Academic literature on the topic 'Animated films DVD'

Theatrical-era short animation has often acquired a complex, even contradictory, textual identity: most cartoons were originally produced for a general audience, but were then marketed almost exclusively towards children as repeats on television. The rise of DVD has further complicated the status of these films. On the one hand, the format has facilitated the release of a lot of rare animated material, most notably within a series of multi-volume special editions entitled the Walt Disney Treasures, explicitly aimed at the previously marginalized adult viewer. However, Disney has also produced lower priced, ‘family friendly’ discs featuring many of the same cartoons. Unlike the Treasures volumes, the latter sets tend to censor problematic content and generally lack contextualizing bonus features. The choice to watch one of these collections over the other can thus have a significant impact upon one’s interpretation of the collected films. Thomas Elasasser argues that film culture – embodied most fervently by the devoted cinephile (and, for the purposes of this study, the equivalent figure of the animatophile) – has often failed to recognize itself as a product of generational memory. It is frequently implied by such groups that DVD special editions are the most ‘authentic’ because they privilege the original cinematic experience, without acknowledging the degree to which the format itself serves to remediate its contents. For instance, while the Treasures discs generally present the films uncut – sometimes ‘restoring’ footage unseen since the 1930s and 40s – these are often prefaced with mandatory disclaimers providing historical context for contentious elements such as racism. The sheer volume of material that these collections provide, including opportunities for binge-watching with ‘play all’ functions, similarly alters the portioned availability of these texts in the theatrical sphere. This article will suggest that both the special edition and ‘family friendly’ DVD options ultimately reflect a nostalgic struggle to appropriate and define the present and future reception of the films, rather than to truly reclaim the past.

A qualitative inquiry of reviews of films featuring digital humanlike characters was performed by sampling user comments from three online reviewer aggregator sites: the Internet Movie Database, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. The films chosen for analysis were: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (dir. Hironobu Sakaguchi and Motonori Sakakibara, 2001), The Polar Express (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2004), and Beowulf (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2007), all produced using CGI animation, together with A Scanner Darkly (dir. Richard Linklater, 2006) whose visuals are depicted by rotoscoping using Bob Sabiston’s Rotoshop software. The authors’ analysis identified individual differences in the viewing experience, particularly in relation to the uncertain ontology of the humanlike characters created using CGI (CGI-Humans). They found examples of reviews indicating an inability to distinguish between real and CGI-Human actors, observations of characters transiently exhibiting realism before returning to their artifice, and of characters being viewed as eerie (analogous to the uncanny valley), thus illustrating a complex and dynamic response to this phenomenon. In some situations, character uncanniness was related to the presence of an atypical feature such as movement of the eyes. Whilst specifically for Beowulf, perceptions became more problematic when there was familiarity with the actor playing the CGI-Human character, with some reviewers describing difficulties in categorizing the character as either real or animated. CGI-Human performances were also characterized by a lack of, or inappropriate, social interaction. Online reviewers did not perceive characters depicted using Rotoshop (Rotoshop-Humans) as eerie; rotoscoping was found to preserve, and possibly enhance, the natural social interactions between actors recorded from the live-action film which was used as the source material for the animation. The authors’ inquiry also identified user motivations for viewing these films and the importance placed by reviewers on the form of display when viewing the CGI films. They situate their interpretation of these findings in relation to Walton’s make-believe theory ( Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, 1990).

With the invention of moving pictures, the creators sought to supplement them with sound. Even before the invention of cinemat, E. Reynaud in the optical theatre gave performances in which moving images were combined with sound. It was pre-cinema experience, which represented the theatre model of audiovisual show. The attempts to synchronize the dynamic images and sound were taken by T. Edison, S. Meshes, L. Gaumont, O. Kellum, E.Tigerstedt, J. Engel, G. Phocht and J. Massol. However, the systems suggested by these inventors were not perfect. An important step towards creation of a sound film was the appearance of the optical sound recording system Phonofilm designed by Lee de Forest. In 1923, he became acquainted with Brothers Fleischer, outstanding American animators. Together with H. Riesenfeld and E. Fadiman they organized Red Seal Pictures Corporation and began to shoot Ko-Ko Song Car-Tunes, which consisted of a series of animated shots Sing-alongs (featuring the famous bouncing ball). It was a kind of multimedia shots, as there was no plot, no character and no narrative structure. They were created basing on popular songs, but did not illustrate them. The Sing-alongs shots were produced for the audience to sing their favorite songs before the session, while reading the text of the songs from the screen. The animated ball bouncing on the syllables helped them to follow the rhythm of the melody. These films became the prototype of the modern karaoke and music animated shows. The series were released from May 1924 till September 1927. The Fleshers created more than 45 shots, more than 19 of which using the Phonofilm. The first sound animated shots where the images were synchronized with the sound and recorded on the same media, were released in 1925. The film Come to Travel on My Airship was the first where the speech was heard, and in the shot My Old House in Kentucky the Fleischers managed to synchronize the speech with the facial expressions of cartoon characters as they were speaking. When the animating and shooting technology changed, the film structure underwent changes too. Detailed animation parts with the story content appeared. The text animation became variable as well. Since the 1930s, the shots have included scenes with singers and jazz-bands. The animated film series Ko-Ko Song Car-Tunes shot by the Brothers Fleischer established the principle of movement and sound synchronism in the animation. They not only out paced the sound films by P. Terry and W. Disney, which were considered to be the first sound animation films for a long time, but also proved that the sound animation had been possible and the thirty-year era of the silent animation came to an end.

the article presents the results of a sociological study of the perception of the visual image of the family in animated films in children of different ages using the method of in-depth expert interviews. In infancy from birth to a year, the visual image of the family is perceived as a set of color spots. At the age of 1 year to 3 years, the child already understands where in the animated films the visual image of mom, dad, brother or sister is, however, how family relationships are built, how family roles are distributed, children at this age cannot understand. From 3 to 7 years, the visual image of the family is perceived as complete, that is, which of the characters are relatives, how relationships are built within the family, how family roles are distributed, is it a positive or negative family image. At the age of 7 to 12 years, thanks to the almost unlimited possibilities of transmitting visual images in animations, the child receives a certain amount of sensations and emotions, from the existing images he receives ideas that become part of his imagination. At the age of 12 to 15 years, the image of family and family relations in children has already developed, here the child can already consciously select those behaviors that are close to his previous experience and his own ideas. In adolescence from 15 to 18 years, children already perceive and understand what visual images of the family are not constructive

One of the ways scholars and lawyers have understood the institution of property is by thinking of it in terms of legal relationships that people share with each other with respect to a thing. The primary question that animates this article is as follows: If property is to be understood as relationships, what sort of relationships did the evacuee property legislations, a post-Partition legal instrument invented to deal with the problem of abandoned properties left behind in the wake of mass migration, foster among different groups of people with each other and with the state? In order to answer this question, this article explores the newspaper records, parliamentary debates, court orders and archives of the case files of property restoration requests made to the quasi-judicial office of the Custodian of Evacuee Properties present in the National Archives of India.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) is an ongoing phenomenon that characterizes the landscape of the High Coast (63°04'N, 18°22'E, Sweden) / Kvarken archipelago (63°16'N, 21°10'E, Finland) UNESCO World Heritage site. GIA occurs as the Earth’s crust that was depressed by the continental ice sheet during the last glacial period is slowly rebounding towards isostatic equilibrium. The maximum rate of land uplift in the area is more than eight millimetres per year, which – along with the very different topographical reliefs of the opposite coasts – makes the region an excellent study area for land uplift as a phenomenon. As there is a marine area between the coasts, shore displacement is an essential part of the phenomenon in the study area.</p><p>The cartographic representation of GIA and shore displacement has classically relied on static maps representing isobases of the uplift rates and of ancient shorelines. However, to dynamically visualize and communicate the continuity and the nature of the phenomena, an animated map is required. To create a visually balanced, seamless animation, we need to create high-resolution image frames that represent digital elevation models (DEMs) together with extracted shorelines of different moments of time. To create these frames, we developed a mathematical model to transform the DEM in a given time for the past ~9300 years. We used the most recent LiDAR-derived DEMs of Finland and Sweden, and a bathymetric model of the Gulf of Bothnia as our initial data, along with a land uplift rate surface derived from geophysical measurements. We compared the current uplift rates with the shoreline observations of the ancient Baltic Sea stages, Litorina Sea and Ancylus Lake, and created a linear model between the elevations of the shorelines and the present-day uplift rates, as there was a near-linear correlation in both cases. Based on the current uplift rates and the elevations and the dating of the ancient shorelines, we derived an exponential model to describe the non-linear correlation between the elapsed time and the occurred land uplift. Near the present time, we adapted the formula proposed by Ekman (2001) to make the model more robust closer to the present day.</p><p>We assumed that although the uplift rate varies in time, the spatial relation of uplift rates remains the same. Furthermore, as the land uplift is an exponentially decelerating phenomenon occurring with a significantly lower annual rate than shortly after the de-glaciation (Eronen et al. 2001, Nordman et al. 2015), and with most of the total uplift already having occurred (Ekman 1991), we assumed a constant rate of uplift from the present day to the near geological future. We did not consider potential sea level changes caused by human-driven climate change in the predictions, as the geological time scale vastly exceeds the time range of the climate models. Neither did we take into account the historical transgression phases, as they did not appear dominating in the area.</p><p>The elevation and bathymetry data were harmonized and resampled into 4K (3840 × 2160) pixel dimensions to utilize the best commercially available screen resolutions and to avoid unnecessary sub-pixel level computations. This resulted in a spatial pixel size of about 200 metres. The initial spatial resolution of the DEMs of Finland and Sweden was 2 metres and 1 metre, respectively, while the bathymetric data had a spatial pixel size of 400 metres. This, along with the fact that the bathymetric data was partly modelled and inaccurate near the coastlines, meant that it had to be oversampled to generate plausible coastal bathymetry and to allow any future estimations of shore displacement. All the datasets were resampled to EPSG:3857 Pseudo-Mercator projection to facilitate any future use in web map applications. As the visualized area is only about 430 kilometres in the north-south direction, the use of this projection did not introduce cartographic issues.</p><p>The rendered frames required by the animation were produced with a programmatic conversion of raster files to RGB-images. The visualization of shore displacement was implemented by a discontinuity in elevation dependent colour scale at sea level. The bathymetry was visualized with a continuous colour scale in shades of blue until the elevation of zero metres. Elevations above zero were visualized with a colour scale starting from green to create an impression of a discrete shoreline (Figure 1).</p><p>The whole process from computing the DEMs to rendering the frames was implemented in Python, without the need for traditional GUI operated GIS or image processing software. The raster data was read and processed with GDAL and NumPy libraries, and the visualization was carried out using Matplotlib and Python Imaging Library. Each DEM was given the same elevation based colour scale and an individually created hillshading that was blended with the image by multiplication. The whole process was carried out as an open source solution.</p><p>The interval between the calculated frames was set to five years as, particularly at the Swedish coast, the shore displacement can appear abrupt with a longer time interval. The frame duration was set to 0.05 seconds, which means a 100-second duration for an animation of 10 000 years.</p><p>The resulting DEM reconstructions show good agreement with comparable data, such as the Litorina reconstructions by the Geological Survey of Finland (GTK). Also, the mathematical model appears to be in line with previous reconstructions conducted in the area (e.g. Nordman et al. 2015). So far, any continuous series of paleogeographic DEM reconstructions comparable to ours has not been published for this area. The animation provides an understandable way of perceiving the continuous but decelerating nature of the land uplift phenomenon and also highlights the differences in the post-glacial history of Finnish and Swedish coasts. To further improve the visualization, we must consider the removal of post-glacially developed features in the present day DEM, e.g. the various rivers that can both cause bias in the shore displacement and uplift estimations and appear visually distractive. In the very early frames of the animation, the retracting ice sheet must also be present. Also, a balanced addition of other cartographic elements, such as present-day hydrography and place names, can further improve the overall presentation.</p>

In 1929, Walt Disney created a series of animated shorts, featuring mechanized and malleable figures maneuvering alongside neurotically animated objects and landscapes. Released in the year of Aby Warburg's death, he never did dedicate any thought to animation. However, in their extreme externalization of emotions and animation of the inorganic, these films are compelling cultural objects in thinking through Warburg's notions of "Nachleben, Pathosformeln," and accessory forms in motion. This paper addresses the implications of this relationship and how they may be significant in understanding the crisis of modernity, as well as the broader psycho-anthropological ramifications of Warburg's thought.

This final project was based on research which attempted to examine the Effectiveness of Using Animated Films in Improving Students’ Writing Skill of Narrative Text. The main objectives of this research was to find out whether the use of animated film can be effective in teaching writing narrative text to the students of Mts Al-Hadi Girikusumo Mranggen. This research was a quasi-experimental research. The population of the final project was limited of the eighth grade students of MTs Al-Hadi Girikusumo Mranggen in the Academic year 2014/2015 in the second semester. There were 40 students as the sample. They were divided into two groups and they did three types of activities; pre-test, treatment, and post-test. The data were collected through a writing test. The analytical score based on the elements of writing processed the data analysis. The result of t-test in post-test shows a significant difference in the achievement between two groups. From the calculation enclosed the mean of post-test of the experimental group was higher than the control group that was 60.5>39.6, it means that the achievement of the experimental group was higher than the control group. Based on the data analysis, the researcher concludes that the strategy of using animated films in teaching narrative text writing seemed to be applicable for the eighth grade students of MTs AL-Hadi Girikusumo Mranggen in academic year 2014/2015, since the strategies also help students to solve their problems in writing a text. The researcher suggests that English teacher use this method as an additional method to anticipate students’ boredom during writing class. In additional, this method improved students’ fluency in writing English because it was used to write the history.

In the age of digital transformations of images, communications, and storytelling, Marshall McLuhan's insight that "the medium is the message" can be augmented with the corollary that the media is the mix. Digital forms of narrative are not only characterized by their mixed, hybrid forms and content, but their recombinations 1 draw the spectator into the mix in unforeseen ways. By mixing varying degrees of non-linearity and interactivity in what are ultimately animations, digital narratives create new kinds of digital spectatorship. The examples I'll explore here are three films, Conceiving Ada, Gamer, and Time Code. In different yet interconnected ways, each privileges the mix of media over content, or rather, foregrounds the mix as content. These digital narratives divert the reader/spectator/ participant from the traditional ways of making meaning--or at least sense--of narrative. One way to illuminate the examples is to explore how they mix linearity and interactivity. In teaching The Theory and Practice of Digital Narrative, my students and I developed a model for analyzing how different works create new modes of storytelling, and fresh relations of looking at and within the frame.2 Extending some of the terms that Janet Murray develops in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, the diagram posits an x axis of linearity and a y axis of agency.3 Click here for an animated version of this graph. The linearity axis spans narratives from most linear (one plot line that progresses chronologically through time and space to one outcome through a series of cause and effect occurrences represented from a singular point of view) to non-linear (narratives that could be circular, rhizome-shaped, achronological, synchronic, multiple plotlines, multiple points of view, multidimensional).4 The agency axis spans media that call for very little active participation from the reader/spectator/listener to media that demands a high level of interaction. Of course, all "reading" is in some way active, both in the physical acts of seeing and turning pages/clicking a mouse 5 and in comprehending, imagining, remembering, and making meaning. Nevertheless, there is a distinction between page-turning and making choices in a hypermedia work, and Murray uses the term agency to suggest an "active creation of belief" (as opposed to Coleridge's "willing suspension of belief"). Digital environments require that belief be created and reinforced; as William Gibson posited in Neuromancer, the imagined place of cyberspace is a "consensual hallucination," a social agreement to act as if the places in cyberspace exist. The willing creation of belief is a social agreement that relies on a like-minded community. The more self-reflexive and unconventional the narrative, the more it calls for the will to believe. These examples of digital cinema "interpellate," or hail, their spectators as willing agents in the common project of the creation of belief. The subjectivity that these films seek to create for their viewers is one of being an active, technologically-savvy spectator. Instead of encouraging participation in, to use Guy Debord's phrase, the society of the spectacle, these digital narratives perform a Brechtian function in a distinctly technological manner that derives from the mix of media that is digital cinema. The term "digital cinema" has acquired many meanings, ranging from movies shot on digital video in a manner we associate with film (i.e.: single camera) to digital exhibition of media in digitally-equipped movie theaters and streaming video on the web. Lev Manovich defines digital cinema as "a particular case of animation which uses live action footage as one of its many elements."6 Manovich's historical argument suggests commonalities between the earliest moving images and current developments in digital media; animation was marginalized in the development of cinema, and although some of its techniques were adopted by the avant garde, only now animation returns at the very center of digital cinema.7 Lynn Hershman Leeson's film Conceiving Ada explores digital media in both form and content. In the film Emmy, a contemporary computer software engineer, uses technology to make contact with Ada Lovelace, who invented the first computer language in Victorian England. The narrative moves between Emmy in the present day and Ada in the past as Emmy figures out how to send a software agent into the past to retrieve information. Although the plot doesn't really make sense scientifically, it resonates emotionally; despite the 150 years separating their lives, Emmy and Ada face some of the same issues as women working with technology. Instead of building sets, Leeson developed a technique of blending live action footage shot against a blue screen with digitized photographs of Victorian inns. As she explains in the technical notes of the DVD of the film (and also on the Conceiving Ada website): I felt it important to use the technology Ada pioneered. Virtual sets and digital sound . . . provided environments in which she moves freely through time, becomes liberated and, ultimately, moves into visibility. The actors and filmmaker collaborated in what amounts to a consensual hallucination: On the set, these images were maneuvered through several computers where mattes were added and images were put into perspective or enlarged. They were then laid onto digital videotape while the actors were performing. Actors could reference their location through a monitor that showed them their "virtual" environment. . . . The immediacy of shooting live action while simultaneously manipulating digitized backgrounds in real time was, remarkably, exhilarating. By mixing past and present, fact and fiction, personal and professional, digital and analog, live action and animation, Conceiving Ada tells its powerful story in both form and content. Although it is not immediately obvious that the sets are virtual rather than actual, much of the story takes place in front of and inside Emmy's computer equipment. There are many shots of Emmy gazing into the computer, trying to make her programs work, and when she does make contact with Ada, she can see her memories and talk with her on the computer screen. The film frame often encompasses the computer screen, so we too see the graphic interfaces Emmy designs and animates. By mixing some of the techniques of video art with film style and the malleability of the digital image, Leeson extends her trailblazing career in many directions at once in a work that is a mix about mix. A representation of intense digital interactivity, Conceiving Ada's heroines, creators, and spectators use technology, and specifically digital imaging technology, to create agency. Like Conceiving Ada, Time Code is also an example of digital cinema that calls attention to the digital techniques used in its production, and enlists its spectators as accomplices in creating the narrative. Time Code is itself the product of improvisation, and uses digital technology to capture "real time." Director Mike Figgis divides the screen into four frames; each quadrant contains a continuous 90-minute take of an unscripted, improvised performance, all shot simultaneously with four Sony Dvcam DSR-130s; the film was blocked out on music paper. Figgis describes his movie as a "black comedy about a 90-minute slice of life in Hollywood," and it takes filmmaking as one of its subjects along with jealousy, infidelity, and a fin-de-siecle philosophical and artistic exhaustion. The audio mix of the theatrical release of the film shifts its emphasis between the quadrants, thus directing the spectator's attention to a certain quadrant. Choosing to focus on a quadrant is a kind of spectator-editing. Looking at the entire frame means seeing a new kind of animation, created by multiple screens, encompassing multiple points of view. (See Time Code clip here.) The film folds in on itself self-reflexively. The plot centers around the intersecting lives of four characters involved personally and/or professionally with Red Mullet, Inc., a movie studio (which is the real-life name of Figgis's production company; see www.red-mullet.com), and becomes increasingly Brechtian as the movie builds to the climactic scene in which a hot young independent filmmaker pitches a movie that, like the one we are watching, splits the screen and follows the interactions between four characters. In what could be taken as a manifesto for digital cinema that counters the "chastity" of DOGME 95 with the passionate embrace of technology, the filmmaker announces, "Montage has created a fake reality. . . . Technology has arrived, digital video has arrived, and is demanding new expressions, new sensations. . . . It's time to say again: Art, Technology: a new union." She shows the studio executives storyboards of how four cameras will follow four characters, who are really four aspects of the same character at different points in their lives. But the filmmaker's passionate and theoretical speech is undercut by the context of black comedy that infuses the film: artistic praxis clashes with business practice, and all the plotlines peak as Stellan Skarsgard's Alex bursts into laughter and exclaims, "This is the most pretentious crap I've ever heard. . . . Do you think anybody around this table has a clue about what you're talking about?" Figgis assumes his audience does, that Bauhaus, Soviet montage, and Guy Debord are not as foreign to his spectators as they are to the executives; the filmmakers both within and outside the frames show their theoretical orientation. Time Code is the first major work of digital cinema. It creates a new kind of animation based on subjectivity and point of view, and calls for an active creation of belief from the spectator-editor who takes in and ultimately creates the narrative of the film. The DVD extends the spectator's agency even further. Among its special features is a documentary about how the film was shot 15 times, all four cameras operating simultaneously around the actors' improvisation. Figgis chose the fifteenth version for the theatrical release, but also includes the first version on the DVD. Because the making of the film, and how it uses digital technology, is so central to the spectator's experience, the director's commentary and interviews with the cast reinforce the spectator as an active creator of belief and meaning in the film. Moreover, by including a special audio mixing feature, the DVD gives the medium a new level of interactivity. Using the remote control of a DVD player, the spectator/participant can switch between the audio of the different quadrants. Because the audio is a major aspect of directing the spectator's attention (in addition to visual elements such as movement and stasis), being able to make choices in the audio mix is, to use the music metaphor that the film is based on conceptually, to become the conductor of the film.8 The medium is the mix. Like Time Code and Conceiving Ada, the new French film Gamer is also a particularly digital mix. Gamer moves between live action and digital environments as its main character Tony gets the idea for, designs, and then is swindled out of a computer game. The first time the film environment switches to the game environment is when the hero is in a car chase and his car morphs into a game graphic of a car. The shift between a reality created by conventional film style and the unconventional use of game graphics style reveals the main character's subjectivity, for his reality (and other characters' as well) are constructed through their interaction in the playing and making of games. Gamer is aesthetically and viscerally ambitious in the range of live action and computer graphic interfaces it moves between. The adrenalized state of game-playing mixes with a fictionalized account of game design. Gamer succeeds in creating an immersive text about two differently immersive mediums, film and computer games. When the film depicts how live action can be made digital, and both shows and denies the indexicality of the digital image, it explores the nature of digital cinema in a way that is complementary to the projects of Conceiving Ada and Time Code. In addition to fostering new relations of looking, these digital narratives make forays into nonlinearity. Conceiving Ada and Gamer both have discursive plots that revise the conventions of the linear plot, moving between nested narrative frames in time, space, and subjectivity. Time Code is in one way relentlessly linear, but its synchronic depiction of multiple physical and emotional points of view ruptures the cinematic conventions of time and space constructed by the dominant style of continuity editing. Taken separately, these three films hover around the center point of my diagram, raising the issues of agency and linearity that will continue to be at the center of digital narrative. Taken together the films offer a model of digital transformation that points the way to what is bound to be a medium that increasingly involves its audience in thinking about and then participating in increasingly immersive, nonlinear, and interactive experiences. Notes 1. In the “renew” issue of M/C, David Marshall suggests that one of the areas Cultural Studies can look to is how the culture industries that produce “recombinant culture,” make efforts “to incorporate new technologies into different forms in order to reconstitute audiences in ways that in their distinctiveness produce value that is exchangeable as capital.” This essay is part of a larger work that attempts to open up some of the avenues suggested by Marshall. P. David Marshall. "Renewing Cultural Studies." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.6 (2000). [22 February 2001] . 2. This diagram is a work in progress. My students and I have had much discussion about what to term the bottom of the agency axis. “Passive” seems too simple, yet other terms we’ve come up with such as structured, controlled, limited, voyeuristic, or (my favorite) enslaved don’t seem to work. Special thanks to my students Elliott Davis, Tom Mannino, and John O’Connell, for such discussions. 3. Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, MIT Press, 1999, esp. 128. 4. For an interesting discussion and diagramming of story shapes, see Katherine Phelps, “Story Shapes for Digital Media.” [3/7/01] < http://www.glasswings.com.au/modern/shapes/>. Steven Johnson’s assertion that the hyperlink is the “first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries” is an intriguing one for thinking about the connections possible in hypermedia. (Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate (San Francisco: HarperEdge, 1997), 110-111). 6. Lev Manovich, “What Is Digital Cinema?” http://jupiter.ucsd.edu/~manovich/text/digital-cinema.html 7. In a footnote, Manovich makes an interesting point on avant-garde strategies such as collage, painting on film, combining print with animation and live action footage, and combining many images in a single frame: “what used to be exceptions for traditional cinema became the normal, intended techniques of digital filmmaking, embedded in technology design itself.” Innovative forays into the mix of digital media like my examples illuminate not only the emergence of exceptional techniques but also of innovative narrative and spectatorial strategies. 8. Figgis is using the quadrant method once again in a new film, Hotel, which recently finished production in Florence. During the filming, there was a brilliant site that every day had a new page with the four-quadrant split. In addition to quicktimes of footage of the shoot and the actors in the hotel where the film is set, there were some of the cleverest animations I have ever seen on the web. Unfortunately the site shut down after the shoot finished, but it will be up again in May, most likely at www.filmfour.com/hotel, but check www.red-mullet.com as well.

This research paper examined the ways how translators translated metaphors in the dubbing of animation songs and measured the degree of loss occurred in rendering metaphors from English into Arabic; these two languages are culturally and linguistically distinct languages. This study employed descriptive qualitative methods. The data used in this research were metaphors of songs from three animated musical movies: Beauty and the Beast, Tangled, and Pocahontas. This paper analyzed the translation of metaphors depending on the cognitive theory proposed by Mandelblit (1995). The results proved that even though translating metaphors in animation songs was a laborious process, they did not always cause a problem of untranslatability; on the contrary, translators can render metaphors from English onto Arabic without a significant loss in terms of meaning and sound patterns. Compensation in kind and compensation in place helped to achieve the translatability of metaphors in cartoon films’ songs. The analysis of source and target metaphors revealed that there were three translation procedures used to translate metaphors in animation songs, namely: replacing the source metaphor with a target metaphor (substitution), translating the metaphor into sense (paraphrasing), and using literal translation.

Thesis (M.S.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 2006.<br>Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2708. Typescript. Abstract precedes thesis as 2 leaves (iii-iv). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 29-30).

The year 1929 is often seen as marking the end of silent film. “The secret afterlife of silent film” questions this date, demonstrating how that year only signaled the end of production in major studios in the United States. Once the technology for synchronization and amplification became available, the transition to sound in the motion picture industry was smoother than is often depicted. Silent film production continued in pockets around the globe until nearly the middle of the century, as did silent film exhibition. Elements of silent film persist even in the early twenty-first century, from avant-garde to animated films. Silent film is still beloved by critics and cinephiles, and the innovations of the silent period arguably contribute to the ongoing appeal of cinema itself.

This chapter attempts to discover Cukor's style despite his frequent avoidances of a blatant directorial presence in his works by comparing his movies with other versions of the same source material. David Copperfield, filmed by him in 1935, has been made into seven films (three of them silent, one animated) and six television series. Cukor's Holiday (1938) followed a 1930 version, which had earned Ann Harding a Best Actress Academy Award nomination. And his The Philadelphia Story (1940), like Holiday based on a Philip Barry play, morphed into the 1956 musical High Society. By choosing matching scenes from these other versions, this chapter shows what Cukor did to warrant his status as a great filmmaker.

The last chapter begins by briefly discussing postwar developments in dramatic, documentary and animated film. Discourses of nationalist and imperialist identity might no longer be overtly manifested in these genres and media in the early postwar era, but they did not dissolve with the termination of war in 1945. One of the best examples of continuity is the image of the emperor, which survived—and indeed continues today—to serve as one of the most important constituents of nation and nationalism in postwar Japanese media and visual culture. To reinforce this point, the chapter turns to the well-known double portrait of Emperor Hirohito and General Douglas MacArthur, which should be seen as a continuation of the wartime imperial portrait photograph. (120 words)

Abstract We report on our experience using the Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) to collaborate on the design and manufacture of an artifact transport system (ATS). Specifically designed for the purpose of transporting nanometer-scale dimensional artifacts at pressures ∼10−8 Pa, the ATS consists of a transport cart and an ultra-high vacuum (UHV) system. As its name implies, the ATS is to transport an atomically-accurate specimen created in a molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) laboratory to a scanning tunnel microscope (STM) laboratory across the NIST campus, where metrologists verify atomic-scale measurements. The project team involved between 15 and 20 participants — designers, engineers, physicists and manufacturers — and each individual was involved with the design and assembly of the ATS to varying degrees. After the project engineers developed their assembly models with their CAD tools, we exported the components and assemblies to VRML files. These representations were made available, via web browsers with VRML viewers, for feedback to project team members on their own workstations, which included PCs, Macintoshes and Suns. The port involved characterizing the simulation’s performance over a range of parameters such as processor capability, file size, VRAM available and graphics card capability. After meeting with the fabricators and physicists to determine the approximate assembly sequence of the ATS, we edited, augmented and animated the VRML files on a high-end workstation. By visualizing the animation sequence in a common facility with a videowall, participants were able to reach a consensus for the design and assembly changes needed. We conclude that VRML did help our team collaborate in the design and fabrication processes, although the technology supplemented, rather that supplanted face-to-face meetings. Our experience with VRML on multiple workstations leads us also to conclude that the language needs to be characterized to enhance easy development of engineering models and to achieve true and complete platform-independence.