In an article for Foreign Affairs at the outbreak of the World War II, film producer Walter Wanger referred to Hollywood movies as '120,000 American ambassadors'. The preeminence of Hollywood in presenting US ideology to the world has been asserted ever since. Yet the relationship between Hollywood and America's actual ambassadors, employed by the global network of American embassies, has rarel...

Film trailers have specific features defining a distinct visual media genre. Trailer structural features and viewers’ parsing strategies were analyzed in 21 trailers – a set of comedy, drama, and action film per decade from 1940 2010. Trailers’ structural features show a shot duration pattern that replicates the gradual decrease in Hollywood film over the same period (Cutting et al., 2011; Salt...

As military forces around the world embrace modelling and simulation as a fundamental enabling technology necessary to help them meet strategic objectives, the limitations and potential misuses of these tools and the processes that use them are worth closer examination. Of particular concern is the potential for decision-makers to be unduly influenced by state-of-the-art animation and 3D graphi...

Sleepydog is a TV and games company. We also have a strong track record in mobile and social TV. The merging of media silos requires new TV shows to have a strong back story to capitalise on the 360 nature of today's output. Our submission is part of the back story for a detective show. As they say in Hollywood, think Bones in a Bladerunner future. It is set in a future San Francisco 10 15 year...

Scene segmentation is a crucial task in the structural analysis of film. State-of-the-art scene segmentation algorithms target Hollywoodtype films. There is an abundance of films that differ significantly from Hollywood films and need specific scene segmentation techniques. We propose a scene segmentation algorithm targeted at artistic archive documentaries. We evaluate the performance of our t...

This paper analyses the changing use of shot scales and shot types in the films of Alfred Hitchcock from The Pleasure Garden (1925) to The Birds (1963) in the context of the introduction of sound technology to British cinema in 1929 and the director’s move from Britain to Hollywood in 1939. A sample of 42 films was divided into 3 subgroups (British silent films [ = 9]; British sound films [ = 1...

Hollywood likes science. Or, to put that more precisely, Hollywood likes to sound as if it likes science. Consequently, what Hollywood really likes are scientific buzzwords words that sound technical and important so that they impress the audience. In the realm of buzzwords, it is hard to think of any more prominent or more fitting of the description than the words “quantum” and “chaos”. Behind...

This is the story of how the game of Quantum Chess came about, how it was invented, how it was brought to life by a brilliant undergraduate student, how it gained a quick but fleeting fame, and how it came back to prominence with a little help from Hollywood.

Like Hollywood cinema, gong’an drama seizes upon the dramatic and narrative potential of legal trials. Yet, while Hollywood trial films turn viewers into jurors, pushing them back and forth between the competing stories that emerge from the adversarial process, gong’an drama eschews any recognition of opposing narratives, instead centering on the punishment of decidedly guilty criminals. The mo...