Annotated Bibliography Assignment

By Ian Kavanaugh, Team 5

 1. Brogan, Chris. "Why Harry Potter Was So Successful." Owner Magazine. Peterson Media Group, 1 Dec. 2013. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.

Chris Brogan’s blog article, “Why Harry Potter Was So Successful”, examines the series’ success from a very general perspective. Rather than make his article specific to the novel series or the film franchise, he analyzes the series’ success purely based on the story and the main character, Harry Potter.  Brogan has developed a formula for why “Harry is the ultimate point-of-view character…He finds himself in a weird situation. He experiences wonder and surprise. He learns that he has a way to affect the situation. He learns something in front of us that gives us that feeling that we’ve learned something, he vanquishes some enemy or wins some challenge, and we get the feeling of that accomplishment. Repeat.”

            Brogan explains how J.K. Rowling really makes the reader into the hero of the book. We connect with the character, because he is uncertain, vulnerable, and fearful at many times of the book, just as we would be. Harry Potter isn’t a “cocky and confident” character, and thus we connect with his vulnerability. In addition to this, the fact that we are thrown into the magical world of Hogwarts with just as much mystery and surprise as Harry is puts us on the exact same playing field as him. Harry is no expert in J.K. Rowling’s world of wizardry, and we grow to be comfortable in this foreign land just as he does.

2. Socher, Richard, Alex Perelygin, Jean Y. Wu, Jason Chuang, Christopher D. Manning, Andrew Y. Ng, and Christopher Potts. "Deeply Moving: Deep Learning for Sentiment Analysis." Sentiment Analysis. DISQUS, Apr. 2013. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.

     Sentiment Analysis is a broad, online tool that can be applied in a plethora of ways to any kind of text up to 200 lines. After entering a text under this length into the provided box, the tool analyzes the sentiment of each word and phrase within, ranging from “very negative, negative, neutral, and positive, to very positive”. The analyzer then provides its user with a “sentiment tree” that visually presents the determined sentiments of each phrase or word.

            With the provided sentiment tree, a user of this basic sentiment analyzer can proceed to hover his or her mouse over an icon that either represents a word or group of words, which causes the tool to display a bar graph that shows the word or phrase’s specific sentiment levels. If the user disagrees with the sentiment analysis of a given word or phrase, he or she may choose to label it with the correct classification as to add to the tool’s overall database of sentiment analyses. If one pleases, they can download their results or comment about their experience with the tool on the very same page.

            A user of this tool may also access the Sentiment Treebank in order to view other people’s experiences with the tool. In addition, one may access the “Help the Model” section of the website in order to correct sentiment labels within random sentences that he or she would disagree with. The tool’s basic structure and ability to analyze any form of text gives it the ability to be used for a wide variety of purposes. 

3. Puig, Claudia. "How 'Harry Potter' Magically Changed Films - USATODAY.com." USATODAY.COM. Gannet Co., 13 July 2011. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.

     Claudia Puig writes this article for USA Today about the monumental triumph of Harry Potter’s transition from a series of novels to the “most successful movie franchise in history. She weaves together quotes from the films’ screenwriter Steve Kloves, the first two films’ director Chris Columbus, Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe, Twilight director Chris Weitz, Harry Potter production designer Stuart Craig, Lionsgate president of production Alli Shearmur, and Twilight screenwriter Melissa Rosenburg. These quotes, in addition to other information she’s learned about the Harry Potter Franchise, provide Puig’s extensive reasoning for why the novel-to-film transition was received so well.

             Chris Columbus said that while making the first two films, him and the crew “aspired to be a sort of Godfather for kids” in the sense that Harry Potter could be just as “rich and complex” of a world, but merely one that children could enjoy just as much as an adult could. Puig explores how the filmmakers purposefully didn’t simplify the language or plot in order to specifically target a young adult audience. There was something about the series that allowed kids to experience a story and world that was in many ways very “adult-like” and adults to experience a story and world that brought them back through the stages of childhood.

            The article covers many aspects of the franchise’s success, including the road that it paved for other “copycats” such as Twilight, The Golden Compass, and even The Chronicles of Narnia. Puig’s writing begins to examine reasons behind why Twilight succeeded in the box office while The Chronicles of Narnia and The Golden Compass were less fortunate. 

4. Brodbeck, Frederic. "CINEMETRICS - Film Data Visualization."CINEMETRICS - Film Data Visualization. The Royal Academy of Arts, n.d. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.

          Cinemetrics is a bachelor graduation project created by Frederic Brodbeck at the Royal Academy of Arts. Building off of his thesis paper, Brodbeck had the idea of finding a new way to create graphics and visual data for movies. To do this, he decided to “use the movie itself as a source of data, to see what sort of information can be extracted from it, to find ways of visualizing it and to create the necessary tools to do this…” Cinemetrics was created so that one could extrapolate data from a movie itself; the editing structure, color, speech, and motion can be analyzed and broken down into information that can create what Brodbeck calls a “visual ‘fingerprint’” from these different characteristics of films.

            On the project’s main page, he explains all of this, and even continues to pose possible reasons why one would use the tool. Comparing two or more films to each other is a great way to use the tool; you can see the similarities or differences between original films and remakes, movies that are from the same genre or series, “different epochs of film-making”, or “movies by one director”. This tool could benefit people that study films, but also possibly allow people to create a new way to choose movies based off of the “formal criteria” that Cinemetrics creates.

5. McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Diss. 1996. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. Print.

     Brian McFarlane writes this multi-part scholarly article about an introduction to the theory of novel to film adaptation. He introduces the published work by explaining how the structure and language of the novel changed in the coming of the 20^th century; art forms began to converge in an interesting way, which caused novels to focus less on the narrative’s voice and more about creating a visual experience for the reader. For a 28-page scholarly work, McFarlane deeply explores many aspects of the novel to film adaptation, from a basic analysis of storytelling to an examination of what it means for a filmmaker to be “faithful” to a novel.

            This deeply analytical work compares the differences and similarities between a novel and film’s narrative functions. Brian McFarlane discusses the different modes of narration, narrative perspective, and how these different modes have varying cinematic potential. Questioned are posed concerning how the relationship between a story and a plot are both similar and different in novels and films. At the end of the scholarly work, he takes several pages to explain what makes an adaptation “proper”. In order to do so, McFarlane must revisit and explore new aspects of the novel that must be transferred into the film to make for a successful adaptation.