The Australian screen producer in transition

The role of the screen producer is ramifying. Not only are there numerous producer categories, but the screen producer function is also found on a continuum across film, television, advertising, corporate video, and the burgeoning digital media sector. In recent years, fundamental changes to distribution and consumption practices and technologies should have had a correlate impact on screen production practices and on the role of existing screen producers. At the same time, new and recent producers are learning and practicing their craft in a field that has already been transformed by digitisation and media convergence. Our analysis of the work, experience and outlook of screen producers in this chapter is based on data collected in the Australian Screen Producer Survey (ASPS), a nation-wide survey conducted by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, the media marketing firm Bergent Research, and the Centre for Screen Business at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) in 2008/09 and 2011. We analyse the results to better understand the practice of screen production in a period of industry transition, and to recognise the persistence of established production cultures that serve to distinguish different industry sectors.

Broadcasting digital stories on Australian community television : the Digistories Anthology

Community-based arts and media movements have been intsrumental in building population-wide creative capacity for cultural development, social participation and social transformation in many parts of the world. Digital storytelling is a form of media practice that was pioneered in the United States at the intersection of these movements. It is described here as a ‘co-creative’ media production method. This description aims to differentiate the approaches to collaborative content creation that are used in community cultural development (CCD) and community media movements from those valued in professional and consumer modes of media production. Yet, the products of co-creative practices, such as digital stories, do not circulate widely through existing media networks or through the newer social media networks that Australian CCD and community media movements anticipated by at least twenty years. The complex politics of story ownership are one of a number of factors that often render ‘publication’ a secondary consideration in the making of digital stories. The possibility of ‘downstream’ use and re-use of stories in other networks is not usually considered in initial planning and development processes. As landmark projects such as Capture Wales indicate, even where stories are made for broadcast outcomes, television can be a problematic window for exhibiting digital stories. Scepticism about the brave new world of reality television and user generated content also circulates in digital storytelling networks, especially when it comes to ethical concerns for managing the risks of harm associated with widespread distribution of digital stories to indiscriminate publics. This publication reports on a collaborative action research project that took a closer look at some of the constraints relating to the problems of re-purposing digital stories for television. It focussed on ‘best practice’ for managing the risks of harm to storytellers in the process of re-purposing digital stories for broadcast on community television.

Innovation & workplace culture in the Australian interactive entertainment industry : the Halfbrick story

A recent success story of the Australian videogames industry is Brisbane based Halfbrick Studios, developer of the hit game for mobile devices, Fruit Ninja. Halfbrick not only survived the global financial crisis and an associated downturn in the Australian industry, but grew strongly, moving rapidly from developing licensed properties for platforms such as Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, and Playstation Portable (PSP) to becoming an independent developer and publisher of in-house titles, generating revenue both through App downloads and merchandise sales. Amongst the reasons for Halfbrick’s success is their ability to adaptively transform by addressing different technical platforms, user dynamics, business models and market conditions. Our ongoing case-study research from 2010 into Halfbrick’s innovation processes, culminating with some 10 semi-structured interviews with senior managers and developers, has identified a strong focus on workplace organisational culture, with staff reflecting that the company is a flat, team-based organisation devolving as much control as possible to the development teams directly, and encouraging a work-life balance in which creativity can thrive. The success of this strategy is evidenced through Halfbrick’s low staff turnover; amongst our interviewees most of the developers had been with the company for a number of years, with all speaking positively of the workplace culture and sense of creative autonomy they enjoyed. Interviews with the CEO, Shainiel Deo, and team leaders highlighted the autonomy afforded to each team and the organisation and management of the projects on which they work. Deo and team leaders emphasised the collaboration and communication skills they require in the developers that they employ, and that these characteristics were considered just as significant in hiring decisions as technical skills. Halfbrick’s developers celebrate their workplace culture and insist it has contributed to their capacity for innovation and to their commercial success with titles such as Fruit Ninja. This model of organisational management is reflected in both Stark’s (2009) idea of heterarchy, and Neff’s (2012) concept of venture labour, and provides a different perspective on the industry than the traditional political economy critique of precarious labour exploited by gaming conglomerates. Nevertheless, throughout many of the interviews and in our informal discussions with Halfbrick developers there is also a sense that this rewarding culture is quite tenuous and precarious in the context of a rapidly changing and uncertain global videogames industry. Whether such a workplace culture represents the future of the games industry, or is merely a ‘Prague Spring’ before companies such as Halfbrick are swallowed by traditional players’ remains to be seen. However, as the process of rapid and uncertain transformation plays out across the videogames industry, it is important to pay attention to emerging modes of organisation and workplace culture, even whilst they remain at the margins of the industry. In this paper we investigate Halfbrick’s workplace culture and ask how sustainable is this kind of rewarding and creative workplace?

An interactive planning and scheduling framework for optimising pits-to-crushers operations

In this paper, an interactive planning and scheduling framework are proposed for optimising operations from pits to crushers in ore mining industry. Series of theoretical and practical operations research techniques are investigated to improve the overall efficiency of mining systems due to the facts that mining managers need to tackle optimisation problems within different horizons and with different levels of detail. Under this framework, mine design planning,mine production sequencing and mine transportation scheduling models are integrated and interacted within a whole optimisation system. The proposed integrated framework could be used by mining industry for reducing equipment costs, improving the production efficiency and maximising the net present value.

Facial expression recognition experiments with data from television broadcasts and the world wide web

Facial expression recognition (FER) systems must ultimately work on real data in uncontrolled environments although most research studies have been conducted on lab-based data with posed or evoked facial expressions obtained in pre-set laboratory environments. It is very difficult to obtain data in real-world situations because privacy laws prevent unauthorized capture and use of video from events such as funerals, birthday parties, marriages etc. It is a challenge to acquire such data on a scale large enough for benchmarking algorithms. Although video obtained from TV or movies or postings on the World Wide Web may also contain ‘acted’ emotions and facial expressions, they may be more ‘realistic’ than lab-based data currently used by most researchers. Or is it? One way of testing this is to compare feature distributions and FER performance. This paper describes a database that has been collected from television broadcasts and the World Wide Web containing a range of environmental and facial variations expected in real conditions and uses it to answer this question. A fully automatic system that uses a fusion based approach for FER on such data is introduced for performance evaluation. Performance improvements arising from the fusion of point-based texture and geometry features, and the robustness to image scale variations are experimentally evaluated on this image and video dataset. Differences in FER performance between lab-based and realistic data, between different feature sets, and between different train-test data splits are investigated.

Business Innovation and Disruption in Publishing

This is the first volume in a book series examining how organizations in the creative industries respond to disruptive change and how they themselves generate business innovations. The aspiration of this book series is to understand some of the common forces behind the disruptions occurring in so many creative industries today and identifying the most promising strategies and responses by organizations to create new value propositions, business models and business practices that can enable these industry participants to cope with and eventually thrive as their industries and sectors are transformed. The chapters included in the volume examine the processes of disruption and transformation due to the technology of the Internet, social forces driven by social media, the development of new portable digital devices with greater capabilities and smaller size, the decreasing costs of new information, and the creation of new business models and forms of intellectual property ownership rights for a digitized industry. The context for this volume is the publishing industries, understood as the industries for the publishing of fiction and non-fiction books, academic literature, consumer as well as trade magazines, and daily newspapers. This volume includes chapters by an internationally diverse array of media scholars whose chapters provide insights into these phenomena in Eastern Europe, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Russia, and the United States, using different methodological frameworks including, but not limited to, surveys, in-depth interviews and multiple-case studies. One gap that this book series seeks to fill is that between the study of business innovation and disruption by innovation scholars largely based in business school settings and similar studies by scholarly experts from non-business school disciplines, including the broader social sciences (e.g. sociology, political science, economic geography) and creative industry based professional school disciplines (e.g. architecture, communications, design, film making, journalism, media studies, performing arts, photography and television). Future volumes of this book series will examine disruption and business innovation in the film, video and photography sectors (volume two), the music sector (volume three) and interactive entertainment (volume four), with subsequent volumes focusing on the most relevant developments in creative industry business innovation and disruption that emerge.

Games and entertainment software

Games and the broader interactive entertainment industry are the major ‘born global/born digital’ creative industry. The videogame industry (formally referred to as interactive entertainment) is the economic sector that develops, markets and sells videogames to millions of people worldwide. There are over 11 countries with revenues of over $1 billion. This number was expected to grow 9.1 per cent annually to $48.9 in 2011 and $68 billion in 2012, making it the fastest-growing component of the international media sector (Scanlon, 2007; Caron, 2008).

Building sensitising terms to understand free-play in open-ended interactive art environments

In this paper we introduce and discuss the nature of free-play in the context of three open-ended interactive art installation works. We observe the interaction work of situated free-play of the participants in these environments and, building on precedent work, devise a set of sensitising terms derived both from the literature and from what we observe from participants interacting there. These sensitising terms act as guides and are designed to be used by those who experience, evaluate or report on open-ended interactive art. That is, we propose these terms as a common-ground language to be used by participants communicating while in the art work to describe their experience, by researchers in the various stages of research process (observation, coding activity, analysis, reporting, and publication), and by inter-disciplinary researchers working across the fields of HCI and art. This work builds a foundation for understanding the relationship between free-play, open-ended environments, and interactive installations and contributes sensitising terms useful for the HCI community for discussion and analysis of open-ended interactive art works.

Evoking gesture in interactive art

In this paper, we describe an interactive artwork that uses large body gestures as its primary interactive mode. The artist intends the work to provoke active reflection in the audience by way of gesture and content. The technology is not the focus, rather the aim is to provoke memory, to elicit feelings of connective human experiences in a required-to-participate audience. We find the work provokes a diverse and contradictory set of responses. The methods used to understand this include qualitative methods common to evaluating interactive art works, as well as in-depth discussions with the artist herself. This paper is relevant to the Human - Centered Computing track because in all stages of the design of the work - as well as the evaluation - the focus is on the human aspect; the computing is designed to enable all-too-human responses.

Talk2Me : engaging interactive installation environments

In this research I explore what elements there may be in common between tangible interactive-technology works that successfully engage their participants. An exploration of existing methods for obtaining useful evaluations for non-use and ambiguous environments forms a part of the discussion.

The interactive PRP for diversifying document rankings

The assumptions underlying the Probability Ranking Principle (PRP) have led to a number of alternative approaches that cater or compensate for the PRP's limitations. In this poster we focus on the Interactive PRP (iPRP), which rejects the assumption of independence between documents made by the PRP. Although the theoretical framework of the iPRP is appealing, no instantiation has been proposed and investigated. In this poster, we propose a possible instantiation of the principle, performing the first empirical comparison of the iPRP against the PRP. For document diversification, our results show that the iPRP is significantly better than the PRP, and comparable to or better than other methods such as Modern Portfolio Theory.

Unintended consequences : satellite policy and Indigenous television

This article examines two instances of media policy involving satellite transmission and Indigenous television: the introduction of the Viewer Access Satellite Television (VAST) platform in 2010 and the introduction of AUSSAT in the mid-1980s. The government’s failure to provide community and Indigenous broadcasters with an access regime at the time of AUSSAT resulted in Australia’s first and only Indigenous commercial television licensee, Imparja. Over a quarter of a century later, Imparja now forms part of the joint-venture company that runs VAST, a key component of Australia’s digital switchover planning. During the passage of the legislative amendments required to establish VAST, the issue of access resurfaced – this time in relation to Australia’s national and community Indigenous television channels. The article recounts the events leading up to the 2010 Bill, and examines the intended and unintended consequences of satellite policy in relation to Indigenous media, including equalisation and transparency of government funding programs.

Crowdsourcing interactions : using crowdsourcing for evaluating interactive information retrieval systems

In the field of information retrieval (IR), researchers and practitioners are often faced with a demand for valid approaches to evaluate the performance of retrieval systems. The Cranfield experiment paradigm has been dominant for the in-vitro evaluation of IR systems. Alternative to this paradigm, laboratory-based user studies have been widely used to evaluate interactive information retrieval (IIR) systems, and at the same time investigate users’ information searching behaviours. Major drawbacks of laboratory-based user studies for evaluating IIR systems include the high monetary and temporal costs involved in setting up and running those experiments, the lack of heterogeneity amongst the user population and the limited scale of the experiments, which usually involve a relatively restricted set of users. In this paper, we propose an alternative experimental methodology to laboratory-based user studies. Our novel experimental methodology uses a crowdsourcing platform as a means of engaging study participants. Through crowdsourcing, our experimental methodology can capture user interactions and searching behaviours at a lower cost, with more data, and within a shorter period than traditional laboratory-based user studies, and therefore can be used to assess the performances of IIR systems. In this article, we show the characteristic differences of our approach with respect to traditional IIR experimental and evaluation procedures. We also perform a use case study comparing crowdsourcing-based evaluation with laboratory-based evaluation of IIR systems, which can serve as a tutorial for setting up crowdsourcing-based IIR evaluations.