and a country increasingly abandoning the idea of appointment viewing make these services a viable option for smaller films.”

This is significant because India leads the film world on many fronts. And yet, Indian independent filmmakers face the same issues as their sisters and brothers elsewhere.

My take: Isn’t it interesting that Bollywood has the same effect as Hollywood on independent filmmakers in each culture. Here in Canada, this makes me truly respect Quebec’s results; see the chart on page 118 of Profile 2016. It shows that whereas English Canadian films average about 1% of the box office, French films are hitting it out of the park at about 10%, with larger revenue as well. Could it be the key is the lack of a dominant commercial industry that allows a local independent industry to fill the void?

More proof content is king

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More proof this week that we’ve moved beyond the infrastructure and the hardware to the point where content is indeed king.

Chris Welch of The Verge reports that Roku’s CEO Anthony Wood reveals:

“We don’t really make money… we certainly don’t make enough money to support our engineering organization and our operations and the cost of money to run the Roku service. That’s not paid for by the hardware. That’s paid for by our ad and content business.”

Earlier this year Roku admitted to earning more money on advertising than on the sales of its streaming boxes.

Little-known Roku may be positioning itself to replace television networks, as more and more viewers cut their cords.

As it flexes its muscles, Roku is toying with its UI, developing the Roku Channel that curates content from its suppliers. Wood again:

“The Roku Channel is our sort of sandbox for building a next-generation, content-first user interface. And someday, when we think it’s ready and good enough and has enough content in it, it’ll probably become the home screen. But that’s not going to happen right away.”

My take: with more and more Smart TVs coming with the Roku OS baked in, I think Roku might just come up the middle and best AppleTV, Amazon’s FireTV and Google’s Chromecast. Even though Netflix is king today, once Roku perfects their curation algorithm, it has a chance of becoming everyone’s home screen. The two problems this solves: there are too many apps to manage and there is too much content to wade through. One caveat: will viewers stomach the ads?

Greenlight Essentials harnesses big data for indies

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Okay. You got the money. But you want your script to be the best possible — so that it connects with your audience. Wait, who are they again, and what do they want to watch? A crystal ball would come in handy right now.

That’s the promise from Jack Zhang and his company Greenlight Essentials.

Jack has combined his two loves, math and movies, to bring big data to indie filmmakers. He’s been collecting data for the last seven years and the insights are amazing. Jack can tell you how your plot stacks up, who your audience is and where they live.

With this information, you can improve your script and spend your marketing budget with confidence.

After ingesting your script and comparing over 40,000 plot elements with over 3,700 films and millions of box office records, Jack’s AI will plot the likely performance of your film. Change an element here and there, and see what happens.

Next, he’ll give you the demographics of the audience that responds best to your movie: their ages, occupations, incomes, purchase patterns and social media profiles.

Jack can also tell you where your audience lives in the US and Canada.

I recently asked Jack if creatives get upset when his algorithm undervalues their ideas.

“We are just funnelling audiences’ tastes to creatives.  It does upset people sometimes for sure, but it is just showing creatives that audiences want something else, and showing them the ways they can better shape their content to fit the audiences’ tastes.”

My take: this really is a crystal ball. If you ever felt that coverage is inherently skimpy and too much is left to gut decisions, this is worth checking out. Imagine only spending your ad dollars in the cities and on the social media platforms where your audience hangs out. Savings galore!

Netflix leads in US

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Stuart Thompson, writing in Digital TV Europe, reports that Netflix is now the most popular platform in the US.

He cites a study by Cowen & Co that surveyed 2,500 adults on their favourite viewing platforms:

“27.2% said they used Netflix most often to view video content, ahead of basic cable, cited by 20.4% and broadcast TV, cited by 18.1%. YouTube was cited by 11.4% of respondents, with Hulu some way behind on 5.3% and Amazon Prime Video on 4.7%. Only 4.6% of respondents said they view content most often on premium cable services.”

The results were amplified for 18-34 year-olds:

“39.7% used Netflix most often to view video content, ahead of YouTube on 17%, basic cable on 12.6%, Hulu on 7.6% and broadcast TV on 7.5%. Only 3.4% of 18-34 year-olds reported using Amazon Prime Video most often to view video, with 3.5% using premium cable services most often.”

This begs the question: how much of the Internet pipe does Netflix usage consume?

Luckily Domo has done the research and released the sixth edition of Data Never Sleeps.

They estimate every minute sees 3.1 million GB of traffic with Netflix serving over 97,000 hours of content. That’s per minute, folks!

Sign up for the full report or see the infographics on Entrepreneur.

My take: I think it’s obvious to everyone that streaming has trumped cable. In my mind it boils down to the advantages that the new technology gives viewers over the old technology: liberating options for how, when and where to watch. This shift has opened up opportunities for creatives to become the new who and what to watch. Why remains the same. Curiously, one of the unintended consequences of the dismantling of the gatekeeper empires is that it now falls to viewers to curate the glut of content for themselves. In essence, today everyone is their own programmer. Another unintended consequence: getting addicted to shows and binging on them for hours on end. Where are the video playlists?

How ‘The Kissing Booth’ came about

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‘The Kissing Booth‘ is the biggest hit you’ve never heard of.

Seven years ago, a Welsh teenager named Beth Reekles began posting a story on Toronto-based online storytelling community Wattpad.

Her success there got her a three-book deal with Random House in 2012.

UK-based Komixx Entertainment then hired Vince Marcello to write a screenplay; he would go on to direct the rom-com.

The Netflix Original The Kissing Booth debuted online worldwide on May 11, 2018.

Some measures of its success:

My take: what I think is interesting about this story is that it starts and ends online, with stops in the real world in between. Oh, and by the way, I liked it!

Telefilm green lights 45 first features and web series

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Telefilm Canada has just released the list of 45 projects it will fund to the tune of up to $125,000 each.

Film schools and media co-ops across Canada nominated approximately 100 projects for Telefilm’s consideration.

Big ups to these projects from CineVic and the National Screen Institute with Victoria connections:

  • All-in Madonna (Arnold Lim, Ana de Lara, Susie Winters)
  • Esluna: The World Beyond (Denver Jackson, Daniel Hogg)
  • Q (Benjamin Musgrave, Dawn Bird, Dustin Griffin)

Arnold Lim says,

“Telefilm has proven to be a world leader in their support for filmmakers and this is just one more reason I am so proud to be Canadian. Thank you to the Talent to Watch program; we haven’t shot yet but I already feel l am a better filmmaker today than when we started this program — and it never would have been possible without Telefilm’s support.”

(For background on the Talent to Watch program, Telefilm’s upgrade of its Micro-budget program, see Barry Hertz‘s article in the Globe and Mail.)

My take: I’ve mentioned before that this is the best way for Canadian filmmakers to get their first features funded. Kudos to Telefilm for having the vision to nurture new storytellers and work on balancing the gender ratio in film at the same time. And congratulations to all the Victoria teams getting the nod this year!