Collaborative authorship in film production: Walter Murch and film editing

Filmmaking is frequently cited as the most collaborative of all arts, yet for the most part, mainstream and scholarly literature have received films as the creative voice of just one artist – the director. The reasons for this are many: general ignorance of how films are made; the hijacking of film theory by literary theory, and the continuing popularity of the myth of the Romantic Artist as solitary genius are some of them. The case for collaborative authorship has gained momentum since the 1980s as studies on the production of individual films, actors, production companies and the history of the film industry as a whole have proliferated and drawn attention to the disparities between how films are perceived and how they are actually made. This article analyses collaboration in film production culture through examination of the role of the film editor. Concentrating specifically on the film/sound editor and mixer Walter Murch, it examines his role as a collaborative author in his early work with director Francis Ford Coppola and his later work with English director Anthony Minghella.

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.

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.

No photography please

Rather than represent the world merely by photographic means, handmade moving-image artists seek to create new ways of seeing by staging a variety of interventions into the material makeup of celluloid. Handmade artists tattoo film’s skin not only with scratches and paint, but also with blood, dirt, paper, candy, sand, nail polish remover, and seawater. Seeking media not normally found in a filmmaker or artist’s studio, they mine their own bodies and backyards for things to make into moving images.

This program highlights rarely-seen works of artisanal film production from the Coop’s collection. Some of the works are wonderfully constructive, building up the visual surface of the film by combining found footage with painterly abstraction. Others are destructive, subjecting film to a variety of elemental and material stresses. Taken together, these films not only exhibit the diversity of handmade practices and concerns, they also provide a framework for rethinking how cinema can be made through its unmaking.

In other words, handmade cinema—in concept, material, and execution—is counter-cinema.

Knights moves

This essay examines how the found footage films of Martin Arnold (Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy, 1998) and Peter Tscherkassky (Outer Space, 1999 and Dream Work, 2002) can be read as a belated response to Peter Wollen’s 1970s splitting of the avant-garde. Wollen’s tactical move, his article The Two Avant-gardes (Wollen, 1975 and revised in 1982) marked a historic moment when both critics and artists gained easy access to the film editing-machine for both film analysis and reflexive film production respectively. Wollen’s text asserted differences between a political and formalist avant-garde, opening up a space between structuralist/materialist film and feminist film theory and its counter-cinema. This move enabled Laura Mulvey and other Cine-Feminists to eschew formalism in favor of a political feminist counter–cinema and further, as part of its move into the academy, to develop and enlist Textual Analysis as a tool for uncovering the patriarchal ideologies at the heart of Hollywood melodrama.

Technological change in the postproduction film industry a Victorian case study

The first and last stages of filmmaking production and projection remain relatively unchanged, but computerization (through digitalization) has radically transformed film and sound editing. The aim here is to examine some of the effects of this transformation on postproduction employment. The experiences of twenty Victorian postproduction workers, interviewed in 2001, provide the data presented here. The interviewees were divided into groups to reflect their life stage and time working in postproduction.

Revelation International Film Festival (11th : 2008 : Perth, WA.)

Machinima revelations presents cutting-edge machinima experiments from around the world. Machinima is filmaking by combining the techniques of filmaking, animation production and the technology of real-time 3D game technologies.  Machinima Revelations curator Dr Leon Marvell from Deakin University presented cutting-edge machinima experiments from around the world and Australia, including the award-winning feature-length machinima, Stolen Life by Australian pioneer Peter Rasmussen

More than Ballyhoo? : The importance of understanding film consumption in Australia

We have all become used to reading stories filled with alarm and recrimination, or (more rarely) tentative optimism concerning the local production industry's percentage of the domestic box office. This blunt but exploitable indicator greatly simplifies the interaction between film product and its consumer.

Questions of (re)production and legitimation : a second screening of 3 films on teacher-student relations

This study considers three Hollywood films that take, as their subject, a teacher-hero confronted with a 'problem' group of students and, as their narrative, the rehabilitation of these students and the resolution of their problems. Employing a Bourdieuian analysis, we attempt a second screening of these films on two levels: first, by stepping inside these celluloid classrooms, so to speak, and narrating a different text, one that is spoken from the position of students and which challenges each film's portrayal of good people achieving fine things; and secondly, by screening for gaps in their accounts of schooling, exposing their limited frames of reference and their legitimacy to speak on behalf of authentic classrooms. The first of these projects is undertaken as a way of challenging teachers and interested others to be wary of uncritical readings of popular images of teaching, whereas the second provides a beginning from which to consider how teachers' pedagogy and school curricula can be informed by a radical democratic view of education - how teachers might embrace the foreign.

Identifying film takes for cinematic analysis

In this paper, we focus on the ‘reverse editing’ problem in movie analysis, i.e., the extraction of film takes, original camera shots that a film editor extracts and arranges to produce a finished scene. The ability to disassemble final scenes and shots into takes is essential for nonlinear browsing, content annotation and the extraction of higher order cinematic constructs from film. In this work, we investigate agglomerative hierachical clustering methods along with different similarity metrics and group distances for this task, and demonstrate our findings with 10 movies.

The more things change, the more they stay the same : the 2012 alternative film/video festival

The Alternative Film/Video Festival in Belgrade has historically been one of a triumvirate of critical festivals, with Pula’s MAFAF (1965-1990) and Zagreb’s initiating GEFF (1963-70), servicing experimental, exploratory, avant-garde, personal film in the former Yugoslavia, at Belgrade’s Academic Film Center (AFC) within the Student City Cultural Centre (DKSG). Initiated in 1982 it was resurrected in 2003 with a dual regional and international focus after a hiatus due to the collapse of the socialist states of the former Yugoslavia. As well as a series of curated and retrospective programs each competition program is now split into international and regional halves, selected by Greg de Cuir and Zoran Saveski with production support by Milan Milosavljević. Two film workshops were also available. One on scratch film by Ivan Ladislav Galeta, the other on filming and processing led by Vassily Bourakis. Initiated by de Cuir the first Alternative Film/Video Research Forum was part of the festival this year bringing together research on alternative/ experimental/ avant-garde/ underground film and video. Although I participated in this side-bar I will concentrate here more on discussions from the festival roundtable and contextualise a small number of films, a couple from competition but mainly regional work that I would find difficult to encounter without attendance here.

Boom and bust in Australian screen policy: 10BA, the Film Finance Corporation, and Hollywood's 'race to the bottom'.

In recent years, a narrative has emerged in the Australian popular media about the box office 'unpopularity' of Australian feature films and the 'failure' of the domestic screen industry. This article explores the recent history of Australian screen policy with particular reference to the '10BA' tax incentive of the 1980s; the Film Finance Corporation of Australia (FFC), a government screen agency established in 1988 to bring investment bank-style portfolio management to Australia's screen industry; and local production incentive policies pursed by Australian state governments in a chase for Hollywood's runaway production.

We argue the 10BA incentive catalysed an unsustainable bubble in Australian production, while its policy successor, the FFC, fundamentally failed in its stated mission of 'commercial' screen financing (over its 20-year lifespan, the FFC invested 1.345 billion Australian dollars for 274.2 million Australian dollars recouped - a cumulative return of negative 80 percent). For their part, private investors in Australian films discovered that the screen production process involved high levels of risk.

Foreign-financed production also proved highly volatile, due to the vagaries of trade exposure, currency fluctuations and tax arbitrage. The result of these macro and micro-economic factors often structural and cross-border in nature was that Australia's screen industry failed to develop the local investment infrastructure required to finance a sustainable, non-subsidised local sector.

The films of John Hughes: a history of independent screen production in Australia

ABSTRACTIn The Films of John Hughes: A history of independent screen production in Australia filmmaker and academic John Cumming tells the ongoing story of Hughes’ work illustrating the delicate balance of individual, collective and corporate agendas that many contemporary artists need to negotiate. This story begins in the 1960s with a generation of intelligent, socially engaged young people who challenge established power structures, conventions and stereotypes in art, politics and the media. Experiments were being made with grassroots democracy, with new social formations and new ways of seeing and communicating. The book also pays attention to earlier periods of cultural and political activism that captured Hughes’ imagination in the 1970s and became the subject of a number of his films over a period of nearly forty years. Through these films Cumming traces the outline of post-war film culture and production in Melbourne from the 1940s and sets this history within the context of international trends in independent filmmaking throughout the 20th Century and into the 21st.The work of an independent filmmaker has always included a great deal more than directing films. Working in an artisanal mode, he or she often performs, or has a hand in, every aspect of craft at the same time as engaging in discussion and organisation around the wider sphere of screen culture and industry. In addition to having proficiency as a producer, photographer, sound recordist, editor, distributor and exhibitor of films, there is research, organisation, lobbying, entrepreneurship and mentoring to be done. As an independent producer-director, John Hughes has engaged in all of these activities – often simultaneously. He is also a scholar, writer, organiser, activist and teacher. As a television bureaucrat he was both eminent and innovative, and through his filmmaking he has become a leading historian of Australian documentary cinema. ‘… that view – that art and politics are inherently at odds – is still lurking around. It is at the heart of cultural conservatism; and John Hughes’s film-making, from the 1970s to the present, confounds its proponents. His cinema is at once crowded, detailed, elegant and absolutely lucid; at the same time, it is shot through with political and historical understandings.’ Sylvia Lawson, ‘Such a Bloody Wonderful Place’, Inside Story, 28 April 2013.