Story vessels

Twelve sculptors were chosen to research and create a story vessel to represent the stories of the twelve wards of The City of Greater Geelong. I organised the community meetings for nine of the sculptors including myself.  This involved facilitating 27 meetngs.  I then documented and curated the exhibition of the twelve story vessels at three locations (Geelong City Hall, Johnstone Park and Federation Square).  This was part of the project called Connecting Identities in which other artists consulted with other communities to record stories, write and compose songs, poetry and performance art.

A probabilistic framework for extracting narrative act boundaries and semantics in motion pictures

This work constitutes the first attempt to extract the important narrative structure, the 3-Act storytelling paradigm in film. Widely prevalent in the domain of film, it forms the foundation and framework in which a film can be made to function as an effective tool for story telling, and its extraction is a vital step in automatic content management for film data. The identification of act boundaries allows for structuralizing film at a level far higher than existing segmentation frameworks, which include shot detection and scene identification, and provides a basis for inferences about the semantic content of dramatic events in film. A novel act boundary likelihood function for Act 1 and 2 is derived using a Bayesian formulation under guidance from film grammar, tested under many configurations and the results are reported for experiments involving 25 full-length movies. The result proves to be a useful tool in both the automatic and semi-interactive setting for semantic analysis of film, with potential application to analogues occuring in many other domains, including news, training video, sitcoms.

Scene extraction in motion pictures

This paper addresses the challenge of bridging the semantic gap between the rich meaning users desire when they query to locate and browse media and the shallowness of media descriptions that can be computed in today's content management systems. To facilitate high-level semantics-based content annotation and interpretation, we tackle the problem of automatic decomposition of motion pictures into meaningful story units, namely scenes. Since a scene is a complicated and subjective concept, we first propose guidelines from fill production to determine when a scene change occurs. We then investigate different rules and conventions followed as part of Fill Grammar that would guide and shape an algorithmic solution for determining a scene. Two different techniques using intershot analysis are proposed as solutions in this paper. In addition, we present different refinement mechanisms, such as film-punctuation detection founded on Film Grammar, to further improve the results. These refinement techniques demonstrate significant improvements in overall performance. Furthermore, we analyze errors in the context of film-production techniques, which offer useful insights into the limitations of our method.

Toward automatic extraction of expressive elements from motion pictures : tempo

This paper addresses the challenge of bridging the semantic gap that exists between the simplicity of features that can be currently computed in automated content indexing systems and the richness of semantics in user queries posed for media search and retrieval. It proposes a unique computational approach to extraction of expressive elements of motion pictures for deriving high-level semantics of stories portrayed, thus enabling rich video annotation and interpretation. This approach, motivated and directed by the existing cinematic conventions known as film grammar, as a first step toward demonstrating its effectiveness, uses the attributes of motion and shot length to define and compute a novel measure of tempo of a movie. Tempo flow plots are defined and derived for a number of full-length movies and edge analysis is performed leading to the extraction of dramatic story sections and events signaled by their unique tempo. The results confirm tempo as a useful high-level semantic construct in its own right and a promising component of others such as rhythm, tone or mood of a film. In addition to the development of this computable tempo measure, a study is conducted as to the usefulness of biasing it toward either of its constituents, namely, motion or shot length. Finally, a refinement is made to the shot length normalizing mechanism, driven by the peculiar characteristics of shot length distribution exhibited by movies. Results of these additional studies, and possible applications and limitations are discussed.

Towards automatic extraction of expressive elements from motion pictures : tempo

This paper proposes a unique computational approach to extraction of expressive elements of motion pictures for deriving high level semantics of stories portrayed, thus enabling better video annotation and interpretation systems. This approach, motivated and directed by the existing cinematic conventions known as film grammar, as a first step towards demonstrating its effectiveness, uses the attributes of motion and shot length to define and compute a novel measure of tempo of a movie. Tempo flow plots are defined and derived for four full-length movies and edge analysis is performed leading to the extraction of dramatic story sections and events signaled by their unique tempo. The results confirm tempo as a useful attribute in its own right and a promising component of semantic constructs such as tone or mood of a film.

Study of shot length and motion as contributing factors to movie tempo

This work seeks to lay the framework of film grammar over the video to be analyzed. We use the shot attributes of motion and shot length to produce a novel continuous measure of one of the aesthetic elements of films, namely the movie tempo. We refer to our previous work detailing the study of this construct and its automatic derivation, and also demonstrating its usefulness as an expressive element and as a sound basis for higher semantic descriptions such as dramatic events and story elements. Initial assessment of tempo was performed in our study on the basis that the relative importance of both shot length and motion in formulating the tempo function was the same. In this paper, we analyze their relative contributions to tempo, and demonstrate how these two factors can be manipulated to influence audience perception of movie time.

Neighborhood coherence and edge based approaches to film scene extraction

In order to enable high-level semantics-based video annotation and interpretation, we tackle the problem of automatic decomposition of motion pictures into meaningful story units, namely scenes. Since a scene is a complicated and subjective concept, we first propose guidelines from film production to determine when a scene change occurs in film. We examine different rules and conventions followed as part of Film Grammar to guide and shape our algorithmic solution for determining a scene boundary. Two different techniques are proposed as new solutions in this paper. Our experimental results on 10 full-length movies show that our technique based on shot sequence coherence performs well and reasonably better than the color edges-based approach.

Indexing narrative structure and semantics in motion pictures with a probabilistic framework

This work constitutes the first attempt to extract an important narrative structure, the 3-Act story telling paradigm, in film. This narrative structure is prevalent in the domain of film as it forms the foundation and framework in which the film can be made to function as an effective tool for story telling, and its extraction is a vital step in automatic content management for film data. A novel act boundary likelihood function for Act 1 is derived using a Bayesian formulation under guidance from film grammar, tested under many configurations and the results are reported for experiments involving 25 full length movies. The formulation is shown to be a useful tool in both the automatic and semi-interactive setting for semantic analysis of film.

Consciousness-raising tasks versus deductive approach : two form-focused instruction types in teaching grammar to Iranian high school EFL learners

Consciousness-raising (CR) task is a new way of teaching grammar developed in communicative contexts although little has been written on the effectiveness of CR tasks in EFL setting. The present study is an attempt to investigate the impact of CR tasks in Iranian EFL setting by comparing them with deductive, grammar lessons common in the Iranian schools. The subjects of this study were 80 EFL pre-university male students who were randomly assigned to an experimental group and a control one. The control group received three ordinary teacher-fronted, deductive lessons, a common way of teaching methodology in Iran, on three grammatical structures (adverb placement, indirect object placement and the use of relative clause). The experimental group, however, was treated with three ‘consciousness-raising’ (CR) tasks dealing with the same target structures. The results showed that in the short-run, CR tasks were as effective as deductive approach in promoting the learners’ grammatical knowledge while in the long-run, the CR group maintained their gains more effectively than the deductive group. The conclusion is that CR tasks can function more effectively than deductive approach if the following conditions are met: (a) performing the consciousness-raising tasks in learners’ L1; (b) providing the learners with feedback whenever they encounter a problem in solving the tasks; (c) grouping the learners in such a way that at least one learner in each group would be more proficient than the other members to help the less proficient ones understand and discover the rules more effectively.

En-gendering the nation : gender-bending and nationalism in Miles Franklin's 'My brilliant career' and Emily Lawless's 'Grania: The story of an Island'

Writing in the lee of first-wave feminism and in an era of nation-invention, the Irish Ascendancy novelist, Emily Lawless, and the aggressively Australian Miles Franklin (of Irish, English and German extraction and coming from families who were pastoralists) wrote novels of adolescence, respectively, 'Grania: the Story of an Island' (1892) and 'My Brilliant Career' (1901). Similar and different in many ways, they both wrote as women and self-consciously inserted themselves into nation-inscribing projects with an eye to overseas readerships, and they played fast and loose with class. Curiously, both contributed to the process of transforming 'nowhere-places' into iconic nationalist places: Franklin put the Monaro on the map (a region that was a nationalist icon before the 'Red Centre' usurped its place); and Lawless wrote in ethnographic ways about the Aran Islands more than a decade before J.M. Synge tramped westward in search of the 'Peasant Quality', so beloved of the Abbey Theatre playwrights and audiences. Most compellingly, they wrote of the near-pathologies of masculinities within nationalist agendas, and of marriage and sexuality. This article examines the novels comparatively and contrastively and asks uncomfortable questions about why and how their interventions were untimely.

En-Gendering the Nation: Gender-bending and Nationalism in Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career and Emily Lawless’ Grania: the Story of an Island

Writing in the lee of first-wave feminism and in an era of nation-invention, the Irish ascendancy novelist, Emily Lawless, and the aggressively Australian Miles Franklin (of Irish, English and German extraction and coming from families who were pastoralists) wrote novels of adolescence, Grania: The Story of an Island (1892) and My Brilliant Career (1901) respectively. Similar and different in many ways, they both write as women, and self-consciously insert themselves into nation-inscribing projects with an eye to overseas readerships, and they play fast and loose with class. Curiously, both contributed to the process of transforming ‘nowhere-places’ into iconic nationalist places: Franklin put the Monaro on the map (a region that was a nationalist icon before the ‘Red Centre’ usurped its place); and Lawless wrote in ethnographic ways about the Aran Islanders more than a decade before Synge tramped westward in search of the ‘Peasant Quality’ so beloved of the Abbey playwrights and audiences. Most compellingly, they write of the near-pathologies of masculinities within nationalist agendas, and of marriage and sexuality. This paper examines the novels comparatively and contrastively and asks uncomfortable questions about why and how their interventions were untimely.

Making mathematics and science relevant through story

The article examines the relevance of mathematics and science to story. It aimed to explore how mathematics and science teachers experienced its subject cultures, to identify the pedagogies that appeared to be subject culture's representative, and to know the ways in which pedagogy was shaped. The result has identified four categories such as illustrations of relevance, explorations of contexts, humanising stories of historical and contemporary heroes, and representations of human endeavour.