September 15, 2023
The Cinemetrics net hunt continues
Dear Cinemetrics users!
As previously reported on the this News, the cinemetrics.lv URL has been stolen, as a probable result of which the data submitted to either the .lv or uchicago.edu URL are not showing on the cinemetrics database as of this June. We did some quick research and found out that the stolen cinemetrics address points to a German company info@teaminternet.com which allegedly sells their advertising through stolen addresses. We also found a related instruction, which reads: «For any questions or concerns regarding data protection on this website, please contact the website provider and controller. Alternatively, you can also contact the data protection officer of Team Internet AG, Rechtsanwalt Christian Schmoll, via email at privacy@teaminternet.com» If anyone has an idea how to procede please write to Yuri Tsivian at ytsivian@uchicago.edu
Thanks, Yuri
September 9, 2023
MORE INFO REGARDING THE CINEMETRICS TEMPORARY BLACKOUT ANNOUNCED ON SEPTEMBER 9 (SEE "NEWS" BELOW):
Carmen Caswell, a Digital Humanities curator of Cinemetrics at University of Chicago reports:
Hi Yuri,
Michael and I were able to look at the current submission database and can confirm that it has not stored any submissions since June. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to determine why they're being rejected. However, we've made quite a bit of steady progress on the new, improved site over these past summer weeks. Sandy and Jeff are completing OCHRE upgrades to allow the system to receive data. Our summer student worker has built out much of the replacement site's functionality, and this past week the Forum officially hired a Software Engineer who will soon be able to complete it.
Your message to users is correct that the classic tool will erroneously state that the submission was successful, and users should indeed save their cut data locally.
Best,
Carmen
September 7, 2023
ATTENTION CINEMETRICS USERS!
Temporarily the Cinemetrics is under reconstruction, and is only partially functional.
THE GOOD NEWS IS: You can access/work with cinemetrics data submitted before mid-summer 2023.
THE WORSE NEWS: Please refrain from sumbittling new data before further notice. "The system accepts your data signalling "Submission successful!" but your data will not be visible in the database. If you use the downloaded "classic tool, please make sure you save your measurements for submissing later on.
ALSO: Do NOT use the url "cinemetrics.lv" for at present it leads you to a wrong website. Do use https://cinemetrics.uchicago.edu instead.
Sorry for the inconvenience -- cinemetrics is under a reconstruction.
Best, Yuri
December 24, 2022 – Tsivian, Yuri
Dear Cinemetrics Users!
Naum Kleiman sent me this wonderful Byblical drawing by Eisenstein complete with Holiday greetings, which I forward to you all, adding mine:
August 27, 2022 – Tsivian, Yuri
Excellent News
After a year-plus of searching, we were fortunate to find a dream team of IT experts who agreed to restore the FACT tool we lost to the Remove-Flash-from-Browsers campaign and make the Classic tool Mac-User-friendly. Here is an excerpt from the agreement signed today.
"Third North Technologies LLC will develop a Google Chrome extension enabling users to navigate through a film, capture timestamps, and transmit that data to an existing MySQL database.
Developer Deliverables The principal deliverable will be the Chrome extension. Expected features are: 1. User may play a video file stored on user’s machine. 2. User may navigate through the video file at frame-by-frame increments. 3. User may place timestamps at any point in the file. 4. User may input sufficient film metadata for identification: title; year of release; director; country of origin. 5. User may save data, and re-open to continue, at any time; user should be able to re-open an in-progress submission, restoring markers previously placed, to continue the work. 6. User may upload completed data to the existing Cinemetrics database. 7. User may access the extension and make use of the features when not connected to the internet (data will be saved locally as work continues and uploaded to the database upon reconnection). 8. Users will be able to use the tool in both “start-and-stop mode” (using the video player controls) and in “continuous mode” (without using the video player; for example, the user places timestamps while viewing a film in a theater or television set). An additional deliverable will be a written and illustrated tutorial, preferably including a video with instructions how to best use the various features of the toolkit."
August 9, 2022 – Tsivian, Yuri
In the first week of August, a number of data were submitted to Cinemetrics that have no film title (except acronyms like A or TPQS) and year marked. These may be legitimate tests, or a bunch or robotic scams.
I have deleted those, as we usually do with submissions missing essential metadata.
June 3, 2022 – Tsivian, Yuri
CINEMETRICS working again
I'm so sorry for that service interruption last night. It seems our sysadmin Peter was performing some quick maintenance yesterday afternoon, and Adam attempted his submission in that very brief window.
There ideally shouldn't be any lingering issues.
June 2, 2022
SUBMISSION ALERT
One of the Alluder team guys, Adam Peterson, tried his hand for the first time to submit a movie to Cinemetrics, and the system foiled him (see details below);
From: Adam Peterson <adam@alluder.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 2, 2022 5:18 PM
To: Yuri Tsivian <ytsivian@uchicago.edu>
Yuri, I'm sad to report that my first experience with Cinemetrics ended unsuccessfully.
I watched The Night House (2020) and recorded every cut. However, when I submitted the information I experienced a long submission wait time (screenshot below), then was notified my submission was unsuccessful, after which the application crashed and my data was lost.
Adam
Having received Adam’s message, I ran a quick test and got the same “unsuccessful” reply:
I tried the database, and the database works as usual.
IF YOU ARE PLANNING TO SUBMIT NEW DATA TO CINEMETRICS PLEASE MAKE SURE YOUR DATA ARE SAFE BEFORE YOU HIS "SUBMIT" OR WAIT TILL THE PROBLEM IS SOLVED.
May 21, 2022
Wonderful news!
Cinemetrics has a younger sister, named Alluder. While its task is usefully broader than Cinemetrics', one can use Alluder for calculating cut frequency as well. I leanded of Alluder's existence from this email from its creator:
Hi Professor Tsivian,
My name is Aaron Peterson and I'm an undergrad at New York University.
About a year and a half ago, my brother and I formed an idea to create a chrome extension that would allow film researchers and makers to create time-stamped annotations to be used for research and collaborative purposes. We called it Alluder (our first idea was to point out every allusion in a film) and have since published it on the chrome store.
This semester, I've been busy upgrading it with features and showing it to both students and professors. One professor I showed it to yesterday told me it reminded her of Cinemetrics. Being unfamiliar with the tool, I used it last night and made a submission (3:10 to Yuma).
While Alluder doesn't provide the same ability to track shots as Cinemetrics does, I think it could and I'd very much like to connect to hear your thoughts and see if I could be helpful.
I'm also going to include a video I made for a film and tv class I presented to last week to demo Alluder.
Look forward to hearing your thoughts and thank you for your time.
Best,
Aaron
December 24, 2021
Happy Holidays to all Cinemetricians!
Yuri
September 13, 2021
Good news: our field is advancing, slowly bur surely. In August, I got this email from Barry Salt: "Dear Yuri,
I have got another piece out in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities in the advance articles online form of that journal, dated 21 May 2021. Lord knows when and if they will put it on paper. Anyway I attach it for you, and it is available for everyone on the starword.com website. That is the important thing. It contains a new metric."
Indeed, a break-trhough thing, titled "The end of the Great Speed-Up." Just click and download. Another good news is that a study of editing by James E. Cutting, mostly researched on Cinemetrics, is out from Oxford University Press: Movies on Our Minds: The Evolution of Cinematic Engagement. Take a look here.
May 24, 2021
A new original study has been added to the section "Cinemetrics of Film Style: Case Studies" in the Mesurement Theory tab:
"The evolution of form in Andrei Tarkovsky's films" by Filippo Schillaci
Take a look, it's really interesting as far as its methods and results.
March 29, 2021
Good news from China
I just happened to get a message from Shanghai from Prof. 龙井问茶, who had organized and supervised a crash course in Cinemetrics I taught for 4 weeks at one of Guangzhou universities in 2017. Yang has just translated into Chinese and published two essays on Cinemetrics and reports on the growing demand for more Cinemetrics-related literature and cinemetrics-informed teaching. (He was stopped by Covid on the tracks of organizing a conference in Cinemetrics at the Shanghai Normal University, and will go on if we all live). I paste Yang’s account below—not just to boast (that too), like some kind of Marco Polo, of our outreach, but because we just succeeded in hiring a Chinese student, Kevin Cao, to redsign the FACT tool disable by the demise of Flash software. See below…
From: 龙井问茶 <57599625@qq.com>
Sent: Monday, March 29, 2021 2:07 AM
To: Yuri Tsivian <ytsivian@uchicago.edu>
Subject: for the permsion of translation and publication of the essay “A Numerate Film History?"
Dear Yuri,
I am write to tell you that Cinemetrics has genarated more and more warmly discussions science two of you and Barry Salt’s essays translated in Chinese and published in Contemporary Cinema ( “Cinemetrics, Part of the Humanities’ Cyberinfrastructure”;“Statistical Style Analysis of Motion Pictures”). Some have begun to use Cinemetrics as a tool in their Chinese film studies. But my plan to hold (or co-hold with you) an international conference on Cinemetrics has been delayed by covid-19.
I appreciated you two very much for your generous permission for the translation and publication. I am sure that’s the first time for Cinemetrics to appear in Chinese film study journals. Many readers and researchers tell me that they want to know much more about Cinemetrics, some scholars ask me if I can introduce more about it.
Do you remember that last time you mentioned the essay “A Numerate Film History? Cinemetrics Looks at Griffith, Griffith Looks at Cinemetrics,”which I have read many times. Would you please help me get the permission from the authors, including yourself and your wife Daria, for its translation in Chinese and publication in Journal of Guizhou University(Art)? Due to the poor financial status of academic journal, the payments would be poor too. But I would try to pay compensation to the authors in other ways, when I get a chance.
With many thanks and good wishes,
Yang
Shanghai Normal University, China
January 4, 2021
Happy New Year to all
Dear Cinemetrics users,
I have two news to announce:
The bad news from the past year was that the frame accurate (FACT) Cinemetrics tool became inoperative due to the fact that most of modern-day browsers do not support the "flash" software any more. Now, the good news is, the University of Chicago who hosts Cinemetrics, has procured funds to replace FACT by an updated successor, TACT (Time Accurate Cinemetrics Tool), and has posted a search for a software specialist to build the latter. Here it is
Cinemetrics Project
Student Position : Javascript Developer
General Job Summary
The Cinemetrics project of the Department of Cinema & Media Studies is seeking a motivated student employee to develop a customized Chrome Extension to record, edit and upload time stamps from browser-based video players into an existing MySQL database.
Job duties primarily include frontend web programming (Javascript; HTML5, CSS) to implement custom functions in a Chrome Extension to 1) save a current time stamp, 2) provide fine navigation (in units of milliseconds) video controls, and 3) upload the time stamp data to the database.
Commitment: 10-20 hours per week for up to 10 weeks.
QUALIFICATIONS
Required
· Experience with web-based programming frameworks, including Javascript, HTML5 and CSS
· Good problem-solving skills
· Good communication skills
· The ability to respond quickly and professionally to stakeholders and beta-testers
Desired
· Experience handling streamed video content within web-based programming frameworks
· Experience developing Chrome extensions
· Experience with web programming for mobile devices and frameworks
· Experience in Cinema and Media studies
· Experience with SQL-based backend database systems
· Familiarity with version control systems such as Github
Apply by sending an email with a cover letter and resume to [email]
November 3, 2020
Cinemetrics is back and working, but do check the News from time to time, there are going to be some major changes in the data gathering/submission functions because, as of December, the Flash software on which our tools are based will no longer be supported by major browsers. More on this later.
Meanwhile, Barry Salt has alerted me today, in the process of rebuilding some of the writings on cinmetrics theory have gone missing.
This is in the "Measurement Theory" section, under "Dealing with Film data".
In the sub-section "Taking shot Lengths", your contribution is missing with a 404 Not Found error.
In sub-section "Cinemetrics of Film Style" the Barry Salt section: "How They Cut Dialogue Scenes" is missing.
In sub-section "Uses of Cinemetrics" the Keith Brisson, Mike Baxter, and D.W. Griffith sub-sub-sections are all missing.
In sub-section "Shot Lengths and Psychology", Mike Baxter's "Evolution in Hollywood editing", Barry Salt's "Salt on baxter on cutting", James Cutting's "More on the Evolution...", and Mike Baxter's "Further Comments" are missing.
In sub-section "Film & Statistics", all articles are missing,
and finally, Mike Baxter's "Cinemetric Data Analysis" is missing.
Barry found this out, he says, because James Cutting makes extensive references to the pieces in the "Shot lengths & Psychology" sub-section in one of his papers on the topic.
November 2, 2020
Today is Nov 2, and guess what measurement I found posted to Cinemetrics today? www.cinemetrics.lv/movie.php?movie_ID=27097 The graph is short and sweet, and the subject timely. It'd for this video, take a look https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPOYVQhAuto&ab_channel=CNN
As I wrote in the comment, “I am Yuri Tsivian, and I approve this message.”
June 10, 2020
Good news from Barry Salt
1) free PDFs of his books are now available on the starword.com website.
2) Barry Salt's study "The style of Ingmar Bergman’s films" has been published in The New Review of Film and Television Studies. Here is an excerpt from the abstract:
After a brief summary of Ingmar Bergman’s filmmaking
career and his films, his individual films are analysed in terms of the
characteristics of the shots in them, such as length, closeness of camera, camera
movement, POV, and so on. A simple statistical consideration of all these
quantities enables a new separation of Bergman’s career into three phases
from this perspective, with the film Persona being one of the turning points.
Using a new technique of digital frame analysis, other points emerge regarding
the development of his handling of actor movement and camera movement in
his staging of love scenes, which gives rise to what could be called the Bergman
signature shot.
May 9, 2020
Good news
Database is back up and running!
May 8, 2020
This afternoon, the Cinemetrics database stopped responding. This is not unfamiliar: this sometimes occurs due to outages or other problems with the University of Chicago Humanities IT servers. Wait and tell your students to wait till this is fixed (hopefully, soon). While your submissions (if I understand it correctly) reach the database, users are unable to access it.
Sorry for the inconvenience!
May 1, 2020
Dear Cinemetricians,
Some news, rather topical I am afraid. Despite (or maybe because) of the international stay-at-home policies, Cinemetrics daily submissions have intensified. Those following the growth of our database may have noticed a new bunch of movie trailers--an interesting and promising research.
Also, I want to report a quick enquiry I made last week about a somewhat mysterious set of data submitted massively a few days ago, with numbers instead of movie titles and no year or other data provided. Fortunately, I could trace the name and email of the submitter (Luke Naylor-Perrott, a young but already award-winning filmmaker and film student), find below what I wrote to him and, below my email, Luke's reply to my email. As Gegel used to say, SIGNS OF THE TIME.
1. MY EMAIL TO LUKE:
My name is Yuri Tsivian, I am in charge of Cinemetrics, the website designed to measure and store average shot lengths of films. The reason why I am writing is that for the last few day you (or your namesake, or someone using your name) submitted a bunch of data with metadata missing. Each of the submission uses a number (like # 410 and so on), without the year or country of origin indicated for each submission. Some are identified by your name, some by the initials LNP2, e.g. https://www.cinemetrics.lv/movie.php?movie_ID=26028
If this set of data originates with you or someone working in your name, could you kindly give me a quick idea of what these submissions are about, what films they stand for and whatever you’d like me to add for other Cinemetrics users to know what we are dealing with?
One of the reasons I need to know is that at time the Cinemetrics site is being targeted by cyber-robots generating random meaningless data. If this is the case this time, and a robot is using your name I will instruct the University of Chicago IT people to erase the submissions as false. If it is you indeed, I will post a clarification and whatever you’d want us to know about your project on the website NEWS.Dear Yuri,
2. LUKE'S EMAIL TO ME:
Thank you for reaching out, I’m so sorry I caused you trouble - I promise that wasn’t my intention!
Firstly, it’s an honour to meet you (albeit electronically) - I have read a number of your articles and you are a big influence on what I am doing at the moment. I’m a Master's Student at the University of Amsterdam and for my thesis I am looking to analyse the formal and aesthetic variety of music videos - your tool is a lifesaver and as you can see I’m using it intensely!
An apologia for my strange (bot-like) behaviour on your site. Essentially, my deadline for data collection is the end of this week - however, I am having to do it all over the next few days: my current situation as an international student is somewhat precarious because of Covid19 - I may have to go home suddenly in the next few days, which will cause a lot of disruption, and a number of my relatives are elderly which means that if they do contract it, I doubt I will be in the right headspace to work. All this is to say that I have been using your site at a ridiculous pace and only filling out the bare minimum and a number, which makes searching back for the data as quick as possible (the number refers to my spreadsheet, as seen in the picture attached).
As part of my plan, once I have finished my analysis and hopefully the pandemic has settled down somewhat, I was intending to comment on each of my submissions with the song name and artist, alongside uploading my thesis onto my website and posting the link with each comment. I am planning to include as an appendix the table of my data and their corresponding numbers for easy access as well.
I realise this isn’t the same as posting the metadata straight away, and I am very sorry for any inconvenience caused. I hope, nevertheless, that my thesis will contribute to the world of quantitative film analysis in some small way.
Many thanks,
Luke
Here is a sample of Luke's metadata in Excel
June 11, 2019
Good and sad news this spring
The good news: Veronica Schmidt's book "Quantitative Film Studies. Regularities and Interrelations Exemplified by Shot Lengths in Soviet Feature Films" came out recently. Veronica used the Cinemetrics tool for the measurement of 70 Soviet feature films: 1920s-1980s, 5 comedies and 5 dramas per decade.
The sad one: Veronica's teacher and mentor cinemetrician Peter Grzybek (1957 – 2019) died recently. See the obituary at https://www.iqla.org/GrzybekObituary.pdf
March 10, 2019
A sad anniversary last month.
Last year at the end of February time Daria Khitrova and I received this email from Hilary Cool, English archeologist, and wife of our mutual friend and collaborator Mike Baxter, Professor Emeritus in Statistical Archaeology at Nottingham Trent University, UK:
“I’m afraid I have to relay some bad news. Mike died suddenly and unexpectedly last Thursday. … I want to let you know how much he enjoyed his forays into cinemetrics in the early days of his retirement and meeting you and Daria through it. He was extremely bored with doing archaeological statistics at that point but after cinemetrics he went back to it refreshed and had something of an annus mirabilis in 2015 doing some really clever modelling work that got published in 2016. He’d just finished writing an account of archaeological problems that had given rise to novel statistical work and took the opportunity in the final part to reflect why he got involved in archaeological statistics and who had influenced his intellectual development. It now has the feel of a valedictory signing off given his death, but he had been planning a couple of new papers.”
The annus mirabilis Hilary refers to is 2014, the year when Mike, Daria and I won a Neubauer Collegium grant for the project “Cinemetrics Across Boundaries: A Collaborative Study of Montage” https://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/faculty/cinemetrics/. This was the first time I met Michael in person—even though earlier on, in 2013, Mike, Barry Salt and I had been involved in a three-month online dialogue “Films and Statistics: Give and Take” to be found here: https://www.cinemetrics.lv/articles.php
Barry Salt was the first to whom Daria and I passed on the sad news that Hilary conveyed to us. Here is what Barry wrote back:
“Sorry and a bit sad to hear about Mike Baxter's death. He was a generous person and a real statistician. He was also a real scientist, which does not necessarily follow. I regret that I was not able to ever meet him in person.”
As I said, Daria and I did meet Mike, and were quite impressed. What Barry—a trained statistician—says of Mike became instantly evident when you met him. Mike was a true scientist, more at home among modes, medians and means than in the world of palpable realities, the world he never paid too much attention to—except for (in this order) Hilary, movies, and a glass (or two, as in the picture) of Italian wine. Daria and I were lucky: we came to know Hilary, had more than one glass with her and Mike at their summer abode in Sorrento, and spent enough time analyzing film editing with Mike to get a sense of what statistics can reveal about movies. The three of us had a plan: to write a book titled “A History of Film Editing.” We only managed to write two chapters of it, both published under our three names. One, titled “Exploring Cutting Structure in Film, with Applications to the Films of D. W. Griffith, Mack Sennett, and Charlie Chaplin” appeared in 2015 in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, see here: https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article-abstract/32/1/1/2957363?redirectedFrom=fulltext ; the other, “A Numerate Film History? Cinemetrics Looks at Griffith, Griffith Looks at Cinemetrics” in the French journal Mise au Point, see https://journals.openedition.org/map/2108
Mike was a non-stop worker, appearing at a breakfast table half-awake, wearing his pajamas and already carrying his laptop—a machine trained to convert long numeric tables into beautifully colored scatter plots and trend-lines. It would take some time (worth every minute of it) to compile Mike’s full bibliography. Here are some items close at hand:
n Video recording of a talk given in Chicago (UofC) in 2014: “Graphical Griffith: Cutting-Patterns in the Films of D.W. Griffith,” see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw3p_pNz5mU
n MikeMetrics, Mike Baxter’s website primarily concerned with the quantitative analysis of archaeological data, and with cinemetrics, interpreted here as the statistical analysis of quantifiable data descriptive of the structure of film. See https://www.mikemetrics.com/#
n “Evolution in Hollywood editing patterns?” To be found among links available here: https://www.cinemetrics.lv/articles.php
n “Further comments on evolution in Hollywood film: the role of models” To be found among links available here: https://www.cinemetrics.lv/articles.php
n “Monograph: Notes on Cinemetric Data Analysis” To be found among links available here: https://www.cinemetrics.lv/articles.php
n “Cinemetrics – a bibliography.” To be found among links available here: https://www.cinemetrics.lv/articles.php
January 3, 2019
HAPPY NEW 2019 to all Cinemetrics users!
Of many news, the most recent are:
1) A series of (nearly 40) submission of (mainly) Bergman's films by Barry Salt, made in November using his signature hand-measured frame-accurate method.
2) A large number of films submitted by a class of students taught by our regular user Radomir Kokes. It's a regular part of his introductory course on film studies analysis at the Masaryk University in Brno, Radomir tells me. Students at the end of the semester measure one or two movies to learn how to perceive the cuts and adopt a program for their later researches (for many of Kokes' former students Cinemetrics was an important part of their BA and MA thesis projects). Then, in the following seminars, they analyze, discuss and explain the editing structures of these films. Radomir also has his own database: https://www.douglaskokes.cz/pdz/ I find it very useful - there are not so many overlaps with either our database or with Barry Salt's database available on the Cinemetrics website.
3) Since May 2017, students at Izmir University of Economics under the guidance of Serkan Savk have been creating Cinemetrics data for Turkish films. The data set can be viewed under the Cinemetrics lab "Yesilcam 1960s and 70s." An important group of submissions occurred in October 2018. As Serkan tells me, their intention is developing a distant reading model for Turkish films. Serkan says he will share the initial findings of his study at the ECREA 2018 Conference.
Dear Cinemetricians, do send me your project descriptions if you want them to appear on the News. Have fun in the New Year!
January 7, 2017
A memorial dedication to Gunars Civjans, my son and co-founder of Cinemetrics, has now been added to the from page of this website, see here.
From now on, I resume posting news -- roughly, on a monthly basis.
I wish a happier new year to all cinemetrics users.
July 26, 2016
Gunārs Civjans (1975-2016)
I have a tragic news to share. My son Gunārs Civjans whom many Cinemetrics users know as our sole software inventor and developer passed away after a sudden two-day illness in Jūrmala, Latvia, on April 23, 2016, at age 40. Gunārs loved working for Cinemetrics, helping some of you with their data submissions, and working on new generations of Cinemetrics tools. I find no words in me to express my love and admiration for Gunārs as a son and collaborator. Let me instead quote those who met Gunārs in May, 2015 during the cinemetrics conference he and I conducted at the University of Chicago:
BARRY SALT: I will miss him as a person, too, apart from all he did to help create Cinemetrics.
ADELHEID HEFTBERGER: I have no words to describe how this news shocked me. I still remember when Yuri first mentioned Gunars many years ago. It must have been in connection with sailing. Over email conversation I had formed this image of the intelligent and gifted mastermind behind Cinemetrics, who constantly developed the site and added useful features. When I met him finally in Chicago, I was surprised to see that he was also one of the funniest people I had ever met. I admired his dry humor and I can only imagine what a wonderful and loving father and husband he has been too. I am so sorry to hear that Gunars is no more and I cannot understand how this is possible.
LEA JACOBS: I am so sorry to hear about Gunars. It was so great meeting him at the Cinemetrics conference last year. I loved his amused and ironic way of discussing the site, his style was so different from most of the computer experts I have encountered.
CHRISTINA PETERSEN: Although a bit late, I wanted to send you an email to offer my condolences. I heard about Gunnar through the Chicago pipeline and although I only met him in person once, at the Cinemetrics Symposium last year, I was very sorry to hear of your loss. My favorite memory of Gunnar in fact is from the semester in Spring 2007 when he skyped you during International Cinema II and you answered him, telling the class: “This is Gunnar, he helped invent Cinemetrics,” which prompted the class to break into a spontaneous burst of applause. That is the way I hope to remember him, always connected to you despite geographic or other distances in work and play.
March 20, 2016
Good news from three quarters into March.
1) A query (+ a reply) about Cinemetrics metadata on our Discussion Board.
2) A letter from a film scholar of China:
I’m taking the liberty of writing to you to pay tribute to you for your outstanding achievements in Cinemetrics, and see if we could find some possibilities of cooperation in film studies.
Please allow me to do some self-introduction. My name is Yang Shizhen, a professor at School of Journalism and communication in Guangzhou University, China. My teaching and research is centred on Chinese film studies and the comparative study of Chinese and American film language, for undergraduate and postgraduate.I was very excited when I first visited your cinemetrics.lv last year’s September by chance. The quantitative methods, which you adopted in studying film’s style and form, do give me lots of inspiration. I agree with most of your research methods and conclusions.
As we know, China has become the No. 2 movie market of the world in 2015, but the Grand Theory still plays the leading role in Chinese film study. I am far more skeptical about its validity. My voice is so faint to be heard from here. Therefore, I am greatly encouraged by your research when I met with it. Anyway, I should express my gratitude to you for your work.
Actually, in recent years, I have used some very similar methods in my teaching and research, with different tools. I used to guide students to extracts film form data with some editing softwares as a tool, such as After Effects/ Corel Video Studio/DaVinci Resolve and so on. In addition, I also used the data analysis of film form in the student’s practical training of editing and directing, and it has got some positive effect.
Well, I have some thoughts and tentative proposals:
1. I am leading some graduate students to found the database of Chinese film form, which I hope can be a part of the bigger database you established for researchers to compare film forms of different countries.
2. As for CINEMETRICS and FACT, my students and I still have a lot to learn from you. I hope we could attend some relevant academic conferences held by your school, so that we have the opportunity to talk face to face.
3. It’s a great honor for me to invite you to come to Guangzhou University and give lectures. Would you please accept the invitation? If possible, I will apply for all related expenses from Guangzhou University.
4. I truly wish that we could have a variety of cooperation and academic exchanges in terms of Cinemetrics, like the translation of your work, the exchange of the graduate students and teachers, etc..
Eager for your kind reply.
Sincerely yours, Yang Shizhen
Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, Guangzhou University
March 5, 2016
Good news from early March.
On the scholarship front:
1) Our colleague Adelheid Heftberger of Austrian Film Museum published a book, take a look (in German) much of which is based on digital study of Vertov's editing, including measurements done on Cinemetrics.
2) David Hare from Australia contacted me with this message:
I recently submitted my PhD thesis on digital stereoscopy (D3D) for marking. One of the areas of interest was to do with the relationship between the uptake of the D3D screen technology and popular film techniques and visual styles. I used the Cinemetrics software to explore ideas about cutting rates, namely that D3D films in relation to conventional films have longer cuts in order to give the audience time to process the rendering/illusion of the third-dimension. The findings showed that this is not necessarily the case. Cinemetrics was such a great help. So, thank you and Gunars Civjans for sharing the program online.
February 20, 2016
Good news from mid-Feb.
1) a few days ago I got this message from a collegue whom I do not know personally. It gives us some idea of the cross-disciplinary spread of what we all are doing on Cinemetrics:
Dear Dr. Tsivian,
My article on digital representations of film analysis has been accepted for publication in France by Classiques Garnier in the proceedings of the 2013 Conference of the International Association of Comparative Literature (ICLA). My main point consists in demonstrating that film analysis is no longer restricted to textual and verbal commentary, and has been taking many graphic forms since Bellour's work on Hitchcock's films. I am writing to request from you the authorization to reproduce and publish the Cinemetrics screengrab (posted on the homepage of your website) to illustrate my article. I thank you in advance for your reply. Should you need any further information, please don't hesitate to let me know.
Best regards,
Caroline Eades, Associate Professor of Film and Comparative Literature University of Maryland, College Park
2) A newcomer to Cinemetrics Julian Sittel is in the process of submitting Antonioni's body of films distiguishing between differrent shot scales and shots with the static vs. mobile framing. Looks like the beginning of a promising research. I bet fluctuations in shot scales across Antonioni's many films will lead to a meaningful conclusion. Keep measuring, Julian, if this is your plan, I look forward to more submissions
April 12, 2014
Good news from the month of April.
After a period of consultations and deliberations (see the relevant topic on the Discussion Board) Gunars Civjans and I decided to launch our Database cleansing campaign. Some incomplete, incomprehensible or repeated submission will be as of now disappearing from the Cinemetrics database. This does not mean that these data have been erased forever. None of your data, including "tool-test" data will be eliminated. These data will just be invisible to the submitter or to the rest of us the Cinemetrics users. If you think this or that submission has vanished in error or in vain, just write a note about this to Gunars who has the power of turning your data visible again. He may ask you to supply this or that missing info or instruct you to resubmit. In other words, all our cleansing actions are reversible and negotiable.
So far I have cleansed the whole of year 2014, From January 1 to present. Here are some examples of the types of data I have removed (to repeat: removed from sight, not eliminated).
1) test submissions marked as such:
2) obvious junk, for instance:
3) unidentified floating titles with essential metadata (like year, submitter) missing:
4) data debris resulting from on-line outages or other counting/submitting errors, for instance Peter Grzybek's recent submission:
5) films with forgotten metadata; for instance, a recent submission by our regular collaborator Cid Vasconcelos the film title and year are missing:
6) In cases of fully identical multiple submission just one has been left visible for Cinemetrics users:
March 2, 2014
A quick update on good news
A one-day conference on Cinemetrics took place yesterday (Saturday, March 1) at the University of Chicago. Look here for details.
An article by Kevin B. Lee that acknowledges Cinemetrics and used its method to analyse gendered time distribution in Oscar-nominated films came out today in the Sunday edition of The New York Times. Very interesting, look here.
September 22, 2008
News from software development!
The movie graph is now interactive. You can hover your mouse pointer over the graph to get shot-specific information and add notes to the shot. Here's how it works:
Put your pointer over the shot you are interested in. A box with shot information will pop up. The information contains shot number, timecode (minutes:seconds.deciseconds), shot length, shot type (for advanced measurements), and the number of shot notes. Click on the shot to add notes to the specific shot the same way you add comments to the movie. The shots with notes are marked with green bars at the bottom of the graph.
For now, this update concludes our toolbox for single film analyses. We will now concentrate on tools for multiple movie comparisons.
For the Mac people waiting for a Cinemetrics tool: it's already here! Use the online version, it's exactly the same as the downloadable one.?� We will not be making platform-specific updates anymore and will start phasing out the Windows version as well. This also means that the Cinemetrics tool can be used on the modern cell phones and handhelds with internet access, so take it with you to a movie theater!
January 5, 2007
A couple of small technical updates:
- the long promised standard deviation and max/min data now available for every shot type for advanced measurements
- changed how the step adjustment behaves for graphs. If the graph is adjusted automatically to fit the screen, the word 'Step' shows up in red. It doesn't show the nondescript 'Auto' anymore, instead the step size to which it has adjusted to fit the screen.
I moved Yuri's 2006 Summary to a separate page. See news below or in the menu.
April 23, 2006
Gunars' Apr 21, 2006 revision solves two problems:
One, we now can pinpoint the shot or scene which is the shortest or longest in the film by way of using the timer to find the wanted segment on the tape/DVD/whatever.
Two, we can now estimate the variance between the shortes and the longest shot of the given film. For instance, Isobel Walker can now say that even thought the ASL of the silent version of Blackmail is longer that the ASL of the sound version, this loss in tempo in the sound version is compensated for by a higher degree of variance in the latter.
Now we know that the range between the shortest and the longest shots in the silent version is only 9 seconds against the range of 11 seconds in the sound version. If earlier we could only say this comparing the steepness of mountains and valleys in the corresponding trendlines, the variance now can be expressed numerically, and we can, if we want to, compare the variance of Blackmail editing to the same parameter in other films. Good news indeed.