Annotated Bibliography Assignment

By Sam Beeler, Book-to-Film Franchise Project

 1. Sragow, Micheal. "The Secret to Harry Potter's Success".  BaltimoreSun.com 18 July. 2011. Web. 16 Nov. 2011.

In his article, Sragow examines the social impact of the Harry Potter film franchise promptly after the release of the final film in the series.  He explains that the franchise has resonated with a wide audience, including a very close gender split percentage.  "The audience numbers from this weekend's opening reflected that wide appeal: 54 percent were female and 46 percent were male", Sragow writes about the final films' audience opening weekend.  It is a comment that blatantly shows how the films were not extremely targeted for one specific gender.  Just as they targeted both genders, they also found their way into the hearts of all ages.  Sagow sites Adam Birnbum, a "film booker" who states, "That's why they've appealed so strongly to more than one generation," Birnbaum said. "Older kids who may have read the books years ago are now young adults. Younger kids then are now teenagers. And the later titles are new enough that there's a third demographic of kids just now discovering the books and going to the movies".  Sragow explains this time-elapse effect as so , "The books emerged over a 10-year period (1997-2007) and the movies, too, came out in the space of a decade, just a few years behind (2001-2011)".  This effect is a major reason as to why the film franchise was so successful. They gained popularity during this time in such a rapid way that it had a cultural impact like no other book to film franchise ever.

2. Clarke, Cath. "From Harry Potter to Narnia: The Pressure on Film Franchises to Perform". The Guardian. 9 Dec. 2010. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.

Throughout Clarke's article, she examines many differnet ways that film franchises might not measure up to the success of the Harry Potter films.  Looking specifically at the Narnia films and the Golden Compass, which had been planned on being a trilogy though did not pan out, Clarke looks at different possibilites as to why these films did not have as much commercial response as the Potter franchise. Although 2005's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was received fairly well by the public, the sequels were not.  "Prince Caspian took $420m worldwide. It cost $225m to make, and the same again to market. By comparison The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe took $745m, having been made for $180m".  Here Clarke shows that it cost more to make the sequel and the film took in far less money than its predecessor.  Clarke continues by explaining why it was believed that Prince Caspian wasn't as successful, "Here's Screen International's Mike Goodridge again: "I hate to say it, but with these films you have to hit what the studios call the 'four quadrant market': men, women, young and old. You have to hit everybody and then you have a genuine phenomenon." Prince Caspian, it was thought, pandered too much to teenage boys".  Therefore the demographic that these films cover is not broad enough to make the film franchise successful.  This brings up Clarke's next point that the Narnia films have switched studios due to the money loss and studios feeling as though they cannot support the franchise any longer. 

3. Levallois, Clement. "Umigon: sentiment analysis for tweets based on lexicons and heuristics". Web. 17 Nov. 2014

Since 2012 Umigon has been developing.  What umigon does is detects sentiment in tweets.  While it processes millions of tweets a minute umigon gives special care to "smileys and onomatopes" as well as "evaluates hashtags".  The user can input a tweet or a twitter users handle and up pops a chart of how the system reads each tweet with the umigon users search.  Each tweet is then categorized into one of three categories based on how the system reads the tweet.  The three categories are positive, negative, and neutral.  However, these readings may not be entirely accurate.  The system has no way recognizing sarcasm or irony so individual tweets are not always reliable when collecting data.  Instead it would be more useful to pull from a increased scale of tweets. This way a human user is also able to detect the overall feel of a tweet or a group of tweets.

4. Brodbeck, Fredric.  Cinemetrics-Film Data Visualization. Web. 17 Nov. 2014

The main premise behind Cinemetrics is to measure in a visual manner data about film.  In doing so it creates a "fingerprint" each film analyzed.  By looking at different aspects of the film such as color or the way in which a film is edited Cinemetrics is able to construct a unique visual graph for a film.  This method of analyzing film provides a new and intersting way for those looking to watch a film to understand what they are getting themselves into. The user can take a film and the tool extracts, processes, and visualizes the movie data.  The extraction consists of video, audio and subtitles. The processing then includes shot detetion and length, motion measuring, and color pallets.  While finally the visual measurement comes to us in the form of the film's fingerprint.  The fingerprint is then put on to the "poster".  The poster shows the breakdown of the film that has been analyzed and explains where the data has come from.

5. Brogan, Chris.  "Why Harry Potter Was So Successful". Owner Mag. 1 Dec. 2013. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.

Brogan clearly states in the beginning of his article that he is not the biggest fan of the Harry Potter world.  However he does not deny the success of it all. He begins to breakdown his reasoning as to why Harry Potter was so successful and the reasons are fairly simplistic. "Harry is the ultimate point-of-view character. He lets us see the world through his “is this really happening?” mindset, and gives us that feeling of “whoa, this seems pretty complicated, but if Harry’s going to be brave, I guess I’ll be brave and see how he’s going to navigate through all this”.  Brogan also includes a few bullet points such as "Harry learns something in front of us that gives us that feeling that we learned something" and "He vanquishes some enemy or wins some challenge, and we get that feeling of accomplishment" to help strength his point.  These simple reasons Brogan explains help us as readers to connect to the story and to the main character of Harry Potter.  It is through this we find entertainment in this world.  The more we are entertained the more we want to continue into this world. Brogan compliments this by stating, "J.K. Rowling makes us the hero of the Harry Potter books because she connects our fears and uncertainties with the character of Harry".  By making such a relatable story, in terms of character experience not so much story events, Harry Potter became something that people responded to in a tremendous way and will remain one of the most successful book series.