CCTV not all it’s cracked up to be: Police procedural producers panic

Could this be the end of The Bill? Make Red Road a one off rather than the first of its kind? Will this be the end of the line for lazy, time- or budget-strapped producers of police shows now they will have to work harder to use the miracle of surveillance camera as easy guarantee of guilt (and convenient plot truncation).

Interesting use of image recognition software to ‘backtrack’ surveillance footage and defeat dastardly hoodied hoodlums, appropriated from advertising.

Owen Bowcott reports for The Guardian May 6 (audio here)

Police officers monitor CCTV screens in the control room at New Scotland Yard in London. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AFP/Getty images

CCTV boom has failed to slash crime, say police

Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.

The warning comes from the head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) at New Scotland Yard as the force launches a series of initiatives to try to boost conviction rates using CCTV evidence. They include:

· A new database of images which is expected to use technology developed by the sports advertising industry to track and identify offenders.

· Putting images of suspects in muggings, rape and robbery cases out on the internet from next month.

· Building a national CCTV database, incorporating pictures of convicted offenders as well as unidentified suspects. The plans for this have been drawn up, but are on hold while the technology required to carry out automated searches is refined.

The unit is now investigating whether it can use software - developed to track advertising during televised football games - to follow distinctive brand logos on the clothing of unidentified suspects. “Sometimes you are looking for a picture, for example, of someone with a red top and a green dragon on it,” he explained. “That technology could be used to track logos.” By back-tracking, officers have often found earlier pictures, for example, of suspects with their hoods down, in which they can be identified.

All roads lead to Dino de Laurentiis

Preparing a talk for ATOM Queensland on contemporary trends and developments, and simultaneously thinking and writing about the history of the Gold Coast as a movie location.

1. The idea of YouTube as a modern ‘cinema of attractions’ is an idea that my AFTRS colleague Teresa Rizzo developed to teach early cinema in screen studies through production. Students mimic the conditions and concerns of the early actualities, often to great effect:

(’Bondi Sushiland’)

(’A Minute to School’)

2. The idea about YouTube and the cinema of attractions came from Henry Jenkins, who writes about ‘YouTube and the Vaudeville Aesthetic’ on his blog Confessions of an Aca-Fan,

Some YouTube content also involves spectacular use of technology, as in this video which I received from one of my students. Here, the basic mechanics of the racing game are hacked, producing a spectacular and sublime display of movement, which very much recalls the fascination with escalating chases which was part of the early cinema. The film historian Tom Gunning has talked about cinema at the turn of the century as a “cinema of attractions” and that term seems very apt for what draws us back again and again to YouTube.

Unfortunately the video Jenkins links to doesn’t seem to work (for me?).

3. I haven’t read Henry Jenkins’ blog for a while, so I clicked over to the latest posts. Here I encounter the fifth of his MIT Masters students’ “intimate critiques”

Spy Stories
by Xiaochang Li

Marcel Proust, working from the sinking grave of his bed, tells us that we are creatures
assembled from faulty memory, the eager sum of our desperate retellings, frantic
optimists. Autobiography is not the province of excavation but construction, and even
the most honest of us are careful architects of repetition and forgetfulness, deliberate
amnesiacs working to amass reasonable explanations for what we have become.
Recollection, I learned, is just another form of secrecy.

In the 60s spy satire, Get Smart, Maxwell Smart is a haphazard agent engaged in a long-term stand-off with an organization called KAOS, an epic battle against the perpetrators of general disarray. He fumbled his way through disarming death rays and and foiling assassination plots, assured in his aptitude even as he walked into the obvious traps and locked himself inside phone booths. This he taught me too: we are not always what we appear, even to ourselves.

Read the rest of this fine essay here.

4. I read another ‘intimate critique’, a mode of academic writing: Lana Swartz’s ‘My Mary Sue: What Fanfic Noobdoom Reveals about Scholarly Method‘, a story of obsession with Les Miserables and later Tolstoy and War and Peace.

5. Dino De Laurentiis produced War and Peace in 1956. He told Stephen Prigge (in Movie Moguls Speak: Interviews With Top Film Producers Jefferson, NC: Macfarland, 2004, p. 62) “You could write a whole book on my experiences with War and Peace“. Later he says:

There is a type of producer who knows only the mechanics of how to make a picture. Then there is also a producer who has inside himself the intuition that I call, in Italian, ‘Pallino’ [to be obsessed]. The Pallino gives the drive to create the movie in a certain way… The movie industry is not an industry of prototypes. In every movie we have different challenges creatively and artistic problems. They have to be solved in very different ways. (p.68)

Headset allows control of video games by mind power

Sydney Morning Herald reports the development by Australian company Emotiv Systems of the EPOC headset which will retail in the US for US$299

Featuring 14 sensors that measure electrical impulses from the brain, the headset - which plugs into the PC’s USB port - will enable games to register facial expressions, emotions and even cognitive thoughts, allowing players to perform in-game actions just by visualising them.

The headset works in a similar way to voice recognition, in that it must first be calibrated using Emotiv’s software to recognise patterns in the user’s electrical brain impulses, which are used to perform 30 preset actions.

Set to Screen : Baz Luhrmann how-to podcasts and student filmmaking competition

Set to Screen

Baz Luhrmann and Apple Education launch podcast series of short how-tos and lessons on roles and departments on set, from the set of Australia.

Every few weeks through October, a new podcast episode from Baz and his production team will introduce you to another aspect of moviemaking, starting with on-set still photography, then moving on to costume design, cinematography, scoring, and more. You’ll get insights from the artists at work on Australia, watch them in action, view footage the rest of the world hasn’t seen yet, and follow along as the movie comes together.

There is also a series of competitions for secondary and tertiary students, info at the site.

Oh, and one more thing. Submit the top project for the final challenge, and Baz himself will plan your trip to Oz, meet you there, and take you along on the promotional tour for the film in the U.S. Your project will even be included on the DVD release of Australia.

Start your journey now.

Subscribe to the Set to Screen Series, and iTunes will automatically download each new episode that’s posted. Once you’ve watched an episode, come back here to check out the notes about the featured member of the production team, and—if there’s a challenge for that episode—get all the details you’ll need to participate. So start exploring your creativity. You could wind up anywhere, even Down Under.

Peter Giles at The New Black is enthusiastic, but disappointed.

The only thing is they’re not doing as good a job as Peter Jackson did on King Kong in 2005 with his on-set video diaries being posted on the web every week of the shoot. The site is still up here and it’s maintained by King Kong fans but includes all those original production diaries which are such a mine of information for film students everywhere. And they’re distributed by Bit Torrent as opposed to Baz Luhrmann’s material going through the Apple iTunes walled garden. Common guys, get with the program - and I mean Apple, Fox and Luhrmann - make this stuff freely available everywhere and it will actually have a much bigger pay off in terms of generating pre-release buzz. And it won’t harm your street cred with an internet savvy audience.

It may be a little early to compare this with Jackson’s Kong diaries, and I seemed to be able to download the podcasts for free via iTunes today.

Lynden Barber has background story at Eyes Wired Open, and several parodies of the trailer featuring a montage of Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman’s roles in other films to tell the story of this epic film.

Forthcoming episodes:

  • Design —
    Coming in May
  • Costume Design —
    Coming in May
  • Location Shooting I —
    Coming in June
  • Location Shooting II —
    Coming in July
  • Cinematography —
    Coming in July
  • Location Sound Recording —
    Coming in August
  • Music Composition —
    Coming in September
  • Editing —
    Coming in September


Frank S Foster on Project Canoe, via MediaPost’s TV Board blog 28 April 2008
Frank S Foster on Project Canoe, via MediaPost’s TV Board blog 28 April 2008

Project Canoe has tremendous potential. Imagine a single sales entity that might allow cable to compete in the national spot market with a variety of new television advertising vehicles. Perhaps Madison Avenue might be interested in on-demand and addressable advertising on a massive scale? Project Canoe may provide the answer. Would CBS be interested in reducing its national inventory by one minute per prime-time hour to sell Canoe-enabled addressable spots during “Survivoror “Cold Case? Would NBC and Fox embrace an on-demand, addressable-ad-supported service to complement Hulu? Would advertisers be interested in true, near-census commercial ratings for both broadcast and cable television? With a unified advertising sales vision across all cable operators, these opportunities and more are possible.

Foster writes on ratings, and is a strong critic of Nielsen.

Background on Project Canoe at Multichannel News

Absent parents in Australian cinema

Walkabout Tom White
Just doing the final edits on my chapter with Brian Yecies on Sejong Park’s Birthday Boy. The editors rightly requested examples to flesh out my throwaway line that “the absent parent is common to both Korean and Australian cinema”.

Thinking about some Australian examples of which there are many, I realise that there are a variety of types of films about/featuring (or rather, not featuring) absent parents distinguished by whether it is father or mother who is absent, whether the absence of the parent drives the narrative (eg. the quest to find the parent), is peripheral to it, or is never fully explained (except perhaps in the characters of surrogate parents as in boarding school films), whether there is reconciliation at the end between absent parent and child(ren), whether the absence occurs prior to the start of the film, or whether it happens during the film, whether the film tells the story of the parent who is absent or the story of the child(ren).

Some examples:

Bad Boy Bubby (1993, Rolf De Heer) - Bubby kills his mother and Pop (his father?) and enters the real world

Beneath Clouds (2001, Ivan Sen) - Quest - Lena’s search for her father

The Boys (1997, Rowan Woods) - Absent father never explained, weak surrogate father

Careful, He Might Hear You (1983, Carl Schultz) - Dead mother (in childbirth), absent father, absent father returns - struggle between aunts for custody of six year old boy, alcoholic father returns late in the piece

Dead Letter Office (1998, John Ruane) - Absent father - woman who has been writing to her absent father for years takes a job at the Dead Letter Office and tries to find him

Hotel Sorrento (1994, Richard Franklin) - Death of father at family reunion

Love Letters from Teralba Road (1977, Stephen Wallace) - Absent father unremarked

Metal Skin (1994, Geoffrey Wright) - Absent mother, crazy father dies during film

Radiance (1998, Rachel Perkins) - Death of mother precipitates family reunion

Romper Stomper (1992, Geoffrey Wright) - absent father seems to be reason for secondary character Davey joining skinhead gang

Soft Fruit (1999, Christina Andreef) - Dying mother precipitates family reunion

Storm Boy (1976, Henri Safran) - Absent mother never properly explained

Tom White (2004, Alkinos Tsilimodos) - Story of the father who leaves, some kind of reconciliation at end

Walkabout (1971, Nicolas Roeg) - absent mother (no explanation), death of father (suicides early in the film) sparks journey of two children through the outback

Any others, or other types?

Looking inside the brain in real time

This is quite extraordinary.

Neuroscientist Christopher deCharms (founder of Omneuron), a life sciences company developing new uses of MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) technology gave a talk at TED this year in which he demonstrated real-time scanning of brain activity. At present, the focus of Omneuron’s research is on chronic pain management, based on the idea that if you can see your brain activity when you are in pain, you can control it. There are many potential uses of this technology; it could conceivably help us understand what happens in the brain as we watch or interact with media, which might then help content creators develop particular kinds of content with particular functional ends in mind.

A hypothesis: If it is possible to stimulate the production of new nerve cells in the brain (as Professor Perry Bartlett of the Queensland Brain Institute and other researchers have shown), and if watching and engaging with media content stimulates brain activity (which is common-sensical, but has also been demonstrated by researchers at the Computational Neuroimaging Laboratory in the Center for Neural Science at New York University among others), then it will be possible to design media content to stimulate brain activity in people whose brains have been damaged by dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and perhaps even rewire the brain.

Nu Image/Millennium Films due to break ground today on Shreveport, Louisiana studio

Variety is reporting that construction is due to begin today (22 April) on a new studio in Shreveport, Louisiana. The studio is being built by Nu Image/Millennium Films, which has already made five feature films in the city since October 2006: Blonde Ambition and Major Movie Star both starring Jessica Simpson, Mad Money, My Mom’s New Boyfriend, and Cleaner.

The new studio was only made possible through the generosity of Louisiana taxpayers; it is reported (by Melody Brumble of Associated Press - “Shreveport residents moved to make way for film studio”, 22 March 2008) that Nu Image/Millennium Films will receive up to US$4.8 million in tax credits over the next five years in return for its $10 million investment in the studio.

Millennium received pre-certification for up to $4.8 million in tax credits in October [2007], but it must spend at least one-fourth of the total project cost before receiving the first round of credits. The credits will be paid out over five years, with more than three-quarters of the payout scheduled in the first three years.

The development highlights the growing practice of governments providing tax credits, low-interest loans and other forms of incentives to production companies to secure production infrastructure and film projects. Almost forty US states now offer some kind of production incentives. And the cost to the public purse is not limited to these incentives to production companies; the city, through the Shreveport Housing Authority and the Community Development Department, bought up land and properties at the site and is providing housing vouchers and paying relocation expenses including utility deposits for residents of the Pendleton Apartments building which is being razed to make room for the studio.

For many governments, such developments are opportunities to ‘revitalise’ or remediate or rebuild urban areas, although the long-term benefits to the community are moot. In her chapter in the forthcoming book Cross Border Cultural Production: Economic Runaway or Globalization? (eds Janet Wasko and Mary Erickson, Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press), Susan Christopherson notes:

In her State of the State Address in January 2005, Louisiana’s governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, said that Louisiana’s $73 million growth in tax revenues in 2004 would be unavailable for teacher raises because it would,instead, fund the (currently) $70 million film tax credit program (p.68)

In another chapter of the book Shenid Bhayroo and Eileen R. Meehan (”The Other L.A.: Louisiana Woos Hollywood”) describe the development and implementation of Louisiana’s generous film incentives program. (I also have a chapter in the book, co-authored by Tom O’Regan, entitled “International Film Production: Interests and Motivations”.)

Earlier this month, the state of Michigan introduced a 40% rebate on production spending, and tax credits for expenditure on production infrastructure. Michigan’s governor, Jennifer Granholm, described the state’s incentives as the most “aggressive” in the country. Louisiana offers a 40% tax credit for studio development, although the scheme has been compromised by developers including golf courses, hotels, and retail stores in their applications for the credits. The credits can be used to reduce the developer’s state income tax liability, or they can be sold often at a discount to brokers acting on behalf of (non-film) investors to reduce their income tax payments.

The Shreveport studio development comes less than a year after plans for a $185 million studio in New Orleans were shelved following the arrest of Louisiana’s former film commissioner on suspicion of taking bribes in return for inflating the value of state tax credits. The Times-Picayune newspaper reported on 4 April that Mark Smith pleaded guilty to accepting bribes in September 2007, and was due to be sentenced earlier this month. Sentencing was postponed until the end of July as the FBI’s investigation into the state’s incentives program is still ongoing. There is no suggestion that Nu Image/Millennium Films were in any way involved in this case.

The Louisiana state legislature enacted a 40% tax credit for production infrastructure built in the state after 1 July 2005; the scheme has recently been overhauled after the Louisiana Economic Development Foundation received 34 applications for a total of $3.9 billion (see Gary Perilloux “State Hones Film Rules” The Baton Rouge Advocate 25 Jan 2008). Eligible film productions can also claim a 25% tax credit.

In an article in the Boston Globe (”Show Me the Money” 17 April 2008), Bruce Mohr describes how the credits work:

Traditional tax credits reduce how much tax a company has to pay on its profits. They are of little value to movie production or life science companies that often wait years before turning a profit. What these companies desperately want is to monetize their tax credits and turn them into cash. Refundable or transferable tax credits allow them to do just that. In essence, the more money a company spends on a targeted business activity the more money it gets back from the state.

The 25 percent film tax credit is a perfect example. A movie spending $20 million here [Massachusetts] would receive credits worth $5 million that could be sold to someone who owes taxes in Massachusetts or sold back to the state at 90 cents on the dollar. Either way, the production company walks away with cash that helps defray the cost of the movie.”It’s free money,” said John Hadity, a former Miramax executive who now runs a New York consulting business that helps studios maximize the tax credits states are showering on them. “Credits have become the math for making films.”

Nu Image/Millennium Films also owns the NuBoyana Studios (the former Bulgarian national film studio), where Brian DePalma’s The Black Dahlia was shot in 2006. Last year the company built a giant New York backlot in Bulgaria.

2020 Summit: Producer Sue Maslin reports for Screen Hub

Producer Sue Maslin (Road to Nhill, Japanese Story) has written an insider’s report for Screen Hub on the ‘Towards a Creative Australia’ stream of the 2020 Summit which was held on the weekend of 19-20 April in Canberra.

In relation to screen culture, our goal is to increase growth in three major ways: growth in capacity (production and distribution): quality and audience/user reach. Simply put, we want to tell more stories, better stories and we want to tell them in better ways that are relevant to audiences.

We had seven priority ideas and a host of others which can be summarised as follows:

1 – Increase expenditure on Research & Development
• Tax Incentives for private investment in R & D
• Mandating 20% of government screen funding expenditure to be allocated to R&D

2 – Reward success
• Ensure incentives which reward screen content which demonstrates significant cultural and financial success

3 – Remove barriers
• Rigidity of funding models and reporting requirements
• Inadequate marketing support
• Inadequate support for new digital media technologies
• Legal complexity and excessive documentation
• Rigidity of R&D investment
• Lack of increase in real terms for national broadcasters to invest in local talent
• Lack of practitioner representation on boards,
• Complexity of applications
• Optical fibre to the node and not to the home
• Inflexible and expensive insurance

4 – Future proof government screen and broadcasting policy:
• Make producer offset format and technology neutral (including non time based media)
• Mandate 80% quota for Australian content by broadcasters in digital delivery five fold increase in support of public broadcasting as a hub / brand for quality, distinctive Australian content into the future

5 – Develop metrics to measure cultural value – ‘creative credits ‘(i.e. carbon credits) as a tradeable commodity

6 – Ensure access for emerging practitioners to screen agencies in changing media environment.

7 – Simplify governance demands of screen agencies
• cap administrative / internal costs at 5 – 10% of annual budgets.

There were many, many more ideas including keeping on the table the need for a whole of industry national screen strategy, government taking culture out of the US Free Trade Agreement, making Marketing a key priority of the new Screen Australia, Government taking immediate steps to remove the sedition laws that impede freedom of speech, establishing an innovation fund and finally, taking immediate steps to improve the Producer Offset including increasing the rebate to 40% on documentaries.

The Summit was an initiative of new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. It brought together 1000 Australians from around the country to discuss ‘big ideas’ for the nation’s future policy, social, economic and cultural settings. The ten areas of focus were:

  1. The Productivity Agenda – education, skills, training, science and innovation
  2. The Future of the Australian Economy
  3. Population, sustainability, climate change and water
  4. Future directions for rural industries and rural communities
  5. A long-term national health strategy – including the challenges of preventative health, workforce planning and the ageing population
  6. Strengthening communities, supporting families and social inclusion
  7. Options for the future of indigenous Australia
  8. Towards a creative Australia: the future of the arts, film and design
  9. The future of Australian governance: renewed democracy, a more open government (including the role of the media), the structure of the Federation and the rights and responsibilities of citizens
  10. Australia’s future security and prosperity in a rapidly changing region and world.

The initial report is available here, with more of the detail of discussions in each stream to be put on the website in coming weeks. There was some criticism that some areas - games and digital culture - were under- or un-represented in the Creative stream, although some of these concerns were covered in one of the many pre-Summit local, school and community summits. Tom Worthington has a full report on the Open: Technology and Digital Knowledge Local Summit which was held on 3 April. There has also been predictable criticism from the Opposition that the Summit was simply a leftie gabfest or a jamboree for ‘Keating-loving elites’ and an attempt to revive issues and ideas that last had significant airings during the term of the previous Labor PM. Most of their outrage was focused on the Summit’s reignition of the Republic debate.

The question of whether the Summit will make a difference to Australian screen culture or any other area is obviously still moot. But representatives of screen industries and screen culture bodies were vocal and visible throughout the weekend in the ABC coverage I watched, with Cate Blanchett and new baby Iggy featuring in almost every speech and photograph, and being an ongoing subject of debate post-Summit.

And this was not (only) an opportunity for sector representatives to make the same old arguments for ‘more (public) money for the Yarts‘, as some critics have suggested. There were some ideas that Sue Maslin did not report on which do go significantly beyond this and which could achieve much broader outcomes than simply sustaining artists and creatives, such as the proposal to employ mid-career artists as mentors in schools (artists here not, presumably, being confined to visual or performance artists, but also to all creatives), and another to encourage philanthropy through individual sponsorship of individual artists.

Other streams came up with ideas that could have far-reaching implications for arts and screen culture, including one proposal from the Future Security and Prosperity stream for a campaign to develop regional literacy and engagement with Asia through language teaching and community links which would have a significant arts and cultural component. Personally I would like to see this integrated with another proposal to develop a ‘Pacific partnership’, starting with micro-states, to ensure that the cultural diversity and potential of the vast region east of Australia is not overlooked (again) in the rush to develop ties with Indonesia, Japan, China and India.

Screen music and transnationalism


A report from Associated Press (’Bulgaria the new location for outsourcing film scores‘) highlights two norms of contemporary screen production: inter- or transnational collaboration, and the global competition not only for entire projects, but for parts of a project, in this case screen composition, orchestration and music recording.

As the American film industry cuts costs, orchestras in Prague, Budapest and Sofia are picking up recording contracts for Hollywood scores, or those of French and Italian blockbusters.

A Balkan country known for its skilled musicians and low labour costs, Bulgaria has become an attractive spot for outsourcing film scores.

It was in the early 1990s that Western filmmakers began shifting film score recording to studios in Eastern Europe - Prague, Budapest, Moscow, Belgrade, Bratislava, Sofia - mostly for financial reasons. “Compared to the United States or even Western Europe, our prices are five times lower,” Borislav [Chouchkov] says.

The recordings are done in a studio at Radio Bulgaria, which Borislav says is thought to be unique in the Balkans because of its acoustics and equipment.

He says his company’s best asset is its orchestra, also called SIF309. Its original film scores include the music of Bruno Coulais to Les Choristes, a 2005 Oscar nominee for best music.

The Chouchkov family’s company, SIF309, includes an orchestra, the Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra-SIF309. It has worked on a large number of films and other projects with filmmakers principally from Europe (Italy and France in particular) but also from the USA. A full list of credits is available here.