This week I want to return to something mentioned in passing in a post on from a couple of weeks ago. I quoted a paper on editing in television news by Richard Schaefer and Tony Martinez, which noted that there was a dearth of formal analyses of television news programmes, which they attribute to ‘the [...]
The following articles were authored by Nick Redfern
A few weeks ago I posted a selection of paintings of cinemas (here), and to follow-up I thought that this week we would have some short stories and comics freely available from the World Wide Web. E. Phillips Oppenheim was a prodigious English writer, and even made the cover of Time Magazine on 12 September [...]
Last Friday the BFI launched its report on the cultural contribution of the cinema to the UK. I was unable to attend the launch, but the report is no available online here. The motivation for this report is partly to do what is says and explore the contribution to British cinema, but it is also [...]
The various selections of empirical research on film style that I have posted on this blog have been dominated by feature films, and television has received rather less attention. In part, this is because there is a lack of research on television style: Schaefer and Martinez (2009) (see below) write: that formal study of the [...]
A few weeks ago I used the order structure matrix to describe the time series of shot lengths in Top Hat (see here). The matrix is a simple way of visualising the evolution of a film’s editing, and is based on whether a shot is greater than or less than the shots that precede it. [...]
Other posts on this blog have listed links to papers addressing the indexing of video by analysis of the stylistic components of the video itself (shot lengths, colour, sound energy, etc). An alternative approach is not to look at the video but to look at the viewer watching the video or to look at the [...]
To round off a series of posts on genre and box office this August, I look at the frequency of different genres in five European countries – France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK – to see what we can learn about different national markets. For each of the five countries, I accessed the data [...]
To carry on the theme of some recent posts, this week I present the first draft of analysis of the genre trends at the US box office over the past twenty years. The pdf can be accessed here: Nick Redfern – Genre trends at the US box office Abstract This paper examines genre trends in [...]
Given the fundamental role genre play sin the film industry and the extensive range of genre studies produced by film scholars it is surprising that there are so few pieces of research to track the box office performance of genres over time. One such study, which looks at the top 20 films at the US [...]
Historically, particular movie studios were often associated with a specific genre of filmmaking as a strategy of differentiating their product in the marketplace (e.g. MGM and musicals, Universal and horror films, Warner Bros. and gangster films), whilst also ensuring that their product was sufficiently diverse to mitigate changes in audience taste and fashion. Table 1 [...]
This week, another set of papers that analyse the style of films. This time, they all have the analysis of sound as a means of revealing the structure and form of motion pictures. Austin A, Moore E, Gupta U, and Chordia P 2010 Characterization of movie genre based on music score, IEEE International Conference on [...]
A couple of weeks ago I posted about some empirical research on editing and the viewer’s experience of pace in the visual media from the 1970s. A fascinating read on the same topic is the UNESCO report on mass communication research published in 1961, which presents a comprehensive and global bibliography of research on the [...]
This week we have a mini art exhibition of paintings of cinemas. This post contains only a small selection of paintings by a handful of artists, and it is easy to find many more examples using Google’s image search. This first work is by Anna King, and is of the now disused Odeon cinema in [...]
Following on from my use of running Mann-Whitney Z statistics to look at the time series structure of Top Hat (here), this week I have the first draft of an analysis of 15 BBC news bulletins using the same method. The pdf file can be accessed here: Nick Redfern – Time series analysis of BBC [...]
Searching through the internet for something completely unrelated, I came across this piece of research that I think is worth sharing with the world. Marks JN 1974 The Effects of Television Pacing Rates on Viewer Attitude and Interest Levels. Concordia University, Unpublished MA Thesis. Abstract Three differently edited versions of the same TV presentation consisting [...]
