Annotated Bibliography Assignment

By Ricky Miller, Book-to-Film Franchise Project

1. Bethune, Brian. "The Afterlife of Harry Potter." Maclean's 124.27 (2011): 52. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 15 Nov. 2014.

This article, written by Brian Bethune for Canadian magazine Maclean's, is centered around the Harry Potter film franchise. The article is particularly focused on the social resonance and impact the film has with a wide audience. Bethune's article was published days after the release of the final Harry Potter film installment, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows - Part 2. As such, the article is less about the singular film's content or quality and more about the entirety of the franchise. Specifically, Bethune was interested in its "pure cash-generating power" as "the most far-reaching pop culture phenomenon of all time." Bethune rationalizes his assertion that the franchise will continue being socially relevant well past the final installment by noting that the film is now academically referenced by government institutions and is known by the general public across the world. He further theorizes that the franchise has enough presence in the physical world, through its real-life locations in London and theme park attractions dedicated to it, to never be forgotten by the public. However, Bethune also notes that the film studios responsible for Harry Potter will continue to propagate it through tie-in merchandise and even more theme park attractions as a way to maintain some of the revenue stream the series reliably brought in. Websites such as Pottermore and the availability of the Harry Potter book series, Bethune observes, are other factors that lend themselves to the franchise's longevity. Brian Bethune thus conveys that the Harry Potter media franchise spanning books, films, and merchandising is not only a stalwart within public consciousness, but that it is also consistently sustained beyond one medium as its own brand.

2. "Cinemetrics - Film Data Visualization." CINEMETRICS. Web. 11 Nov. 2014.

This is a software tool designed to analyze the visual qualities of a film and display a comprehensive graph of the analysis. With this tool, a user can input a DVD and the tool itself will break down the video files, audio files, subtitle files, and chapter data into individual parts. The tool extracts the files and gathers data from each individual part for analysis. Afterward, it synthesizes the data into a visual report of the findings. The process is more in-depth than a manual human could likely be, and it allows for an overall quicker analysis of several films. The software studies the video files according to "shot detection, average shot length, motion measuring, color palettes." The tool then creates a visual representation of the data. Using a segmented circular graph, each scene is represented. The size of the graph is based on the length of the entire film. Each segment within the graph "represents the length of ten shots" within the film, meaning the graph is segmented according to the amount of shots. In each segment of the graph, the tool displays the overall color palette of the film as well as the color palette for that particular set of shots.  The graph is also animated, each segment moving independently to represent the amount of movement in the chosen shots. The interactivity of the tool allows the user to better understand the significance of every shot in the film. Placing one's cursor over a point on the graph causes the tool to open a small window that displays the shot in the film that that point on the graph corresponds to. Because this tool was designed for data comparisons, it also has the ability to simultaneously examine multiple films without needing to start an entirely new project. Using several preset options even causes the tool to group several films together in one project for quick comparison between related films. These presets include comparing film remakes to the original production, comparing certain films within the same genre, or comparing several films by one director. The user can add to or subtract any of the films presented to better suit the individual's goal. Ultimately, this tool has various functions that allow any user to examine and compare the visual and tangible qualities of a film or video.

3. Grover, Ronald. "The Lion, the Witch, And the Franchise." Bloomberg BusinessWeek Magazine. Bloomberg LP, 6 Nov. 2005. Web. 15 Nov. 2014.

Ronald Grover, an entertainment industry writer for Bloomberg BusinessWeek Magazine, examines the process and intentions behind adapting The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe from a book to a film in this piece. The focus of the article is on the creation of a film franchise and the financial balance between cost and returns in terms of marketing and box office results. Grover establishes that part of the process in creating a flagship franchise for Anschutz Film Group and Walt Disney Co., the film's production studio and distributor respectively, involved acquiring the rights to the novel series for adaptation and establishing a fifteen-year plan for the franchise. The studios, according to Grover, intended to capitalize on the 90 million readers of The Chronicles of Narnia book series by creating what was at the time one of the most expensive Hollywood film productions. This article posits that each entity involved in the book series adaptation had a specific interest: Anschutz Film Group, being a Christian-founded family-friendly company, was interested in a wide audience being given a film with strong moral values; the Walt Disney Co. intended to create a special-effects driven franchise that would reliably bring in money comparable to rival Time Warner Inc. and Sony Picture Entertainment's Harry Potter and Spider-Man film series. Grover goes on to argue that both of these goals could work against the film. He posits that The Chronicle of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe would likely narrow its audience due to its heavy Christian leanings, and that its costly special-effects would necessitate massive box office returns to make the film financially successful. However, Grover acknowledges that the Walt Disney Co. heavily marketed the film to build anticipation for the film in every it could. Grover theorized the distributor hoped to recreate its success with The Lion King by licensing tie-in merchandise such as toys and replicas of the swords used in the film. The article goes on to reveal that the distributor hired the same marketing firm used to promote The Passion of the Christ, another Christian film that went on to gross over $600 million on a $30 million budget. With all this, Ronald Grover's overall examination concludes that two companies behind The Chronicle of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe film are separately concerned different aspects of the film's quality and inherent franchisability, but then goes on to detail how the companies aimed to market the former to exploit the latter. 

4. "Netlytic." Netlytic. Web. 11 Nov. 2014

Built around social media interactions , Netlytic is a "cloud-based text and social networks analyzer" that can be used to summarize and understand online conversations. By creating a free account, a user can create three datasets before requesting more. The user can import text files directly or import data from various social media sites. Users can link their Twitter and Instagram accounts to Netlytic to gather information from those sites. Videos from YouTube can be analyzed by inputting specific video IDs, and information from public Facebook pages can imported by copying that page's URL. Datasets from cloud storage providers and RSS feeds can also be imported for analysis. Furthermore, the Facebook data collector can be set to update at regular intervals. The imported and compiled text is gathered into the user's chosen dataset which can be named at any time.  The vast quantity of gathered text is sorted based on key terms and subjects to be analyzed according to the user's criteria. With the imported data, Netlytic illustrates the network through graphs. In addition to pie charts, Netlytic visualizes the results of its data-mining by using nodes in color-coded clusters. Each node represents a subject that is connected with lines to other subjects. This visual graph shows branching paths as subjects relate to different subjects. Netlytic ranks the nodes based customized criteria such as their connectivity with other nodes. In such a case, certain nodes that are central to multiple branches would be depicted as being larger than the other nodes. The created graph could then be exported as a .PNG file. These many features give Netlytic the ability to process, sort, and analyze massive amounts of data and text from social networks, cloud storage providers, and imported text files.

5. "Umigon." Umigon - Sentiment Analysis for Tweets/Twitter. Web. 11 Nov. 2014.

Umigon is an application that takes advantage of the social networking site Twitter. The user can input a "Twitter handle" or a specific "tweet" to begin using the tool. When given a handle, the tool gathers relevant tweets and presents them in a chart. This chart, which can also be exported to Windows Excel, consist of the user who sent the tweet pertaining to the inputted handle, the tweet itself,  the sentiment based on the individual words in the tweet, and the semantic features of the tweet, as well as an option to report a sentiment error to the applications coders. If the user chooses to input tweets instead of a handle, then the specific tweet or tweets are examined rather than any tweets related to it. Because this software examines sentiments and semantics independently and without an understanding of irony, sarcasm, or connotations, the resultant sentiment may not be conclusively accurate. The application also does not search for related keywords of similar handles when gathering multiple tweets. Thus, Umigon is useful in gathering large breadths of information for the user to then analyze closer than the software is able to itself. However, it also requires the user to input several variations of a Twitter handle to gather a reliable set of data. While Umigon itself possesses no ability to compare the findings, the chart it generates can be compared using Windows Excel.