Buzz in motion pictures : what is buzz and how can marketing create it?

In the movie industry, the extraordinarily successful theatrical performance of certain films is largely attributed to buzz. Despite longstanding commentary about the role of buzz in successful movie marketing and the belief that it accelerates new product diffusion, limited scholarly evidence exists to support these assertions. This is primarily due to the lack of conceptual distinction of buzz from word-of-mouth, which is often used as the main basis for conceptualising buzz. However, word-of-mouth does not fully explain the buzz surrounding films such as 'Gone With The Wind', 'The Dark Knight' and 'Avatar'. Informed by valuable insights from key experts who have launched some of the most successful movies in box office history, as well as a range of moviegoers, this thesis developed a deeper understanding of what buzz is and how it is created. This thesis concludes that buzz is not the same as word-of-mouth.

American Desi : representation and reproduction in diaspora /

This study explores ~ow South Asian diasporic film represents and reproduces South Asian identity in the diaspora. It commences with a review of the literature in cultural studies and post-colonial theory on identity in the diaspora. A textual analysis of three films: American Desi, Bollywood/Hollywood, and East Is East, helps frame the characteristics of South Asian diasporic film. Theoretical concepts of diaspora and identity are extended to this reading of the films. In-depth, open-ended, semi structured interviews were conducted with eight participants to test the validity of theoretical concepts through participants' own reading of American Desi. Findings indicate that while theoretical concepts of identity can be usefully applied at the level of the text, these perspectives do not always easily explain participants' interpretation of the film in relation to their everyday experiences.

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.

Novel approach to determining tempo and dramatic story sections in motion pictures

This paper presents an original computational approach to extraction of movie tempo for deriving story sections and events that convey high level semantics of stories portrayed in motion pictures, thus enabling better video annotation and interpretation systems. This approach, inspired by the existing cinematic conventions known as film grammar, uses the attributes of motion and shot length to define and compute a novel continuous measure of tempo of a movie. Tempo flow plots are derived for several full-length motion pictures and edge detection is performed to extract dramatic story sections and events occurring in the movie, underlined by their unique tempo. The results confirm reliable detection of actual distinct tempo changes and serve as useful index into the dramatic development and narration of the story in motion pictures.

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.

Role of shot length in characterizing tempo and dramatic story sections in motion pictures

Motivated by existing cinematic conventions known as film grammar, we proposed a computational approach to determine tempo as a high-level movie content descriptor as well as means for deriving dramatic story sections and events occurring in movies. Movie tempo is extracted from two easily computed aspects in our approach: shot length and motion. Story sections and events are generally associated with changes in tempo, and are thus identified by edges located in the tempo function. In this paper, we analyze our initial founding of the tempo function on the basis that the distribution of both shot length and motion in movies is normal. Given that the distribution of shot length is approximately Weibull as confirmed in our experiments, we examine the impact of modelling and modifying the contributions of shot length to tempo. We derive an appropriate normalization function that faithfully encapsulates the role of shot length in tempo perception, and analyze the changes to the story sections identified in films.

Film grammar based refinements to extracting scenes in motion pictures

To enable high-level semantic indexing of video, we tackle the problem of automatically structuring motion pictures into meaningful story units, namely scenes. In our recent work, drawing guidance from film grammar, we proposed an algorithmic solution for extracting scenes in motion pictures based on a shot neighborhood color coherence measure. In this paper, we extend our work by presenting various refinement mechanisms, inspired by the knowledge of film devices that are brought to bear while crafting scenes, to further improve the results of the scene detection algorithm. We apply the enhanced algorithm to ten motion pictures and demonstrate the resulting improvements in performance.

Betty Friedan speaks at "Films and Women" meeting about violence against women in motion pictures

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Diabetes in South Asians

Economic, dietary and other lifestyle transitions have been occurring rapidly in most South Asian countries, making their populations more vulnerable to developing Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Recent data show an increasing prevalence of Type 2 diabetes in urban areas as well as in semi-urban and rural areas, inclusive of people belonging to middle and low socio-economic strata. Prime determinants for Type 2 diabetes in South Asians include physical inactivity, imbalanced diets, abdominal obesity, excess hepatic fat and, possibly, adverse perinatal and early life nutrition and intra-country migration. It is reported that Type 2 diabetes affects South Asians a decade earlier and some complications, for example nephropathy, are more prevalent and progressive than in other races. Further, prevalence of pre-diabetes is high, and so is conversion to diabetes, while more than 50% of those who are affected remain undiagnosed. Attitudes, cultural differences and religious and social beliefs pose barriers in effective prevention and management of Type 2 diabetes in South Asians. Inadequate resources, insufficient healthcare budgets, lack of medical reimbursement and socio-economic factors contribute to the cost of diabetes management. The challenge is to develop new translational strategies, which are pragmatic, cost-effective and scalable and can be adopted by the South Asian countries with limited resources. The key areas that need focus are: generation of awareness, prioritizing health care for vulnerable subgroups (children, women, pregnant women and the underprivileged), screening of high-risk groups, maximum coverage of the population with essential medicines, and strengthening primary care. An effective national diabetes control programme in each South Asian country should be formulated, with these issues in mind.

(Pro)Motion Pictures: Len Lye in the Thirties

This article examines Len Lye’s film-making in the 1930s within a broader visual arts context, seeking to clarify the nature and extent of his involvement in British documentary film culture at this time. In particular, it demonstrates how Lye's method of fusing 'live action', found footage, and animation techniques created the possibility of a radical documentary practice that could reconcile promotional advertising and commercial art with avant-garde abstraction and kinaesthetic experimentation. In particular, the article focusses on Lye's N. or N.W. (1937, 35mm, b&w, 10 mns), arguing that his work from this period should be regarded as central - and not marginal - to any serious reassessment of Britain's “Documentary Movement” of the inter-war era, and its relations to any history of the cinema and visual culture.

Symposium on 'nutrition interventions in high-risk groups' - CVD risk in South Asians: the importance of defining adiposity and influence of dietary polyunsaturated fat

The prevalence of the metabolic syndrome (MetS), CVD and type 2 diabetes (T2D) is known to be higher in populations from the Indian subcontinent compared with the general UK population. While identification of this increased risk is crucial to allow for effective treatment, there is controversy over the applicability of diagnostic criteria, and particularly measures of adiposity in ethnic minorities. Diagnostic cut-offs for BMI and waist circumference have been largely derived from predominantly white Caucasian populations and, therefore, have been inappropriate and not transferable to Asian groups. Many Asian populations, particularly South Asians, have a higher total and central adiposity for a similar body weight compared with matched Caucasians and greater CVD risk associated with a lower BMI. Although the causes of CVD and T2D are multi-factorial, diet is thought to make a substantial contribution to the development of these diseases. Low dietary intakes and tissue levels of long-chain (LC) n-3 PUFA in South Asian populations have been linked to high-risk abnormalities in the MetS. Conversely, increasing the dietary intake of LC n-3 PUFA in South Asians has proved an effective strategy for correcting such abnormalities as dyslipidaemia in the MetS. Appropriate diagnostic criteria that include a modified definition of adiposity must be in place to facilitate the early detection and thus targeted treatment of increased risk in ethnic minorities.

Cut-points for waist circumference in Europids and South Asians

There is little strong evidence that currently recommended higher waist circumference cut-points for Europids compared with South Asians are associated with similar risk for type 2 diabetes. This study was designed to provide such evidence. Longitudinal studies over 5 years were conducted among 5,515 Europid and 2,214 ethnically South Asian participants. Age-standardized diabetes incidence at different levels of waist circumference and incidence difference relative to a reference value were calculated. The Youden Index was used to determine waist circumference cut-points. At currently recommended cut-points, estimated annual diabetes incidence for a 50-year-old Europid was <0.6% for both sexes, and for a 50-year-old South Asian, 5.8% for men and 2.1% for women. Annual diabetes incidence of 1% was observed for a 50 year old at a waist circumference 35–40 cm greater in Europid compared to South Asian men and women. Incidence difference between recommended cut-points and a reference value (80 cm in men, 70 cm in women) was 0.3 and 4.4% per year for Europid and South Asian men, and 0.2 and 0.8% per year for Europid and South Asian women, respectively. Waist circumference cut-points chosen using the Youden Index were shown to be dependent on obesity levels in the population. The much higher observed risk of diabetes in South Asians compared to Europids at the respective recommended waist circumference cut-points suggests that differences between them should be greater. Approaches that use the Youden Index to select waist circumference cut-points are inappropriate and should not be used for this purpose.