Author Archives: Michael Korican

About Michael Korican

A long-time media artist, Michael’s filmmaking stretches back to 1978. Michael graduated from York University film school with Special Honours, winning the Famous Players Scholarship in his final year. The Rolling Stone Book of Rock Video called Michael's first feature 'Recorded: Live!' "the first film about rock video". Michael served on the board of L.I.F.T. when he lived in Toronto during the eighties and managed the Bloor Cinema for Tom and Jerry. He has been prolific over his past eight years in Victoria, having made over thirty-five shorts, won numerous awards, produced two works for BravoFACT! and received development funding for 'Begbie’s Ghost' through the CIFVF and BC Film.

Netflix scores with trippy interactive movie ‘Bandersnatch’

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The Black Mirror team have handed Netflix a major win with interactive movie ‘Bandersnatch.’

Netflix has dabbled with interactive titles before, but only for kids. This outing is definitively all-grown-up with drugs, madness and violence.

As summarized on SYFYwire:

“To experience the film, viewers begin watching it like any other program or movie. But as Bandersnatch moves along, a series of choices appear on the screen, roughly every few minutes or so. Using a remote control, console controller, or keyboard, viewers make the decisions for the story’s protagonist, sending the narrative off in any number of new directions.”

Over five hours of completed scenes were shot.

“The branching narratives have been developed through a new Netflix software called Branch Manager, which can also allow viewers to exit and start all over again if they choose. The project is supported on most TVs, game consoles and either Android or iOS devices as long as they’re running the latest version of Netflix.”

How complex is the story map? See this picture or this summary. Warning: contains spoilers.

My take: I love this! The theme of who’s in control is perfect for an interactive movie about a programmer programming an interactive video game. The fact that the movie has been gamified (as the various endings have different point ratings) is hard to miss. Makes my first interactive musings look simple in comparison. I would love to make a Netflix Interactive Movie!

LG announces new Ultra Short Throw 4K projector

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Will you still be on Santa’s Nice List in January?

LG will announce its latest CineBeam Laser 4K projector at CES 2019 in Las Vegas within two weeks.

The HU85L uses Ultra Short Throw (UST) technology that lets it project a 90-inch diagonal image when the unit is a mere 2 inches from the wall.

It can project a 120-inch image when placed 7 inches from the wall.

Here’s a review of last year’s model:

My take: Not cheap at something like $3,000 (3K for 4K?) but would mean you could dispense with a TV in your living room.

AI-generated photos now life-like

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Tero Karras, Samuli Laine and Timo Aila of Nvidia have just published breakthrough work on Generative Adversarial Networks and images:

“We propose an alternative generator architecture for generative adversarial networks, borrowing from style transfer literature. The new architecture leads to an automatically learned, unsupervised separation of high-level attributes (e.g., pose and identity when trained on human faces) and stochastic variation in the generated images (e.g., freckles, hair), and it enables intuitive, scale-specific control of the synthesis. The new generator improves the state-of-the-art in terms of traditional distribution quality metrics, leads to demonstrably better interpolation properties, and also better disentangles the latent factors of variation.”

I’ve blogged about Nvidia’s GANs and image generation before, but this improvement in quality is remarkable.

If I understand it correctly, the breakthrough is applying one picture as a “style” or filter on another picture. Applying the filters in the left column to the pictures across the top yields the AI-generated pictures in the middle.

Read the scientific paper for full details.

Of course, we’ve seen something similar before. Way back in 1985 Godley & Creme released a music video for their song Cry; the evocative black and white video used analogue wipes and fades to blend a myriad of faces together, predating digital morphing. Here’s a cover version and video remake by Gayngs, including a cameo by Kevin Godley:

My take: Definitely scary. But if that’s the current state of the art, I think it means we are _not_ living in the Simulation — yet, even though Elon Musk says otherwise.

Fandor latest streaming service on the ropes

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Matt Lopez writes in The Wrap that Fandor has laid off its whole 40-person staff as it looks for a buyer in order to continue.

He adds context:

“The layoffs come a month after Defy Media shut its doors, laying off an estimated 80 staff, and less than a week after Otter Media announced it was cutting 10 percent of its staff. The news also follows WarnerMedia’s closure of its classic movie streaming service FilmStruck, a shutdown that Fandor ironically tried to capitalize on by offering a discount to former FilmStruck subscribers. Other video-centric companies that have been met with layoffs this year include WarnerMedia’s DramaFever, which shutdown in October; Refinery29, which lost 40 employees that same month; and Mic, a news-focused media outlet that laid off most of its staff towards the end of November.”

My take: it’s always sad when a streaming service can’t continue, especially one that revered classic, cult and indie movies. At $6/month, Fandor wasn’t expensive. My problem is that I only have so much time to devote to consuming screen entertainment. Sorry, Fandor, you were on my radar but Netflix and Prime have my eyeballs for now.

Netflix Canada raises prices amid more competition

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Barely a year after it raised prices, Netflix is doing it again.

Netflix vs. Amazon Prime vs. Hulu Plus

The CBC reports that the streaming juggernaut will be upping prices by $1 or $3 per month, depending on the plan.

According to the CBC:

“Netflix says the move will help fund upcoming TV series and films as well as overall improvements to the Netflix platform.”

Recently, Bell Media doubled the price of its Crave streaming service to $19.98, now including Hollywood movies and HBO.

Emphasizing the shift to cord cutting, the CBC claims:

“Bell’s move marks the first time Canadians will be able to legally obtain new HBO shows without a cable television subscription.”

Also, on the horizon is the revamped Criterion Channel that…

“…will be picking up where the old service left off, programming director spotlights and actor retrospectives featuring major Hollywood and international classics and hard-to-find discoveries from around the world, complete with special features like commentaries, behind-the-scenes footage, and original documentaries. We will continue with our guest programmer series, Adventures in Moviegoing. Our regular series like Art-House America, Split Screen, and Meet the Filmmakers, and our Ten Minutes or Less section will all live on, along with Tuesday’s Short + Feature and the Friday Night Double Feature, and of course our monthly fifteen-minute film school, Observations on Film Art.”

For less than Netflix.

My take: Also in the wings are Disney’s standalone streaming service and Apple’s rumoured content hub. Obviously, it will get expensive to sign up for every streaming service out there. What will differentiate them? Ease of use, codec efficiency and, mainly, content exclusivity. 2019 will be the year the media landscape fractures into specialty outlets. Gone will be any semblance of one service for all audiences.

Toronto’s Wattpad generates a billion data points daily

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Leora Kornfeld, on the CMF Trends Now & Next E03 podcast, interviews Aron Levitz, head of Wattpad Studios.

Wattpad has 65 million monthly readers and 4 million authors. All of that activity generates a billion data points — daily.

The key take-away: this amount of written word big data allows creative industries to make much more educated bets on filmed content.

Aron concludes:

“At the end of the day, the data is a tool. It becomes part of a development executive’s, director’s, show-runner’s and editor’s repertoire that they don’t have today. By no means does this negate the necessity for a great screenwriter. We need a script to be generated, we need someone with a creative vision on how to take 300 pages and turn it into 90 for a feature, for example. But the data is there to help you understand what people have loved already and what people will love in the future.”

Read the full transcript.

My take: I’ve blogged about Wattpad twice previously. I’ll admit to liking The Kissing Booth. I’m fascinated by the insights actual user data illuminates — down to the paragraph level!

File sharing on the rise; is exclusivity to blame?

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Cam Cullen of Sandvine has made a curious observation: “File sharing on the internet reverses a downward trend.”

He details on his blog:

“In 2011, file sharing was huge on fixed networks and tiny on mobile. In the Americas, for example, 52.01% of upstream traffic on fixed networks and 3.83% of all upstream mobile traffic was BitTorrent. In Europe, it was even more, with 59.68% of upstream on fixed and 17.03% on mobile. By 2015, those numbers had fallen significantly, with Americas being 26.83% on the upstream and Europe being 21.08% on just fixed networks. During the intervening year, traffic volume has grown drastically on the upstream, with more social sharing, video streaming, OTT messaging, and even gaming on it.”

And concludes: “That trend appears to be reversing, especially outside of the Americas.”

Karl Bode of Motherboard continues in an article focussing on piracy:

“After years of declines, BitTorrent usage and piracy is on the rise again. The culprit: an increase in exclusivity deals that force subscribers to hunt and peck among a myriad of streaming services to actually find the content they’re looking for.”

Case in point, Disney is about to pull its titles from Netflix and launch its own streaming service.

Karl argues:

“The problem: consumers only have so much disposable income, and the growing laundry-list of services users now need to subscribe to if they want to watch all of their favorite movies and shows can not only become confusing, but prohibitively expensive. That’s especially true overseas, where geographical viewing restrictions hamper access to popular U.S. content. As a result, these users are starting to drift back to piracy.”

My take: it’s paradoxical that, as they move away from expensive Cable TV bundles of standard and premium content to the internet and its cheaper streaming services, viewers now face the daunting and expensive task of recreating similar bundles online. Hence the lure of BitTorrent for some: they can get all of their favourites there. Recall this was the case before Apple launched iTunes and gave law-abiding citizens an easy, relatively cheap way to download their music. (In the meantime, music has moved to a subscription-based model.) Who will be the first to offer every TV show and movie in a subscription service? This would be the culmination of the evolution from Cable TV to Premium TV to VOD to Streaming.

||Superwoman|| brb???

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CBC Arts correspondent Eli Glasner reports that Canadian Youtube star Lilly Singh is taking a break. Appropriately, she made the announcement on Youtube:

Understandingly, she wants to prioritize her mental health. She is:

  1. physically, mentally and spiritually exhausted
  2. not happy with her current content
  3. confused by constant Youtube algorithm changes, and
  4. busy with her production company and other commitments

She says she will be right back but needs this break for her sanity and happiness.

Singh was 2017’s highest paid female Youtube star, earning $10.5M and tenth place. She was third on the list in 2016, earning $7.5M.

My take: clearly celebrity takes a toll. Being at the mercy of your platform must be difficult too. One day, your formula works. Some technological tweaks later, it doesn’t: it’s not you, it’s Youtube. Happened to me when Google tweaked its search algorithm and we disappeared off the main page for our search term where we’d been happily ensconced for a decade. Poof!

Streaming video consumes more than half of Internet traffic

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Sandvine has released the latest version of their Global Internet Phenomena Report and the insights are many.

For example:

  • Video streaming is almost 58% of total downstream volume
  • Netflix is 15% of total downstream volume
  • Youtube is 11% and Amazon Prime is 4%
  • BitTorrent is almost 22% of total upstream volume
  • League of Legends is 26% of global gaming traffic
  • Fortnite is 15% and Minecraft is 7%
  • Instagram is 42% of global social networking traffic
  • Facebook is 38% and Tumblr is 5%
  • Spotify is 33% of global audio streaming traffic
  • Apple Music is 9% and Google Play Music is 1%

Download the PDF here.

My take: interestingly, Netflix videos have the smallest file sizes, followed by Prime Video and then iTunes. I wonder if that could somehow be part of their success; imagine what their share of internet traffic would be if their file sizes were double or even ten times larger.

FilmFreeway defeats Withoutabox

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Chris O’Falt reports on IndieWire that FilmFreeway “will not use its position to force festivals into exclusive arrangements,” the tactic that Withoutabox thought would ensure its survival.

Last week Withoutabox unexpectedly announced that it would be shutting down within a year.

O’Falt quotes Andrew Michael:

“While we love it when festivals choose to use FilmFreeway exclusively, we never require exclusivity and we never will. Festivals should have complete autonomy as to how they run their events and the services they choose to help them reach filmmakers. We don’t believe in the approach that WAB used to lock up festivals exclusively with secret contracts. We’ve always believed that if we provide festivals with a high quality product, personal customer care, and a world-class user experience they will continue to happily utilize FilmFreeway to facilitate and manage their submissions.”

O’Falt sketches a brief history of WAB and its issues.

He then reveals some welcome news from FF:

“Recently, the company started offering festivals the ability to sell tickets on FilmFreeway with no fees, and is getting ready to create a free-of-charge DCP creation tool for customers. This week, FilmFreeway plans to announce a price reduction.”

My take: I’ve used both services and withoutadoubt FilmFreeway is better than Withoutabox. I think the only benefit WAB provided was that your film would get a listing on IMDb. Soon, you’ll have to do that manually. 8-(