Professional Filmmakers Research Articles

Exploring the combined impact of color and editing on emotional perception in authentic films: Insights from behavioral and neuroimaging experiments

Film color and editing are crucial elements in filmmaking, posing significant questions about their effective use in eliciting emotional responses from viewers. While prior research has explored the impacts of color and editing independently, their combined effect remains largely unexplored, leaving the open question of how these elements together affect emotional perception. This study investigates the combined impact of film color and editing on emotion perception, utilizing both subjective behavioral scales and objective functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques. It employs two experiments with a two-factor design to assess the interactions between film color (colored and black-and-white) and film editing (fearful, neutral, and happy levels) on emotional perceptions. Under the direction of a professional filmmaker, a series of film sequences was created for six experimental conditions. In Experiment 1, 117 participants watched the film sequences and subjectively rated the emotional valence of the neutral face in the sequence, uncovering a significant interaction effect between film color and editing on the valence rating of the neutral face. In Experiment 2, 67 participants watched similar film sequences in an MRI scanner to analyze their brain activation patterns. Distinct activations were identified in regions including the insula, anterior cingulate cortices (ACC), and middle frontal gyrus, where a region-of-interest (ROI) analysis of the left ACC revealed an interaction effect on neural responses. These results underscore the integral role of color and editing in influencing viewers’ emotion perception using two types of measurements. This research provides novel insights into the behavioral and neural responses to filmmaking elements that underpin film reception and offers practical implications for filmmakers, encouraging a more holistic approach to considering color and editing to further enrich the audience’s emotional experiences at the pre-production stage of filmmaking.

An Englishman abroad: Evening Land and the struggles of Peter Watkins within Scandinavian film culture of the 1970s

This article analyses Aftenlandet (Evening Land), a film made for the Danish Film Institute in 1976 by Peter Watkins, one of the world’s most politically radical directors and a pioneer of docudrama. The aim is to provide a detailed historical account of the life cycle of a key but hitherto critically neglected film in the director’s career: his last to be professionally funded for nearly 25 years and one that saw Watkins working within the very particular milieu of Denmark, investigating, often controversially, the perceived political fault lines of Danish society during the 1970s. The article traces how this English-born filmmaker came to be working in Scandinavia, details the production of Evening Land and provides a close critical reading of the film’s various themes and techniques as well as considering its reception and aftermath. Correspondence and production files from Watkins’ own personal archive reveal the difficulties the filmmaker clearly experienced as something of ‘an Englishman abroad’ attempting to find a place for himself within Scandinavian film culture of the period. The article asserts that this experience eventually contributed to Watkins’ decision to quit Scandinavia altogether following the completion of Evening Land, a decision that would inadvertently propel Watkins out of the world of professional filmmaking for nearly a quarter century. The article argues, however, that Evening Land, a film long obscure and critically neglected, still has cultural resonance and applicability to our own times in the twenty-first century.

Hidden in Plain Sight: Attending to Women’s Amateur Filmmaking Histories at the Irish Film Archive

This article aims to identify various ways in which women’s amateur filmmaking becomes obscured in both film archives and in the academic scholarship on film and filmmaking. Recognising that amateur film is marginalised and undervalued in relation to commercial and professional filmmaking, the article uses the case study of one Irish amateur filmmaker to identify the processes and practices that have resulted in her work being obscured and overlooked. The filmmaker, Sr Maureen MacMahon, was practicing amateur filmmaking from the 1960s to the 1970s and her work is held at the Irish Film Archive. Investigation of Sr Maureen’s filmmaking drew from a variety of sources including the films and film materials, film metadata recorded at the archive, newspaper archives, an archive held at Sr Maureen’s religious order and an interview with Sr Maureen. Analyses of these materials has resulted in three findings: firstly, the dispersal of materials and information pertaining to Sr Maureen across multiple sites posed challenges for our construction of a coherent narrative about her; secondly, Sr Maureen turned her hand to many creative and pedagogic activities beyond filmmaking, and, in her own estimation, she was an arts educator more than a filmmaker; and, finally, the films are not easily categorised as they are generically and stylistically diverse, making auteurist approaches difficult. Drawing from these findings we discuss the challenges that this creates for foregrounding women’s contributions to film.

The International Reception of Downfall (Der Untergang, 2004)

Nearly twenty years after its premiere, Downfall still constitutes, among German theatrical features, the most significant media event since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The highest-profile sort of German (co-)production with a relatively big budget of approximately €14 million, well-known source material, a tie-in to sordid national history, a saturation exhibition strategy in Germany and (within five months of its September 2004 premiere) theatrical release in over 40 countries worldwide, Downfall sought – and received – wide press and public attention like almost no other German film before it. This article uses discourse analysis to survey and anatomise the international journalistic reception of Downfall, focusing on four of the five major territories for international film (USA, UK, Germany, France). Although there are some national peculiarities to the reception, in general the article argues that the critical reception can be distilled into three main, and overlapping, themes/debates: the perceived (in)authenticity of the representation of history; the aesthetic and moral implications of representing Adolf Hitler, in particular questions of sympathy; and the reception as a subject in itself, often coupled with perceptions of novelty vis-à-vis German film history. Even if the variety of topics and diversity of opinions regarding the film remain modest, Downfall’s international reception supplies powerful and peculiar reminders about how commercially aspirational films representing contentious or sensitive historical events were received in the early twenty-first century. In particular, and first of all, press reactions to Downfall reveal how lived experience and identity – whether a status as a professional filmmaker, specialist historian, established critic or simply a member of a certain generation or national community – became proxies for taste and cultural authority in the early twenty-first century.

The biopic screenplay as a research output: Towards a working definition of narrative fiction filmmaking methodology

Can the writing of a screenplay or the making of a narrative fiction film be considered a form of academic research? This will be a familiar question for those professional filmmakers entering the academy. To answer this question, scholars of screenwriting and screen production face the difficulty of articulating their creative practice as research within the broader institutional research cultures of the academy. This article seeks to overcome this difficulty by reflecting on the methods employed in the process of screenwriting a biopic about British boxer Randolph Turpin. To demonstrate how screenwriting and screen production practice generates and disseminates new knowledge, I offer a working definition of narrative fiction filmmaking as methodology, where mise en scène is shown to operate as a core reflective strategy.

Exploring Empathy and Compassion Using Digital Narratives (the Learning to Care Project): Protocol for a Multiphase Mixed Methods Study.

BackgroundDigital stories—first-person, self-made, 2- to 3-minute videos—generate awareness, impart knowledge, and promote understanding on topics such as mental illness. Digital stories are a narrative-based art form often created by individuals without formal training in filmmaking to relate personal experiences. Somewhat like digital narratives, video testimonies created within the social marketing or fundraising campaigns of government agencies and private or public corporations aim to reduce the stigma of mental illness while supporting research and services. In video testimonies, personal stories are captured on camera by professional filmmakers. Sharing critical life events greatly benefits tellers and listeners alike, supporting catharsis, healing, connectiveness, and citizenship.ObjectiveThis study explores digital stories and video testimonies featuring mental illness and recovery in their ability to elicit empathy and compassion while reducing stigma among viewers.MethodsUsing mixed methods, phase 1 will involve a search of Canadian social marketing activities and fundraising campaigns concerning mental illness and recovery. Phase 2 will involve the organization of digital storytelling workshops in which participants will create digital stories about their own experiences of mental illness and recovery. In phase 3, a pilot randomized controlled trial will be undertaken to compare marketing and fundraising campaigns with digital stories for their impact on viewers, whereas phase 4 will focus on knowledge dissemination.ResultsEthics approval for this study was received in March 2021. Data on the feasibility of the study design and the results of the controlled trial will be generated. This study will produce new knowledge on effective ways of promoting mental health awareness and decreasing stigma, with practical importance for future social marketing and fundraising campaigns. The anticipated time for completion within the 2-year study period includes 9 months for phase 1 (knowledge synthesis activities identifying social marketing and fundraising campaigns) and phase 2 (storytelling workshops), 11 months for phase 3 (feasibility assessment and data collection: randomized controlled trial), and 2 months for phase 4 (knowledge dissemination).ConclusionsThe knowledge generated will have practical implications for the public and for future social marketing and fundraising campaigns promoted by government agencies as well as nonprofit and for-profit organizations by enhancing our understanding of how individuals and societies respond to stories of mental distress and what prompts citizens to help others.Trial RegistrationClinicalTrials.gov NCT04881084; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04881084International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID)PRR1-10.2196/33525

FILM EDUCATION IN GHANA: A NARRATIVE STUDY OF JIM FARA AWINDOR AND VITUS NANBIGNE

This paper studies two of Ghana’s foremost film instructors: Jim Fara Awindor and Vitus Nanbigne. Using narrative design as the research approach, the study delineates on the teaching philosophies and approaches as well as the major contributions of the two instructors to film education in Ghana. Major findings of the study included the two facilitators almost sharing the same circumstance leading to their career and professional path. They both come from the Northern areas of Ghana, they both attended the National Film and Television Institute (NAFTI) and they both won scholarships for their post-graduate studies outside of Ghana. The two facilitators also, officially, started their profession as film teachers at NAFTI. Whilst Nanbigne believes in an explorative approach to teaching, Awindor goes by what he terms the Philosophy of the Mind approach that goes beyond the curriculum to include life experiences that will mould the students, not only for scholarship but for the world. Jim’s contributions to film education in Ghana included the acceptance of documentary making as a specialised area in film education, whilst Vitus has contributed diversely in the areas of film history in Ghana and in Africa. The two facilitators mentioned the lack of key needed facilities as the major impediments to film education in Ghana. The study recommends concerted efforts by film scholars to document the professional journeys of the major film facilitators in Ghana and document their achievements and contributions. The study also calls for support from various stakeholders, to provide the necessary equipment and materials that will facilitate film education to realise its intent of training professional filmmakers in Ghana.

Skateboarders’ Representations of Materiality: A Case Study of Rodney Mullen and Spike Jonze

Physical activity is commonly conceived of in terms of its human involvement – as a test of, and testament to, human ability. However, physical activity does not exist without the contributions of countless non-human agencies, such as equipment and environments, with which the athletes work closely and form relationships. As such, athletes have a unique understanding of non-human agency. In this article I analyse the power of non-human agency in skateboarding through the representations of the professional skateboarder Rodney Mullen and filmmaker Spike Jonze. I examine their lectures, interviews, and films to show the ways in which skateboarders experience, practice, and represent the principles of actor-network theory (ANT). Skateboarders utilise and manipulate the often-unanticipated potential of non-human tools and urban landscapes and translate them into a collaborative result. Skateboarding is a trial-and-error experiment of testing, innovating, and adapting possibilities and limitations set by a network of mediators including people and ‘things’. Mullen and Jonze commonly depict skateboarding as the product of networks rather than independent human action. Their representations reveal how skateboarders perceive and act out their role as humans within networks alongside non-human agencies such as skateboards and obstacles, and which combine to produce skateboarding.

Beyond the ‘Futureless Future’: Edward O. Bland, Afro-Modernism and The Cry of Jazz

The Cry of Jazz, a “thesis film” from 1959 directed by Edward O. Bland, is a long-neglected landmark in black independent cinema recognized today not for its theories about jazz but for its contentious racial politics. Bland, however, was a composer and music arranger, not a professional filmmaker, and the astringency of his film’s racial claims emerges from a particular theoretical approach to the formal structures of jazz music and their historical evolution. This article explores the relationship between musical form and racial identity as presented in The Cry of Jazz. Emphatically insisting on the music as an African American mode of expression, the film develops a critical musicology of jazz that effectively transposes Frankfurt School-like social claims about capitalist dehumanization to American conditions of racial domination. In doing so, however, Bland also argues that any further advance of African American musical culture depends on a sharp break with jazz traditions as well as the destruction of the ghetto. The result is not only a more uncompromising contribution to 1960s-era black cultural radicalism than is typically recognized but also a distinctive reformulation of the Afro-modernist aesthetic. By linking racial change in Jim Crow America to an aesthetic fusion of avant-garde classical and African American vernacular styles, The Cry of Jazz puts forward a high-modernist, composer-centered conception of black art music as cultural emancipation.

Exploring adult learning and its impact on wider communities through arts-based methods: an evaluation of narrative inquiry through filmmaking

This article reports on a project that employed narrative inquiry captured on film to explore the creative practices of five mature graduates. They had previously been mature students and continued to work within their various communities after they had left formal education. The participants were asked to describe their creative practice and its impact on other people through interviews and presentation. A researcher with help from a professional filmmaker carried out the project. From the initial footage, three polished, edited versions of the films were made. The participants could use the films to promote their own work if they so wished. Narrative inquiry is a means of seeing the connections between significant incidents and longer-term impact beyond formal education. The film footage was able to capture the connectivity between formal education, the participants and the people who had been touched by their creative practices. It successfully gave a narrative coherence to the participants’ stories. Where appropriate, the visual aspects of creativity were captured, in this case, the participants all had a creative practice and the visual realm was an important part of their stories. The findings of the project were that the participants had some shared values about the importance of creative education. They all developed portfolio careers in order to carry on their creative work. All the participants were able to give examples of particular instances where their creative practice had had an impact on other people. In other words, adult learning does not just influence the individual but can have a wider and longer-term impact on others.

Elder abuse in the context of dementia: Development of film resources

AbstractBackgroundPeople with dementia are uniquely vulnerable to elder abuse, including from their family members and carers. However, when confronted with instances of elder abuse, service providers often struggle to balance the carer’s needs and the older person’s rights. Without clear and consistent messaging and training, significant discrepancies can arise in provider’s responses to elder abuse in the context of dementia. Addressing this gap, this project aimed to co‐produce with providers and the community, three short films exemplifying best‐practice responses to cases of elder abuse in the context of dementia. This paper describes the development of the elder abuse films. Using co‐production methods, two workshops were conducted with Service Providers (n = 13) and community members (n = 8) respectively. In the facilitated workshops, participants were provided with draft scripts based on real‐life scenarios covering neglect, financial and physical abuse. Following the workshops, scripts were refined and circulated to participants for further feedback. Once refined, films were developed by professional film maker (WHY Documentaries (Wollongong, NSW)), and films were circulated to Service Providers for final feedback. The final three films were launched in March, 2020 and data analytics are currently being collected. This project highlights how the use of film and media can effectively be used in educating front line providers about sensitive topics such as elder abuse in the context of dementia to improve the detection, but also the responses to abuse in community settings.

Engaging Older People in Age-Friendly Cities through Participatory Video Design.

Participatory video design is a novel approach to collect experiences and perceptions of older people about the age-friendliness of their city or neighborhood. In this article, we describe how this co-creative method can add to specific knowledge about the preferences and needs of older people about the improvement or preservation of their environment. We describe two examples of this approach in the cities of The Hague and Leiden, the Netherlands. Persons of 60 years and older were invited to participate in a “workshop” on filmmaking focusing on age-friendly cities. A professional filmmaker and a researcher of the University of Applied Sciences worked in co-creation with older people, to produce short films on the topics that were perceived as important from the perspective of the participants. The older people worked in couples to produce their short films about the city or their neighborhood. Topics of the films included communication and information, outdoor spaces, social relations, and community support. The use of participatory video design can foster empowerment and social interaction among older participants, and insight into the preferences and needs of older people regarding age-friendly cities.

Looking Back, Moving Forward

The Melbourne Women in Film Festival (MWFF) is a four-day event in Melbourne, Australia, that supports and celebrates the work of Australian women filmmakers. Launched in 2017, the festival emerged from our desire as screen academics to increase the visibility of both professional and amateur women filmmakers and their work. Despite a strong history of grassroots and state-supported women’s creative cultures in Australia, women have remained marginal within the domestic screen industry. Women filmmakers are also underrepresented within the global festival circuit. This article traces the curatorial practices underpinning MWFF since its inception. We describe our approach to running a locally based, women-centered film festival; how we define “women” and “women’s filmmaking”; and how our programing choices support our festival ethos. We also contextualize our event as one that both continues and is in dialogue with women’s screen culture in Australia, particularly the one-off Women’s International Film Festival held in 1975. Locating our festival in this historical context, we argue that retrospective screenings play a particularly vital role at MWFF in achieving our festival aims. We recount our inaugural festival in 2017 and explain the significance of retrospectives in building a legacy for women filmmakers and making their achievements visible to the next generation.

Poor Man's Virtual Camera: Real-Time Simultaneous Matting and Camera Pose Estimation.

Today's film and advertisement production heavily uses computer graphics combined with living actors by chroma keying. The matchmoving process typically takes a considerable manual effort. Semiautomatic matchmoving tools exist as well, but they still work offline and require manual check-up and correction. In this paper, we propose an instant matchmoving solution for green screen. It uses a recent technique of planar uniform marker fields. Our technique can be used in indie and professional filmmaking as a cheap and ultramobile virtual camera, and for shot prototyping and storyboard creation. The matchmoving technique based on marker fields of shades of green is very computationally efficient: we developed and present in this paper a mobile application running at 33 FPS. Our technique is thus available to anyone with a smartphone at low cost and with an easy setup, opening space for new levels of filmmakers' creative expression.

Ljós í myrkri: Saga kvikmyndunar á Íslandi

This essay offers a succinct but comprehensive overview of Icelandic cinema from its early 20th-century emergence to the present day. Split into two parts, the first half focusses on filmmaking in Iceland prior to the founding of the Icelandic Film Fund in 1978, which was to establish a continuous local film production for the first time. Prior to that filmmaking in Iceland boiled down to the occasional efforts of local amateurs, albeit often quite skilled ones, and professional filmmakers visiting from abroad. Indeed, the few silent feature films made in the country all stemmed from foreign filmmakers adapting Icelandic literature and taking advantage of its photogenic landscapes. The first Icelandic feature was not made until 1948 and although immensely popular, like those that followed in its wake, the national audience was simply too small to sustain filmmaking without financial support. Although this changed fundamentally with the Icelandic Film Fund, which instigated contemporary Icelandic cinema and the subject of the essay’s second half, the Fund’s support proved insufficient as the novelty of Icelandic cinema began to wear off at the local box office in the late 1980s. The rescue came from outside sources, in the form of nordic and European film funds, whose support was to transnationalize Icelandic cinema in terms of not only financing and production but also themes and subject material. These changes are most apparent in Icelandic cinema of the 1990s which also began to garner interest at the international film festival circuit. In the first decade of the twenty first century, however, American genre cinema began to replace the European art film as the typical model for Icelandic filmmakers. Hollywood itself also began to show extensive interest in Icelandic landscapes for its runaway productions, as did many other foreign film crews. In this way Icelandic cinema is increasingly characterized by not only national and transnational elements but also international ones.

Historical Documentary Gender Identities in Goumenissa of Greece Multimodal Research Material

The subject of this research proposal concerns the gender representations of women in the border town of Goumenissa, a regional unit of Kilkis in Greece, as these representations are constructed on their speech. Goumenissa has been a meeting place of different origin communities, such as local, Pontiac and east Rumelia populations, after the Turco-Greek exchange of populations in Greek national history during the 1920s.The aim of this on-site research is to investigate and map out the status of the refugee and local women of Goumenissa, in years of turbulence and intensity. The research questions concern three basic thematic units: House working - Working outside, the house - Education/family constraints. What is their insight into family relationships, tradition, education and participation in production? How did they define themselves and were defined by others throughout the historical and social conditions? What kind of imprints did these conditions leave on them? How do they continue today? This on-site historical research was based on individual or group interviews and on professional filmmaking in the area of Goumenissa by the two educators Kiouzepi & Kavallari. The outcome-deliverable has been a historical documentary based on the primary original material coming from the women’s interviews that could be used as a multimodal material within an interdisciplinary approach in teaching social subjects. The theoretical axes of the research are the history of gaze, the cultural studies, the socio-semiotics and the expansion of sources in the local and oral historiography.

Reflection as Ethical Process in Documentary Film: Eight Decision-Making Issues

ABSTRACTTraditionally, the objective of documentary filmmaking is to look and to teach—to add perspective on, by way of building knowledge about, issues of public concern. Cinema and media studies scholarship on that enterprise typically focuses on its audio-visual content, what is seen and heard on screen. Much less scholarship is concerned with what is not, or cannot usually, be said and seen in the cinematic space of the documentary screen, such as the process of making documentary films and videos. In contrast to the former tradition of scholarship, this article focuses on the decision-making process involved in the practice of making documentary films. Drawing on interviews with professional documentary filmmakers in Israel conducted over a 10-year period, the article identifies 8 major decision-making issues common to documentary filmmaking. We contend that reflection on those 8 image-making decisions, as demonstrated by media professionals reflecting on them, is a core ethical process.

Nuestras Historias- Designing a novel digital story intervention through participatory methods to improve maternal and child health in the Peruvian Amazon.

BackgroundIn rural areas of the Loreto region within the Peruvian Amazon, maternal mortality rate is above the national average and the majority of women deliver at home without care from a trained health care provider.MethodsTo develop community-tailored videos that could be used for future interventions, we conducted Photovoice and digital storytelling workshops with community health workers (CHW) and mothers from 13 rural communities in the Parinari district. Through Photovoice we recognized local barriers to healthy pregnancies. Participants (n = 28) were trained in basic photography skills and ethics. They captured photos representing perceived pregnancy-related road-blocks and supports, and these photos identified central themes. Participants recorded personal stories and “storyboarded” to develop digital stories around these themes, and a Digital Story Curriculum called Nuestras Historias (Our Stories), was created. An acceptability survey of the digital stories was then conducted including 47 men (M) and 60 women (F).ResultsAccording to the PhotoVoice workshops, pregnancy-related problems included: lack of partner support, domestic violence, early pregnancies, difficulty attending prenatal appointments, and complications during pregnancy and delivery. Over 30 stories on these themes were recorded. Seven were selected based on clarity, thematic relevance, and narrative quality and were edited by a professional filmmaker. The acceptability survey showed that local participants found the digital stories novel (M = 89.4%, F = 83.3%), relatable (M = 89.4%, F = 93.2%), educational (M = 91.5%, F = 93.3%) and shareable (M = 100%, F = 100%). Over 90% of respondents rated the digital stories as “Excellent” or “Good”, found the videos “Useful” and considered them “Relevant” to their communities.ConclusionsThe digital stories address community-specific problems through narrative persuasion using local voices and photography. This combination had a high acceptability among the target population and can serve as a model for developing educational strategies in a community-tailored manner. This package of seven videos will be further evaluated through a cluster randomized trial.

Thinking Like a Director

This article introduces Film Editing Patterns (FEP) , a language to formalize film editing practices and stylistic choices found in movies. FEP constructs are constraints, expressed over one or more shots from a movie sequence, that characterize changes in cinematographic visual properties, such as shot sizes, camera angles, or layout of actors on the screen. We present the vocabulary of the FEP language, introduce its usage in analyzing styles from annotated film data, and describe how it can support users in the creative design of film sequences in 3D. More specifically, (i) we define the FEP language, (ii) we present an application to craft filmic sequences from 3D animated scenes that uses FEPs as a high level mean to select cameras and perform cuts between cameras that follow best practices in cinema, and (iii) we evaluate the benefits of FEPs by performing user experiments in which professional filmmakers and amateurs had to create cinematographic sequences. The evaluation suggests that users generally appreciate the idea of FEPs, and that it can effectively help novice and medium experienced users in crafting film sequences with little training.

Encountering Films in the Estonian National Museum

This paper explores the ways in which films and videos are incorporated in the Estonian National Museum’s new permanent exhibition Encounters, opened in 2016. Although the use of films in museums is not a novel practice, the methods and purposes have greatly broadened in time. Contemporary ethnographic museums are becoming increasingly collaborative with diverse communities and encouraging of social dialogue. Drawing from my own video exhibit Stories of Freedom, and the exhibition films of professional filmmaker Marko Raat, I aim to describe and analyse the methods that support the concept of dialogue creating in Encounters. I explore how the medium of film is integrated in the exhibitions as a means of communicating human experiences.