Browsing by Subject "Video"
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Item A new proscenium : exploring interactive live performance in a socially distant digital world(2021-05-06) Conard, Jordan Christopher; Bloodgood, WilliamIn the era of virtual entertainment and social distancing protocols, many live entertainment industries are asking how they might create engaging experiences that connect audiences and performers. Is it possible to merge Theatre, Television, and Gaming into a new medium that plays to the strengths of each of these forms? What actions can be taken to successfully combine mediums and maintain liveness? How can we remotely and virtually connect audiences and performers? In a connected world, with entertainment at our fingertips, my curiosity in cross medium entertainment has been given an opportunity, as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic, to devise and create a system that would allow for audiences and performers to connect in real-time from anywhere in the world. While the prevalence of producing streamed theatre over Zoom places a temporary band-aid on the problem of being unable to congregate in person; Existing technologies allow for connections to be found for audiences and performers alike in live entertainment, using low latency video streaming, audience voting, bespoke website user interfaces, and audience dictated diverting storylines; audiences and performers can indeed connect via a new spin on live entertainment. While there are inevitably obstacles encountered with emerging technologies and techniques, I conclude the live entertainment industry should explore the convergence of mediums rather than settle for the limitations of virtual Zoom Theatre or recorded Theatre performances. Through a new residency presented by Texas Performing Arts and Fusebox in December of 2020, my collaborators and I, the Frank Wo/Men Collective, explored and designed a new medium that brought together features of theatre, film, television, and gaming. The resulting production revealed that the combination of mediums can in fact create engaging experiences that open up a wild variety of engaging opportunities for the audience and the performers alike. While the COVID-19 pandemic will eventually end, there will be a long-lasting effect on the live entertainment industry as some people may choose to avoid congregating with large groups for years to come. The solutions and explorations presented serve as a starting point for others interested in this live entertainment medium.Item Constructing Tibetanness from the 'in-between' : self-representations of hybrid identity in Tibetan fiction films(2016-05) Carlton, Scott Andrew; Frick, Caroline; Ramirez Berg, CharlesTibet is a contested and ambiguous concept perched precariously between multiple and contradictory sociocultural and historical discourses. In this thesis, I examine self-representation in the liminal space of Tibet through twelve Tibetan feature films in order to determine how the filmmakers, crew, and actors use the poetics of film to construe Tibetan individual, cultural, religious, political, and national identity. These films, with Tibetan directors, Tibetan actors, and largely Tibetan crews, have been described in the press as “Tibetan.” I adopt a neoformalist approach informed by postcolonial theory, especially Homi K. Bhabha’s conception of hybridity, to examine Tibetan self-representations in fictional feature films. The twelve films consistently make use of narrative structures in which protagonists embark on physical quests in order to locate ambiguous or unknowable entities. Their stories often take the form of road films, and emphasize internal yearning and development over external plot detail. Internal character development and identity are conveyed through cultural performance of songs, theater, and storytelling that serve as narrational devices for self-expression and identity articulation. Thematically, identity is represented on these journeys through paradigms of tradition and modernity, complex hybridity, and disenfranchised masculinities. The thesis concludes with an analysis of the career and films of auteur Pema Tseden, an internationally respected auteur. In Tseden’s films, the implications of liminality for Tibetan identity are dire, but the possibility for the processual and ongoing articulation and construction of Tibetanness through the medium of film are emphasized. This group of Tibetan film representations may not reveal an essential Tibetanness, but they do constituate an invaluable platform for critical deconstruction, formulation, articulation, and continual rearticulation of Tibetanness.Item Crafting digital cinema : cinematographers in contemporary Hollywood(2011-08) Lucas, Robert Christopher; Schatz, Thomas, 1948-; Strover, Sharon; Schiesari, Nancy; Hunt, Bruce; Hay, JamesIn the late 1990s, motion picture and television production began a process of rapid digitalization with profound implications for cinematographers in Hollywood, as new tools for “digital cinematography” became part of the traditional production process. This transition came in three waves, starting with a post-production technique, the digital intermediate, then the use of high-definition video and digital production cameras, and finally digital exhibition. This dissertation shows how cinematographers responded to the technical and aesthetic challenges presented by digital production tools as they replaced elements of the film-based, photochemical workflow. Using trade publications, mainstream press sources, and in-depth interviews with cinematographers and filmmakers, I chronicle this transition between 1998 and 2005, analyzing how cinematographers’ responded to and utilized these new digital technologies. I analyze demonstration texts, promotional videos, and feature films, including Pleasantville, O Brother Where Art Thou, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, The Anniversary Party, Personal Velocity, and Collateral, all of which played a role in establishing a discourse and practice of digital cinematography among cinematographers, producers and directors. The challenges presented by new collaborators such as the colorist and digital imaging technician are also examined. I discuss cinematographers’ work with standards-setting groups such as the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the studio consortium Digital Cinema Initiatives, describing it as an effort to protect “film-look” and establish look-management as a prominent feature of their craft practice. In an era when digitalization has made motion pictures more malleable and mobile than ever before, this study shows how cinematographers attempted to preserve their historical, craft-based sense of masterful cinematography and a structure of authority that privileges the cinematographer as “guardian of the image."Item Foveated video compression for lossy packet networks(2010-12) Larcom, Ronald Craig; Bovik, Alan C. (Alan Conrad), 1958-; Caramanis, ConstantineUnreliable networks can severely hamper transmission of video data. In applications requiring minimal latency, video frames must be compressed using intraframe techniques. We develop a video codec suitable for robot teleoperation over unreliable networks with high packet loss rates. The codec combines a foveated image compression algorithm, Embedded Foveation Image enCoding (EFIC), with a Forward Error Correction (FEC) code tuned to network performance. Foveation, or spatially variant image resolution, allows very high compression levels while preserving the most important image characteristics. By tightly integrating an FEC within the codec we are able to virtually eliminate dropped frames independent of the network protocol. We find that the new codec supports much higher video quality than another intraframe compression technique, Motion JPEG (M-JPEG).Item A guide to design and production for the video centric performance(2013-05) Gazzillo, Eric; Otte, CharlesAs modern technologies increase the capabilities of today’s stage, performances have grown to incorporate the use of video as a means to transform the stage in a way never seen before. Digital tools have unlocked designer’s ability to modify space and time in at the actual speed of light. While analogue film projections have been used on the stage for a number of years, it is the advent of digital video that has allowed performance art to develop a new interaction with a virtual world. I intend to explore and document the process behind a video centric performance. In this instance, I define video centric performance as an event in which the action on stage relies on the video content in some way to create a complete performance. Through this thesis I will focus on how the evolving definition of video has created particular workflows and methodologies to help adapt digital video techniques for the stage. Using several case studies, my workflows and methodologies will be developed and formed into a single written document. My written document is meant to be an all-encompassing guide. The goal in writing such a text is to provide single source education for artists looking to grow their understanding of video centric performances. Video production as well as stage production is a nuanced art, which can require years of practice to fully understand. Young artist may use higher education to grow their skills, or experienced professionals may use reading as a means of professional development. In both of these instances, members of the entertainment community are limited by the availability of a single source to bridge the gap between existing educational resources. Throughout the document, I avoid expanding on detailed topics that are covered by other professions, instead opting for an approach that weaves together the skills of performance artists, designers, technicians, cinematographers and animators in a way that focuses these talents towards the stage.Item Inside-outside : practice between the private and the social(2016-05) Chelben, Roni Alexandra; Williams, Jeff, M.F.A.; Clarke, JohnIn the course of the last few years, the work I have been making was very eclectic in terms of methodology and form. My practice ranged from studio practice pieces, to a socially engaged workshop based work. I tend to see the relationship between the different works as dialectical, at least to some degree, while each work is pushing forward a different parameter that was not fully realized in the prior work. These back and forth movements have left me with some questions regarding gallery aesthetics versus socially engaged projects, and my position on the scale between them. The largest question I have, however, is whether I need to choose one practice or another, and if so to which degree the ethics and aesthetics of the different practices can or should be distinguished from one another. In this report I do not attempt to answer those vast questions, which will probably stay with me as part of my practice, but rather to raise four core issues that I find crucial to their exploration, and to which I dedicate four separate sections. Those issues are the gallery as a socially isolated site, questions about the relevancy of socially engaged art change to studio art practice, guilt as motivation for art making, and lastly, relationship between action and documentation in art.Item Items of interest and words of power(2014-05) Donovan, Kelly Michael; Perzyński, Bogdan, 1954-Kelly Michael Donovan is an M.F.A. Candidate in Transmedia in the Department of Art and Art History. Kelly Donovan creates artwork that examines our relationship to digital culture and technology, particularly the Internet. Following the global security disclosures in June 2013, Kelly Donovan created a series of work utilizing webcams, Internet search engines and a list of keywords used for monitoring social media to curate information and images relating to surveillance, privacy and national security.Item Living in the wasteland : character, worldbuilding and humanism in the Mad Max series(2016-05) Harrison, Justin Sean; Schatz, Thomas, 1948-; Beltran, MaryThe long-running Mad Max series is a seminal entry in the contemporary western science fiction canon, particularly within the post-apocalyptic subgenre. This thesis argues that a major reason for the series’ enduring success is that it is a fundamentally humanist text. It further argues that Mad Max’s humanism is identifiable and trackable through the construction of its characters and the world they inhabit across the four films in the series. Subjects of analysis include the films themselves, as well as several books written on and about them.Item Look and listen : from semantic to spatial audio-visual perception(2021-07-24) Gao, Ruohan; Grauman, Kristen Lorraine, 1979-; Zisserman, Andrew; Mooney, Raymond; Huang, QixingUnderstanding scenes and events is inherently a multi-modal experience. We perceive the world by both looking and listening (and touching, smelling, and tasting). In particular, the sounds made by objects, whether actively generated or incidentally emitted, offer valuable signals about their physical properties and spatial locations—the cymbals crash on stage, the bird tweets up in the tree, the truck revs down the block, the silverware clinks in the drawer. However, while recognition has made significant progress by "looking"—detecting objects, actions, or people based on their appearance—it often does not listen. In this thesis, I show that audio that accompanies visual scenes and events can be used as a rich source of training signal for learning (audio-)visual models. Particularly, I have developed computational models that leverage both the semantic and spatial signals in audio to understand people, places, and things from continuous multi-modal observations. Below, I summarize my key contributions along these two themes: Audio as a semantic signal: First, I develop methods that learn how different objects sound by both looking at and listening to unlabeled video containing multiple sounding objects. I propose an unsupervised approach to separate mixed audio into its component sound sources by disentangling the audio frequency bases for detected visual objects. Next, I further propose a new approach that trains audio-visual source separation models on pairs of training videos. This co-separation framework permits both end-to-end training and learning object-level sounds from unlabeled videos of multiple sound sources. As an extension of the co-separation approach, then I study the classic cocktail party problem to separate voices from the speech mixture by leveraging the consistency between the speaker's facial appearance and their voice. The two modalities, vision and audition, are mutually beneficial. While visual objects are indicative of the sounds they make to enhance audio source separation, audio can also be informative of the visual events in videos. Finally, I propose a framework that uses audio as a semantic signal to help visual events classification. I design a preview mechanism to eliminate both short-term and long-term visual redundancies using audio for efficient action recognition in untrimmed video. Audio as a spatial signal: Both audio and visual data also convey significant spatial information. The two senses naturally work in concert to interpret spatial signals. Particularly, the human auditory system uses two ears to extract individual sound sources from a complex mixture. Leveraging the spatial signal in videos, I devise an approach to lift a flat monaural audio signal to binaural audio by injecting the spatial cues embedded in the accompanying visual frames. When listening to the predicted binaural audio—the 2.5D visual sound—listeners can then feel the locations of the sound sources as they are displayed in the video. Beyond learning from passively captured video, I next explore the spatial signal in audio by deploying an agent to actively interact with the environment using audio. I propose a novel representation learning framework that learns useful visual features via echolocation by capturing echo responses in photo-realistic 3D indoor scene environments. Experimental results demonstrate that the image features learned from echoes are comparable or even outperform heavily supervised pre-training methods for multiple fundamental spatial tasks—monocular depth prediction, surface normal estimation, and visual navigation. Our results serve as an exciting prompt for future work leveraging both the visual and audio modalities. Motivated by how we humans perceive and act in the world by making use of all our senses, the long-term goal of my research is to build systems that can perceive as well as we do by combining all the multisensory inputs. In the last chapter of my thesis, I outline the potential future research directions that I want to pursue beyond my Ph.D. dissertation.Item Mean-Variability-Fairness tradeoffs in resource allocation with applications to video delivery(2013-08) Joseph, Vinay; De Veciana, GustavoNetwork Utility Maximization (NUM) provides a key conceptual framework to study reward allocation amongst a collection of users/entities in disciplines as diverse as economics, law and engineering. However when the available resources and/or users' utilities vary over time, reward allocations will tend to vary, which in turn may have a detrimental impact on the users' overall satisfaction or quality of experience. In this thesis, we introduce a generalization of the NUM framework which incorporates the detrimental impact of temporal variability in a user's allocated rewards and explicitly incorporates Mean-Variability-Fairness tradeoffs, i.e., tradeoffs amongst the mean and variability in users' reward allocations, as well as fairness across users. We propose a simple online algorithm to realize these tradeoffs, which, under stationary ergodic assumptions, is shown to be asymptotically optimal, i.e., achieves a long term performance equal to that of an offline algorithm with knowledge of the future variability in the system. This substantially extends work on NUM to an interesting class of relevant problems where users/entities are sensitive to temporal variability in their service or allocated rewards. We extend the theoretical framework and tools developed for realizing Mean-Variability-Fairness tradeoffs to develop a simple online algorithm to solve the problem of optimizing video delivery in networks. The tremendous increase in mobile video traffic projected for the future along with insufficiency of available wireless network capacity makes this one of the most important networking problems today. Specifically, we consider a network supporting video clients streaming stored video, and focus on the problem of jointly optimizing network resource allocation and video clients' video quality adaptation. Our objective is to fairly maximize video clients' video Quality of Experience (QoE) realizing Mean-Variability-Fairness tradeoffs, incorporating client preferences on rebuffering time and the cost of video delivery. We present a simple asymptotically optimal online algorithm NOVA (Network Optimization for Video Adaptation) to solve the problem. Our algorithm uses minimal communication, 'distributes' the tasks of network resource allocation to a centralized network controller, and video clients' video quality adaptation to the respective video clients. Further, the quality adaptation is also optimal for standalone video clients, and is an asynchronous algorithm well suited for use in the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) framework. We also extend NOVA for use with more general video QoE models, and study NOVA accounting for practical considerations like time varying number of video clients, sharing with other types of traffic, performance under legacy resource allocation policies, videos with variable sized segments etc.Item My sister Sarah(2013-05) Chatelain, Elizabeth Marie; Kelban, Stuart"My Sister Sarah" is a 25-minute long documentary film about my sister, Sarah Chatelain, a recovering methamphetamine addict from Fargo, North Dakota. Utilizing a combination of family home videos, Super 8 film and verité footage of Sarah's contemporary life, "My Sister Sarah" relates Sarah's journey with drug addiction from childhood through recovery. This report contains the process of creating the film: its inception, production and completion.Item Natural scene statistics-based blind visual quality assessment in the spatial domain(2013-05) Mittal, Anish; Bovik, Alan C. (Alan Conrad), 1958-With the launch of networked handheld devices which can capture, store, compress, send and display a variety of audiovisual stimuli; high definition television (HDTV); streaming Internet protocol TV (IPTV) and websites such as Youtube, Facebook and Flickr etc., an enormous amount of visual data of visual data is making its way to consumers. Because of this, considerable time and resources are being expanded to ensure that the end user is presented with with a satisfactory quality of experience (QoE). While traditional QoE methods have focused on optimizing delivery networks with respect to throughput, buffer-lengths and capacity, perceptually optimized delivery of multimedia services is also fast gaining importance. This is especially timely given the explosive growth in (especially wireless) video traffic and expected shortfalls in bandwidth. These perceptual approaches attempt to deliver an optimized QoE to the end-user by utilizing objective measures of visual quality. In this thesis, we shall cover a variety of such algorithms that predict overall QoE of an image or a video, depending on the amount of information available for the algorithm design. Typically, quality assessment (QA) algorithms are classiffied on the basis of the amount of information that is available to the algorithm. This thesis will primarily focus on blind QA algorithms, where blind or no-reference (NR) QA refers to automatic quality assessment of an image/video using an algorithm which only utilizes the distorted image/video whose quality is being assessed. NR QA approaches are further classiffied on the basis of whether the algorithm had access to subjective/human opinion prior to deployment. Algorithms which use machine learning techniques along with human judgements of quality during the 'training' phase may be labelled 'opinion aware' algorithms. The first part of the thesis deals with such approaches. While such opinion aware-NR algorithms demonstrate good correlation with human perception on controlled databases, it is impossible to anticipate all of the different distortions that may occur in a practical system and hence train on them. In such cases, it is of interest to design QA algorithms that are not limited in their performance by training data. Approaches which operate without the knowledge of human judgements during the training phase are labelled as 'opinion unaware' (OU) algorithms. We propose such an approach in the second part of the thesis. Further, we propose new VQA algorithms in the last part of the dissertation to address the completely blind VQA problem. The proposed approach quantify disturbances introduced due to distortions and thereby predict the quality of distorted content even without any external knowledge about the pristine natural sources and hence zero shot models.Item Natural-language video description with deep recurrent neural networks(2017-08) Venugopalan, Subhashini; Mooney, Raymond J. (Raymond Joseph); Grauman, Kristen; Stone, Peter; Saenko, Kate; Darrell, TrevorFor most people, watching a brief video and describing what happened (in words) is an easy task. For machines, extracting meaning from video pixels and generating a sentence description is a very complex problem. The goal of this thesis is to develop models that can automatically generate natural language descriptions for events in videos. It presents several approaches to automatic video description by building on recent advances in “deep” machine learning. The techniques presented in this thesis view the task of video description akin to machine translation, treating the video domain as a source “language” and uses deep neural net architectures to “translate” videos to text. Specifically, I develop video captioning techniques using a unified deep neural network with both convolutional and recurrent structure, modeling the temporal elements in videos and language with deep recurrent neural networks. In my initial approach, I adapt a model that can learn from paired images and captions to transfer knowledge from this auxiliary task to generate descriptions for short video clips. Next, I present an end-to-end deep network that can jointly model a sequence of video frames and a sequence of words. To further improve grammaticality and descriptive quality, I also propose methods to integrate linguistic knowledge from plain text corpora. Additionally, I show that such linguistic knowledge can help describe novel objects unseen in paired image/video-caption data. Finally, moving beyond short video clips, I present methods to process longer multi-activity videos, specifically to jointly segment and describe coherent event sequences in movies.Item Optimizing mobile multimedia content delivery(2013-08) Seung, Yousuk; Zhang, Yin, doctor of computer scienceWith the advent of mobile Internet the amount of time people spend with multimedia applications in the mobile environment is surging and demand for high quality multimedia data over the Internet in the mobile environment is growing rapidly. However the mobile environment is significantly more unfriendly than the wired environment for multimedia applications in many ways. Network resources are limited and the condition is harder to predict. Also multimedia applications are generally delay intolerant and bandwidth demanding, and with users moving, their demand could be much more dynamic and harder to anticipate. Due to such reasons many existing mobile multimedia applications show unsatisfactory performance in the mobile environment. We target three multimedia content delivery applications and optimize with limited and unpredictable network conditions typical in the mobile Internet environment. Vehicular networks have emerged from the strong desire to communicate on the move. We explore the potential of supporting high-bandwidth applications such as video streaming in vehicular networks. Challenges include limited and expensive cellular network, etc. Internet video conferencing has become popular over the past few years, but supporting high-quality large video conferences at a low cost remains a significant challenge due to stringent performance requirements, limited and heterogeneous client. We develop a simple yet effective Valiant multicast routing to select application-layer routes and adapt streaming rates according to dynamically changing network condition in a swift and lightweight way enough to be implemented on mobile devices. Bitrate adaptive video streaming is rapidly gaining popularity. However recent measurements show weaknesses in bitrate selection strategies implemented in today's streaming players especially in the mobile environment. We propose a novel rate adaptation scheme that classifies the network condition into stable and unstable periods and optimizes video quality with different strategies based on the classification.Item Seeing the music, hearing the drama : a multimedia suite (six pieces) for instrument(s) and electronics(2018-05-01) He, Yuanyuan, 1985-; Pinkston, Russell; Welcher, Dan; Sharlat, Yevgeniy; Almén, Byron; Bays, BenjaminSeeing the Music, Hearing the Dream is a forty-five minute multimedia suite consisting of six pieces written for various instruments and electronics, which consist of electronic sounds and video. The instrumentation includes solo cello, solo flute, solo piano, solo marimba, and flute and trombone duet. This suite is a compilation of multimedia works, all of which feature the connection and interaction between live instruments, electronic music, and visual art. The first chapter of this dissertation discusses the background and development of the multimedia performing arts field, as well as three different artists/groups and their works. The second chapter is a piece-by-piece analysis of the multimedia suite, complete with explanations of major motives, harmonic language, formal structure, and configuration of and relationships between audio and visual elements of the pieces.Item Ten sounds I cannot hear(2022-11-29) Arumbakkam, Aishwarya; Reynolds, Ann Morris; Hubbard, Teresa, 1965-My report will look at the making of my most recent body of work entitled Ten sounds I cannot hear. I will discuss each individual work through the process of their making, elaborating on my motivations, doubts, and decisions. The report will interweave written text with images of the works on view, and in the studio.Item Under this noise(2022-08-14) Shirley, Leah Elise; Stoney, John; Smith, MichaelAn analysis of the studio experiments of Leah Shirley as seen through an astrological lens.Item Welcome to EchindaLabs!(2016-05) McClellan, Elizabeth Gayle; Williams, Jeff, M.F.A.; Awai, NicoleThis Master’s Report describes the work, influences, ideas, and research that culminate in my final thesis exhibition at the University of Texas at Austin. I position my practice in an intersection between experimental theater and studio art. Working with time, image, installation, and the roll of the audience, I use one art form to point to the traditions, limitations and conventions of the other. My MFA Thesis work, Welcome to EchindaLabs! is a non-linear digital play in the form of a multi-media installation. It exists in the gallery and also as a collection of websites, videos, and ad assets. I discuss my practice of working between studio art and theater, and how I explore narrative content and multi-media form in Welcome to EchindaLabs!Item Why “Go Vote” is not enough an animated short about stuff they didn’t teach you in Texas civics class(2023-04-21) Tomforde, Lucille Blair; Gorman, CarmaPolitical parties, celebrities, non-profits, and prior generations have only one message for members of Gen Z: “Go Vote.” It’s not bad advice, but it doesn’t acknowledge the realities of voter suppression and gerrymandering in Texas, nor does it help young Texans understand why their votes never seem to make a difference. Worse, civics education in Texas schools is intentionally designed to conceal how and why Texas’s voting laws and systems, such as winner-take-all ballots and redistricting, maintain minority rule. I have created an animated short called Bop or Flop, whose humorous game-show format is designed to fill important gaps in Texas civics education and alert Gen Z Texans to how gerrymandering shapes political outcomes in Texas. "Bop or Flop: Old vs. New Gerrymanderers" highlights the lunacy behind America's continued use of a system created two hundred years ago by contrasting the moral and technological evolutions made in other dimensions of American life with the systems politicians use to draw redistricting maps, which have stayed largely the same. With the explicit intent to connect with young Texans, “Bop or Flop” shows how issues that Gen-Z voters care about (e.g., women’s autonomy, LGBTQIA+ rights, the environment, etc.) are affected by Texas’s redistricting process, and satirizes the “values” of legislators who deliberately subvert the principle of majority rule by redrawing districts to maintain their hold on power. I envision this segment as the first in a series of animations highlighting how structural and systemic inequities in the Texas political process negatively impact young Texans’ lives.