Modelling Gaze Behaviour in Subtitle Processing

One of the main rules of subtitling states that subtitles should be formatted and timed so that viewers have enough time to read and understand the text but also to follow the picture. In this paper we examine the factors that influence the time viewers spend looking at subtitles. We concentrate on the lexical and structural properties of subtitles. The participant group (N = 14) watched a television documentary with Russian narration and Finnish subtitles (the participants’ native language), while their eye movements were tracked. Using a linear mixed-effects model, we identified significant effects of subtitle duration and character count on the time participants spent looking at the subtitles. The model also revealed significant inter-individual differences, despite the fact that the participant group was seemingly homogeneous. The findings underline the complexity of subtitled audiovisual material as a stimulus of cognitive processing. We provide a starting point for more comprehensive modelling of the factors involved in gaze behaviour when watching subtitled content. Lay summary Subtitles have become a popular method for watching foreign series and films even in countries that have traditionally used dubbing in this regard. Because subtitles are visible to the viewer a short, limited time, they should be composed so that they are easy to read, and that the viewer has time to also follow the image. Nevertheless, the factors that have impact the time it takes to read a subtitle is not very well known. We wanted to find out what makes people who are watching subtitled television shows spend more time gazing at the subtitles? To answer this question, we recorded the eye movements of 14 participants when they were watching a short, subtitled television documentary. We created a statistical model of the gaze behavior from the eye movement data and found that both the length of the subtitle and the time the subtitle is visible are separate contributing factors. We also discovered large differences between individual viewers. Our conclusion is that people process subtitled content in very different ways, but there are some common tendencies. Our model can be seen as solid starting point for comprehensive modelling of gaze behavior of people watching subtitled audiovisual material.

Human mobility data from the BBC Pandemic project

We present human mobility data for the United Kingdom collected from the “BBC Pandemic”, a public science project linked to the BBC Four television documentary of the same name. Mobile phone GPS trajectories submitted by users and collected over a 24 hour period were aggregated to construct anonymised origin-destination flux matrices at the local administrative district (LAD). We use these data to explore how mobility patterns change with age and employment status - unique stratifications that are not available from other publicly and privately held mobility data sets. We validate the consistency of the aggregated BBC mobility data set against census workflow data and illustrate how the systematic differences in mobility rates with age affect the risk and pattern of transmission between regions with 18-30 year old’s contributing the greatest risk of transmission to adjacent regions, but older 60-100 years playing the most important role in more remote low-density locations.

The Image of the Holocaust in the Television Documentary Drama Trilogy “The Chronicle of the Minsk Ghetto”

The prevailing view in modern film studies is that television documentary drama (docudrama) is either a hybrid, a synthesis, or a documentary film genre. The author of the article hypothesizes that docudrama has long exceeded the boundaries of documentary films and asserted its own place in the system of screen arts on par with feature films, documentaries and animated films. The author claims that docudrama is a unique phenomenon generated by television and it combines all the modern innovations in cinema. Docudrama allows for the text information to be reformatted into an audio-visual experience in an emotional, spectacular and accurate way, therefore possessing the inherent features of other screen arts. Like other forms of screen arts, it forms an image capable of evoking certain emotions and makes the viewer think and draw their own conclusions. The combination of artefacts and quotes adds volume and artistic value to the image. The article explores the genesis and development of television docudrama and gives it a definition based on key characteristics. It shows how films of various genres can be created within docudrama, proving that docudrama is not a subgenre within the genre of documentary film but a new independent branch of screen arts. The author highlights that the reason for the popularity of docudrama lies in the fact that the historical and informative material, which can be interesting and useful to the viewer, is presented in a spectacular and lightweight form. This idea is supported through the analysis of the documentary drama trilogy The Chronicle of the Minsk Ghetto, in which an image of the Holocaust, the unspeakable tragedy of the Jews during the Second World War, is shown.

Michel Gondry as Transcultural Auteur

In the introduction to this volume, “Michel Gondry as Transcultural Auteur,” editors Marcelline Block and Jennifer Kirby present an overview of Gondry’s career as well as this volume’s approaches to Gondry’s oeuvre. Born in Versailles, France in 1963, Gondry is an Academy Award-winning transnational (France-USA) and transcultural (French-American) auteur whose body of work as a writer, director, and producer spans multiple genres—including feature film, short film, television, documentary, music video, big budget superhero film, romantic comedy, the road movie, advertisements—and languages (English, French, Japanese). In this respect, Gondry can be considered a contemporary globalized auteur whose films and other works display continuities and eclecticism. In addition, this introduction presents an overview of each of this volume’s sections and chapters in terms of how they identify connections and continuities between Gondry’s films while placing Gondry’s oeuvre in dialogue with French and American cinematic traditions and socio-cultural contexts. The introduction puts forth this volume’s main contention, namely that “Gondry is emblematic of transnational auteur filmmaking…crossing aesthetic and cultural borders between national film industries as well as between art and popular cinema and between media” and how Gondry’s oeuvre defies classification according to traditional conceptions of European art cinema.

Features and specificity of creating a script for a television documentary drama

The author analyses the specifics of writing a script for a television documentary drama (hereinafter referred to as docudrama), which combines the characteristics of the feature and documentary films. The article points out that many books have been written about the rules of scriptwriting for a feature film. However, there is no literature on the art of scriptwriting for a docudrama despite the fact that there are numerous docudramas being created worldwide. The opinion is given that the mastery of the docudrama scriptwriting is in choosing the most interesting and paradoxical moments in a hero’s life and showing his or her character through the resistance to life challenges: how the hero overcomes them, the motivation behind their actions and why a particular choice is being made. While in feature films the narrative is presented through action and actors’ performances, the article emphasises that docudramas explain the hero’s motivations through an additional figure such as an expert or co­participant in the events. While the difficult moments in the hero’s life and their overcoming are usually depicted through the staged episodes, an exploration into the hero’s character is supported by historical documents, a chronicle or other genuine historical sources. Docudrama is inherently narrative and the author investigates how the best practices of television journalism are used in scriptwriting, in addition to the cinema laws that are used in creating an image. The author explores the methodology of the docudrama scriptwriting in the project “Countdown” (“Vladimir Bokun’s Workshop”,Belarus) as an example.

Representation, Recognition, and the Possibility of a Radically Transformed Future: The Asian Americans Series

Asian Americans, a new five-part PBS series co-produced by Renee Tajima-Peña, Grace Lee, S. Leo Chiang, and Geeta Gandbhir has managed to do a rarity within the genre of Asian American film and video: addressing the need to make Asian Americans visible while simultaneously exploring deeper issues of race, racism, immigration, citizenship, and history that confront and engage the viewer in the ongoing need for social change. This series comes at an especially pertinent time when the seemingly arcane “yellow peril” racism of decades and centuries past has disturbingly resurfaced with the new COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating that history can and does repeat itself. The series argues for the urgency in using media—in this case, television documentary—to condemn the violence that continues to plague not only Asian Americans, but others similarly implicated by virtue of their marginal status, including African Americans, the working poor, and immigrants.