Filmmaking Industry Research Articles

The Politics of Industry and the Wave of Nationalism: Exploring the Shanghai Film Guild, 1927–1930

In the mid to late 1920s, the Chinese film industry experienced a severe setback. Driven by the Ming Xing Film Company and the ‘Merchant Movement’, the Shanghai Film Guild was established in September 1927. It was the first filmmaking industry guild in the history of China. It was relatively outgoing in safeguarding the interests of the industry. It played an important role in maintaining the image of the industry, forcing the film censorship authority to revise its policies, and resisting those foreign films that insulted China. However, it did not form effective industry regulations to address industry autonomy. It did not change the vicious competition in the industry significantly, either. The establishment and operation of the guild was obviously affected by the wave of nationalism at the time, which caused it to perform more intensely in some situations.

Copyright Law Protection of films in Nigeria (Nollywood) and South Africa (Sollywood): Pre and post‐Covid‐19 pandemic

AbstractThe Covid‐19 pandemic inflicted socioeconomic harm on an unprecedented scale. Across the world and to varying degrees, cinemas were closed, festivals were cancelled or postponed, and film releases were moved to future dates or delayed indefinitely. In 2020 the entire global theatrical and home/mobile entertainment market totalled $80.8 billion, the lowest figure since 2016 and a decline of 18% from 2019. Theatrical entertainment accounted for only 15% of the total global entertainment revenue, compared to 43% in 2019. While some has been written about the effects of Covid‐19 on both international and local film industries, this article seeks to provide an African perspective focusing on the realities in Nigeria and South Africa, respectively. This article examines the importance of filmmaking industries in Nigeria and South Africa as well as the difficulties faced during the Covid‐19 pandemic. Copyright laws in both terrains are critically reviewed based on the capacity of these laws to protect the interests of film industries pre and post‐Covid‐19.

Caza de brujas en las aulas: La censura española en la Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía

This article analyses the relation between the Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía (EOC), censorship and the Spanish filmmaking industry during the Franco dictatorship. Founded in 1947, the EOC was an oasis in which students saw, were taught and made films that could never be shown on Spanish screens at the time. Nevertheless, in the last years of the dictatorship, the students of the school were subject to harassment that ended up curtailing their careers. Based on archival research (files about the censorship and scripts, as well as interviews), this article offers a historical analysis of censorship and the EOC that has not been previously explored.

The Construction of U.S. Armed Forces` Image Through Translation Activities in Hollywood Blockbusters

This paper studied 22 influencing Hollywood war films, and extracted translation behaviors among them. Some of the most influencing Hollywood blockbusters themed on wars would be examined to see the role they played in depicting the image of the United States Armed Forces hope to build through the plot(s) of translation activities performed in theatre. From such changes can see the change of people`s attention, as well as the effect Hollywood blockbusters contributed on the building of the U.S. Armed Forces` images. Video productions (especially films) are some of the most welcomed ones. The United States has one of the most powerful film-making industries in the world, which successful products of its are popular around the world, definitely have the American way of thinking and judgment spread and accepted by the film-lovers around the world. Research conducted on such films would reveal how the U.S. Armed Forces` image has changed on cinema screens, and provide a collection of data for translation researchers who has an interest in the field combining translation (behaviors) with the mass media.

Breves encuentros: el cortometraje como esencia del cine [Reseña

Nuevos márgenes del cortometraje es una investigación multidisciplinar y con enfoques diversos sobre la situación del cortometraje en el panorama audiovisual mundial. Los tres autores abordan desde tres líneas distintas de la industria cinematográfica la creación en el formato breve. Sus conclusiones indican que es un estímulo para la animación, el documental y nuevas formas de publicidad como el branded content.

作家•導演•出版：多重主體“合謀”下的九十年代中國電影小說

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.
 發軔于二十世紀初葉的中國電影小說在 1940 年代中後期出現發展的第一次高潮，但在此後長達近半個世紀囿於多重因素發展相對緩慢。進入1990年代以來，在影像文本的電影和紙質文本的文學二者共同誘導與塑造下，電影投資方、製作方等製作主體，導演編劇、作家等創作主體以及圖書出版方等媒介主體這些與電影小說相關的各方對電影小說的本質屬性、生成機制、價值作用等有了充分而深入的認識，以“作家主動參與”、“導演自覺利用”、“出版争相涉足”爲三大表徵，電影小說的創作與行銷成爲電影界、作家界、出版界等多方聯袂協作、互利共贏的一種“合謀”與“狂歡”，由此促使電影小說逐步勃興，並爲在新世紀出現第二次發展高潮奠定了堅實基礎。
 Chinese film novels debuted in the early twentieth century and saw their first climax in the mid-to late 1940s, but for various reasons had been relatively slow to develop for nearly half a century. Since the beginning of the 1990s, as the production of film and film texts underwent some reciprocal developments, there was much more interaction among film investors, producers, filmmakers, directors, screenwriters, writers, and other media subjects, such as book publishers. Stakeholders from all walks of life started to have a full and in-depth understanding of the essential attributes, generation mechanisms, and value of film novels. This new development is reflected in three major phenomena, namely, “writers’ active participation,” “directors’ conscious use of these novels,” and “publishers’ contests for publication.” Characteristically, the creation and marketing of film novels have become a kind of “collusion” and “carnival” of the reciprocally beneficial collaboration of the filmmaking industry, writers, and publishing circles, which have led to the gradual rise of film novels and laid a solid foundation for its second peak of development.

The future of film-making: Data-driven movie-making techniques

Since the term ‘big data’ came to the scene, it has left almost no industry unaffected. Even the art world has taken advantage of the benefits of big data. One of the latest art forms, cinema, eventually started using analytics to predict their audience and their tastes through data mining. In addition to online platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime and many more, which act on a different basis, the industry itself evolved to a new phase that uses AI in pre-production, production, post-production and distribution phases. This paper researches software, such as Cinelytic, ScriptBook and LargoAI, and their working strategies to understand the role of directors and producers in the age of the digital era in film-making. The research aims to find answers to the capabilities of data-driven movie-making techniques and, accordingly, it makes a number of predictions about the role of human beings in the production of an artwork and analyses the role of the software. The research also investigates the pros and cons of using big data in the film-making industry. Keywords: Artificial intelligence, cinema, data mining, film-making.

Ritual culture phenomenon in Igbo films: a study of Money is Money

Film as a means of communication is a very potent instrument for image making, cultural diplomacy, propaganda, education, information and entertainment. The Nigerian film industry (Nollywood) ranks among the first three top world filmmaking industries in terms of the quantity of productions, popularity amongst Nigerians and the transnational audiences. Culture is the bedrock of Nollywood’s thematic film expositions. One can, therefore, conclude that Nollywood is Nigeria’s cultural ambassador. Although Nollywood films are quite potent in celebrating and promoting Nigerian cultures, some of these films have come under thematic criticisms as they glamourize negative, ritual themes in the name of culture. It is against this backdrop that this article examines the occult ritual of cultural phenomenon in Prince Emeka Ani’s Money is Money (2005) and the negative image it portends for Nigeria globally. The film depicts Andy (Kanayo O. Kanayo), an Igbo youth who deploys occult means as an instrument for making money even at the cost of his life. This paper uses content analysis and literary methods as tools to interrogate the preponderance of the occult themes in Nollywood movies. The findings show that Nigeria has several acceptable cultures as raw materials that could positively portray Nigeria’s cultures globally. However, the unceasing preoccupation with “juju”, the relentless celebration of dark rituals and diabolical cults could make viewers cultivate the perception of reality portrayed by these films. Money is Money celebrates the non-attractive side of Nigeria. Therefore, it is recommended that the Nollywood film professionals tell the global audience acceptable culturally based value themes about Nigeria.
 Keywords: Igboland, Ritual culture, Nollywood film professionals, Igbo film, Nigerian cultures

Restorying lived lives in educational research: Storyboarding as a creative space for scholarly thinking in narrative analysis

Traditionally, a storyboard has been used in the film-making industry as part of the preparatory process of film production. In this article, we focus on its use as a creative space for analysis in educational research. Specifically, we make visible our learnings, as social science researchers, about storyboarding as an imaginative, tangible, and reflexive space for narrative inquirers to work with the complexity of restorying lived lives in educational research. We draw on Sibonelo's reflections on using the storyboard in his doctoral dissertation and offer our subsequent dialogues on his reflections as the data for this article. Our learnings indicate that storyboarding opens-up researcher subjectivity in the restorying process. In engaging critical friends, it serves as a space for the mediation of multiple perspectives and meanings of participants' lived lives and is an imaginative space in which to filter creatively large amounts of field texts. We thus suggest that storyboarding enhances verisimilitude in the restorying process.

In Search of George Scott

In the first decade of the twentieth century George Scott established a motion picture firm in Toronto. He filmed the “Great Toronto Fire” of 1904, attempted to show movies on Toronto Island, and took time out to open a “theatorium” in Peterborough, Ont., in 1907. Scott worked in the budding filmmaking industry in London, England, in Europe, and in Toronto, New York, and Hollywood. He also shot film around the world: from the South Pacific, Australia, Southeast Asia, and Japan to British East Africa. He died in Los Angeles in January 1929. Scott had a motion picture career of global proportions, but he is almost entirely known only for having produced one of the first films shot in Toronto. This article traces his life before and after his time in Toronto.

Parallelisation of practical shared sampling alpha matting with OpenMP

In modern filmmaking industry, image matting has been one of the common tasks in video side effects and the necessary intermediate steps in computer vision. It pulls the foreground object from the background of an image by estimating the alpha values. However, the computational speed for matting high resolution images can be significantly slow due to its complexity and computation that is proportional to the size of unknown region. In order to improve the performance, we implement a parallel alpha matting code with OpenMP from existing sequential code for running on the multicore servers. We present and discuss the algorithm and experimentation results from the perspective of the parallel application developer. The development takes less effort, and the results show significant performance improvement of the entire program.

Parallelisation of practical shared sampling alpha matting with OpenMP

In modern filmmaking industry, image matting has been one of the common tasks in video side effects and the necessary intermediate steps in computer vision. It pulls the foreground object from the background of an image by estimating the alpha values. However, the computational speed for matting high resolution images can be significantly slow due to its complexity and computation that is proportional to the size of unknown region. In order to improve the performance, we implement a parallel alpha matting code with OpenMP from existing sequential code for running on the multicore servers. We present and discuss the algorithm and experimentation results from the perspective of the parallel application developer. The development takes less effort, and the results show significant performance improvement of the entire program.

On the code modernization of shared sampling alpha matting with OpenMP

Image matting separates the foreground object from a given image by estimating the alpha values. It has been one crucial step in computer vision, as well as an essential technique in visual effects in the modern filmmaking industry. Due to its time complexity being proportional to the size of the unknown region, the computational speed for processing image matting on high-resolution images has been traditionally slow. In this paper, we present the code modernization of Shared Sampling Alpha Matting (SSAM) algorithm with OpenMP to speed up the computation on multicore server platforms. Significant efforts are required due to the sequential nature of the code, with data dependencies and complex data structures in the original code. The implementation of migrating the SSAM code to multicore platforms and the experiments performed on several server platforms of different categories/specs are presented. Our experimental results demonstrate that the Alpha Matting using OpenMP increases performance significantly on Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing (KNL) processors when processing high-resolution images. The code improvements we achieved can support a parallel application developer with high-performance goals.

Cinema Attendance and Cinema-Going Audience in Malaysia

Cinema audiences’ behavior interests both industry professionals and academics. Cinema-going is still indisputably popular form of entertainment in Malaysia. This study discusses cinema-going in the era of omnipresent screens. It aims to verify Malaysians’ cinema going behaviors and the sustainability factors contributing to the Malaysian film industry. The various factors affecting cinema and movie-going behavior would include encouragement, theme, motivation, perception, gratification, and genre. The local filmmaking industry fell into a decline after 2014 based on observation of annual film production. In the context of westernization, this small market presents a challenge for the government in promoting local popular films. With the influx of genre films from abroad, Malaysian cinema is struggling to the hilt to survive. To understand this situation from the perspective of the audiences, this study, using data from surveys conducted in Malaysia in 2018, discusses the fandom of Malaysian cinema, their cinema-going behavior, and the association with their identities.

Oil Thinking of World Cinema

Oil and cinema are nearly of the same age: they both appeared in the second half of the 19th century. Oil, and more precisely, oil money has created the movies industry. As a confirmation, take one of the first feature films — it was entitled “In the Kingdom of Oil and Millions.”It was shot on the money of oilmen in 1916 in Azerbaijan — the country supplying oil to thewhole world. V. Mayakovsky wrote that if you believed in good future, this was because theblack dense oil from Baku was pumped into hearts of world capitals.The oil industry developed hand-in-hand with the cinema industry. Today we cannot image theworld without both. In the present-day panorama of the world cinema oil has taken a specialplace — it is not only a decoration, but a full-fledged «actor». In the recent decades “films —hydrocarbons” have appeared in the world cinemas to respond to some accomplished historicalevent related to oil discovery, or enormous technogenic disaster entailing serious environmentalimplications. The role of oil can be comprehended only in the context of technological achievements in oil prospecting and oil production. Oil has technologized and commercialized thefilm-making industry — the films collecting multimillion audiences and, accordingly, returningthe millions invested in their making. The oil industry will develop and flourish with the growthof energy demand and, therefore, will grow the film-making industry and cinema business fedby oil-earned money. Filmmakers, using the modern digital and computer technologies, havesucceeded to demonstrate on the screen in a catchy artistic form many aspects of the «oil rush»in its retrospect.

Automatic trimap generation and artifact reduction in alpha matte using unknown region detection

Image Matting is an actively researched topic due to its massive impact on the filmmaking industry. It refers to the accurate extraction of the foreground from an image and is a severely under-constrained problem. To constrain this issue, user input in the form of a trimap is required. However, users must generate this trimap manually, which is an exhausting and time-consuming process. To tackle this issue, we develop an expert system which is capable of generating trimaps automatically without any user interaction. We utilize three different techniques which use machine learning at the core. Our expert system receives knowledge from these three techniques which are processed by our system to generate trimaps automatically. We strongly believe that our study will have a strong impact on the filmmaking industry. Our study lays the groundwork for automatic trimap generation. Furthermore, our study can be applied to expert and intelligent systems related to image retrieval and automatic foreground/primary object segmentation in images or videos. We propose a simple yet effective approach to generate optimal trimaps automatically by combining image saliency, graph cut segmentation (lazy snapping), and fuzzy c-means clustering (FCM). Lazy snapping is an interactive segmentation technique that requires foreground and background scribbles as input. Instead of using user-provided foreground scribbles, we utilize a saliency map as foreground scribbles and input it to the lazy snapping. This results in a coarsely segmented foreground object. We use the corners as the background scribbles based on the assumption that most foreground objects are located in the center of the image. To generate an optimal trimap, we locally cluster the boundary region of the foreground segmentation using FCM. We tested our algorithm on alpha matting evaluation and salient object datasets. In addition to generating accurate trimaps automatically, the alpha mattes generated by our optimal trimaps contain fewer artifacts as compared to trimaps generated by previous works. Moreover, the alpha mattes computed using our optimal trimaps were computed faster as compared to computing alpha mattes with trimaps from previous works. We showed in our experiments that optimal trimaps can improve alpha matte quality by reducing artifacts. Finally, our approach does not rely on depth data like the previous methods. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our method.

WT2: a low budget experiment in ‘heart, humour and horror’

ABSTRACTIn 1999, the London-based production company, Working Title Films, established a subsidiary called WT2 which was given the remit of producing low-budget films. Between 2000 and 2007, WT2 released 10 feature films including Billy Elliot (2000), Ali G Indahouse (2002) and Long Time Dead (2002) which respectively exemplified the company’s creative agenda of ‘the three Hs’, that is, ‘heart, humour and horror’. This article examines the creative and commercial contexts of filmmaking at play within WT2 and, in turn, considers the company’s position within Working Title and between its major financiers, StudioCanal and Universal. In doing so, I argue that WT2’s films occupy a position between the filmmaking industries and cultures of Europe and Hollywood which is distinct from that of its parent company. On the one hand, a number of WT2’s films engage with established trends in low budget British cinema including social realism and the adaptation of television comedy, and were co-produced by British broadcasters, national film agencies and independent production companies. On the other, these films were largely financed, distributed and marketed by multinational media conglomerates with commercial agendas and transnational or global reaches. Thus, this article examines the ways in which the tension between the national and the transnational was played out in both the company’s operation and output.

A Ancinav e os conflitos no meio cinematográfico

O meio cinematográfico brasileiro apresenta um histórico de divisões ocasionado pelas divergências quanto à intensidade da relação entre Estado e audiovisual. Uma recente divisão decorreu da resistência dos setores consolidados ao anteprojeto da Ancinav (Agência Nacional do Cinema e do Audiovisual), cujas propostas objetivavam regular todo setor audiovisual e abrir espaço para produção independente. O presente artigo analisa o posicionamento do meio cinematográfico, compreendendo a estruturação do setor e destacando seus principais agentes. Esta análise levanta as motivações da polarização e os efeitos que o anteprojeto traria.

Cross-Cultural Digital Storywork: A Framework for Engagement with/in Indigenous Communities

While Indigenous peoples have long urged attention to Six Rs (respect, relevance, reciprocity, responsibility, relationality, and representation) that are important to community-engaged work, application of these principles has been sporadic within the filmmaking industry. Many Indigenous communities do not have the technical expertise and/or resources needed to support professional quality audiovisual production. As a result, they rely on predominantly White filmmakers from beyond the community. Unfortunately, mainstream filmmaking practices have historically demonstrated a disregard for Indigenous ways of knowing, and a scarcity of meaningful relationships between filmmakers and community members has further contributed to a legacy of insensitive filmmaking within Indigenous contexts. In addition, internet-based distribution of cultural content raises questions about post-production sovereignty. In this project, Tribal College (TC) students and faculty partnered with students and faculty from a Predominantly White Institution (PWI) to develop culturally sustaining and revitalizing documentaries using storywork, digital storytelling, ethnocinema, and community-centered participatory research. Throughout the Digital Histories Project, TC participants gained technical expertise, PWI participants learned about culturally sustaining/revitalizing filmmaking, and faculty leaders identified ways to support use of the Six Rs within social science, history, and teacher education. Results offer methodological and pedagogical insights for scholars, educators, tribal leaders, and filmmakers.

Knocking on a Saint’s Door, or a Quest for Holiness in a Post-Secular Society

The article examines Successors (Nasledniki, 2015) directed by Vladimir Khotinenko, illustrating a recent trend in the Russian film-making industry, namely, a rising interest in religious topics. While the Orthodox faith is widely seen by Russian political leaders as a basic aspect of national identity, the Church is also becoming more and more visible in the life of society, with religious holidays and events now receiving a higher profile in the public domain. The article analyzes how these trends shape the public consciousness and are reflected in the cinema production of recent years. Successors, a one location movie focusing on the debate over the role of Saint Sergius of Radonezh in the history of Russia, demonstrates that this 14th-century monk is very much present in the lives and minds of people 700 years later. In turn, this suggests that, under a layer of cynicism and consumerism, there is a growing hunger for holiness in a post-secular society.