Genre, gender and interpretation of movie trailers an exploratory study

Commercial movies cost tens of millions to make. Because they are now released on thousands of screens simultaneously, movie trailers are a major and necessary method of intensively promoting movies before they disappear from cinemas forever. Yet there is a paucity of research about how potential audiences react to these trailers. This study aimed at exploring consumers’ interpretations of movie trailers. Nineteen in-depth interviews were the means of data collection, using nine trailers for yet to be released movies from the romance/drama, action, comedy and thriller categories. Genre provided a focus for exploring consumers’ interpretations of movie trailers. Evaluative judgments of movies came first as a result of the value of genre to the consumer and then as a result of content which conveyed the movie would be involving relative to past movie experiences. Interpretations about the target audience for a movie were also influenced by assumptions that genre preferences differ according to gender. The findings pose implications for the construction of movie trailers.

Cinema of (coming) attractions : Bruce Conner's a movie and documentary display

Bruce Conner's film 'Movie' (1958) constructs an argument concerning popular media and history within and through a radical juxtaposition of images to release new and productive meanings. It also comments on the media's representation of history as violence and analyses the consequences of aggression and violence.

Rote movie

"On the voice over de Bruyn places himself behind the wheel of a car, an appropriate metaphor for his expatriate driven reflections on his feelings of exile, distance and loneliness. Necessarily unintelligent memories highlight habitual subjectivity of "walking through a landscape alone", "gypsy", "victim". Images of roadsigns, cars, billboards, the passing landscape; elegantly simple rotoscope (by rote?) drawings, recopied and texturally manipulated filmic images; the inevitability of the repetition of leader. A tired, yearning, moving film." http://www.innersense.com.au/mif/debruyn_films.html

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.

Situated event bootstrapping and capture guidance for automated home movie authoring

This paper describes a novel interactive media authoring framework, MediaTE, that enables amateurs to create videos of higher narrative or aesthetic quality with a completely mobile lifecycle. A novel event bootstrapping dialog is used to derive shot suggestions that yield both targetted footage and annotation enabling an automatic Computational Media Aesthetics-aware editing phase, the manual performance of which is typically a barrier to the amateur. This facilitates a move away from requiring a prior-conception of the events or locale being filmed, in the form of a template, to at-capture bootstrapping of this information. Metadata gathered as part of the critical path of media creation also has implications for the longevity and reuse of captured media assets. Results of an evaluation performed on both the usability and delivered media aspects of the system are discussed, which highlight the tenability of the proposed framework and the quality of the produced media.

Iranian women's sports fandom : gender, resistance, and identity in the football movie offside

As sport enters new global territories, attending to questions of cultural difference is increasingly important to studies of women’s sports fanship. This article draws on theories of transnational feminism and feminist sports scholarship to contemplate the cinematic portrayal of the non-Western female football supporter. Women sports fans rarely appear as film protagonists, with the notable exception of the 2006 movie Offside, which tells the story of Iranian women soccer fans attending a World Cup qualifying match. By focusing on the ways that women fans negotiate their marginal status in the sporting arena, I argue that the film unsettles cultural associations between masculinity and football in Iran, and confounds the oppositional construction of the “other” woman as a passive victim of, or freedom fighter against, Islam. 

Sugar and spice: the golden age of the Hindi movie vamps, 1960s-70s

How do we define the globalized cinema and media cultures of Bollywood in an age when it has become part of the cultural diplomacy of an emerging superpower? Is it still an 'other' industry in a world dominated by Hollywood? Bollywood and Its Other(s) aims to compensate for the lack of scholarly literature on Indian film by opening up hitherto unexplored sites or sites that are in formation. It focuses on the aesthetic-philosophical questions of the other, Indian diaspora's negotiations with national identity, alternative reading strategies/research methods, marginal genres (sci-fi, horror), marginal characters (flaneuse, vamps), marginal gender (non-normative sexualities), marginal cinema (Hindi avant-garde), marginal language (Hinglish), and marginal regions (the Kashmir valley). It intends to address film scholars, South Asian studies researchers, cinephiles and lay readers alike.

Modelling personal preferences for Top-N movie recommendations

Modelling the temporal dynamics of personal preferences is still under-developed despite the rapid development of personalization. In this paper, we observe that the user preference styles tend to change regularly following certain patterns in the context of movie recommendation systems. Therefore, we propose a Preference Pattern model to capture the user preference styles and their temporal dynamics, and apply this model to improve the accuracy of the Top-N movie recommendations. Precisely, a preference pattern is defined as a set of user preference styles sorted in a time order. The basic idea is to model user preference styles and their temporal dynamics by constructing a representative subspace with an Expectation-Maximization (EM)-like algorithm, which works in an iterative fashion by refining the global and the personal preference styles simultaneously. Then, the degree which the recommendations match the active user's preference styles, can be estimated by measuring its reconstruction error from its projection on the representative subspace. The experiment results indicate that the proposed model is robust to the data sparsity problem, and can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art algorithms on the Top-N movie recommendations in terms of accuracy.

Nederlands Dans Theater review: Dancers' stunning performances pack huge emotional impact

Nederlands Dans Theater​ is one of the most famous dance companies in the world, with a repertoire that has had a far-reaching impact. The works of its previous artistic director, Jirí Kylian​, have been staged by companies across the world, including the Australian Ballet.

Effect of three wound dressings on infection, healing comfort, and cost in patients with sternotomy wounds - a randomized trial

Study objective: To compare three dressing types in terms of their ability to protect against infection and promote healing, patient comfort, and cost-effectiveness.

Design: Prospective, randomized controlled trial.

Setting: Major metropolitan, academically affiliated, tertiary referral center.

Patients: Seven hundred thirty-seven patients were randomized to receive a dry absorbent dressing (n = 243) [Primapore; Smith & Nephew; Sydney, NSW, Australia], a hydrocolloid dressing (n = 267) [Duoderm Thin ConvaTec; Mulgrave, VIC, Australia], or a hydroactive dressing (n = 227) [Opsite; Smith & Nephew] in the operating theater on skin closure.

Results: There was no difference in the rate of wound infection or wound healing between treatment groups. The Primapore dressing was the most comfortable and cost-effective dressing option for the sternotomy wound. Duoderm Thin dressings were associated with increased wound exudate (p < 0.001), poor dressing integrity (p < 0.001), more frequent dressing changes (p < 0.001), more discomfort with removal (p < 0.05), and increased cost (p < 0.001).

Conclusions: In the context of no additional benefit for the prevention of wound infection or the rate of wound healing for any of the three dressing products examined, dry absorbent dressings are the most comfortable and cost-effective products for sternotomy wounds following cardiac surgery.