Search Results (15)

This article critically examines the star persona of Lola Flores, an iconic Spanish flamenco artist, within the historical and political context of Francoist Spain (1939–1975). It argues that Flores’s carefully constructed star image not only persisted into post-Franco Spain but also served as a covert vehicle for the continued propagation of National-Falangist Catholic ideology. The article primarily focuses on two major productions: the book Lola en carne viva. Memorias de Lola Flores (1990) and the television series El coraje de vivir (1994). Both portray a linear and cohesive version of her life from childhood to her later years, carefully curated to defend and rehabilitate her image. While many view Flores as a self-made artist, the article argues that her star persona was a deliberate construct—shaped by Suevia Films, a major Francoist-era film studio, and media narratives that aligned her with traditional gender roles, Catholic values, and Spanish nationalism. Despite emerging in post-Franco Spain, Flores’s narrative does not mark a rupture from the ideological frameworks of the past. Instead, it repackages Francoist values—particularly those surrounding patriarchal gender norms, suffering, and the glorification of sacrifice—to ensure her continued relevance. Suevia Films (1951) played a significant role in shaping her star persona as a symbol of Spanish folklore, aligning her with Francoist ideals of nation, Catholic morality, and submissive femininity. Her image was used to promote Spain internationally as a welcoming and culturally rich destination. Her persona fit within Franco’s broader strategy of using flamenco and folklore to attract foreign tourism while maintaining tight ideological control over entertainment. Flores’s life is framed as a rags-to-riches story, which reinforces Social Spencerist ideology (a social Darwinist perspective) that hard work and endurance lead to success, rather than acknowledging systemic oppression under Francoism. Her personal struggles—poverty, romantic disappointments, accusations of collaboration with the Franco regime, and tax evasion—are framed as necessary trials that strengthen her character. This aligns with the Catholic ideal of redemptive suffering, reinforcing her status as the mater dolorosa (Sorrowful Mother) figure. This article highlights the contradictions in Flores’s gender performance—while she embodied passion and sensuality in flamenco, her offstage identity conformed to the submissive, self-sacrificing woman idealized by the Francoist Sección Femenina (SF). Even in her personal life, Flores’s narrative aligns with Francoist values—her father’s bar, La Fe de Pedro Flores, symbolizes the fusion of religion, nationalism, and traditional masculinity. Tico Medina plays a key role by framing Lola en carne viva as an “authentic” and unfiltered account. His portrayal is highly constructed, acting as her “defense lawyer” to counter criticisms. Flores’s autobiography is monologic—it suppresses alternative perspectives, ensuring that her version of events remains dominant and unquestioned. Rather than acknowledging structural oppression, the narrative glorifies suffering as a path to resilience, aligning with both Catholic doctrine and Francoist propaganda. The article ultimately deconstructs Lola Flores’s autobiographical myth, demonstrating that her public persona—both onstage and offstage—was a strategic construction that perpetuated Francoist ideals well beyond the dictatorship. While her image has been celebrated as a symbol of Spanish cultural identity, it also functioned as a tool for maintaining patriarchal and nationalist ideologies under the guise of entertainment. Full article

This study quantitatively examines the coeducation of television series and films between 1986 and 2023. This analysis has been facilitated by applying bibliometric analysis to scientific production using a relevant Web of Science (WoS) database. Analyses of 190 documents were conducted using quantitative and descriptive methods. These results present a multifaceted analysis of scientific production, evaluating historical development, the productivity of countries and institutions, authors’ productivity, and sources’ productivity. The study indicates that scientific production has grown exponentially in the last decade; this coincides with the emergence of video-on-demand platforms, multiscreen consumption, and equality policies. The conclusions must emphasize the significant role played by fiction series and film productions as socializing agents and their educational potential. Full article

Virtual production, a filmmaking technique that seamlessly merges virtual and real cinematography, has revolutionized the film and television industry. However, traditional virtual production requires the setup of green screens, which can be both costly and cumbersome. We have developed a green screen-free virtual production system that incorporates a 3D tracker for camera tracking, enabling the compositing of virtual and real-world images from a moving camera with varying perspectives. To address the core issue of video matting in virtual production, we introduce a novel Boundary-Selective Fusion (BSF) technique that combines the alpha mattes generated by deep learning-based and depth-based approaches, leveraging their complementary strengths. Experimental results demonstrate that this combined alpha matte is more accurate and robust than those produced by either method alone. Overall, the proposed BSF technique is competitive with state-of-the-art video matting methods, particularly in scenarios involving humans holding objects or other complex settings. The proposed system enables real-time previewing of composite footage during filmmaking, reducing the costs associated with green screen setups and simplifying the compositing process of virtual and real images. Full article

This work aims to identify and propose a functional pipeline for indie live-action films using Virtual Production with photorealistic real-time rendering game engines. The new production landscape is radically changing how movies and shows are made. Those were made in a linear pipeline, and now filmmakers can execute multiple tasks in a parallel mode using real-time renderers with high potential for different types of productions. Four interviews of professionals in the Spanish film and television market were conducted to obtain the whole perspective of the new paradigm. Following those examples, a virtual production set was implemented with an Antilatency tracking system, Unreal Engine (version 5.3), and Aximmetry (version 2023.3.2) as the leading software applications. Results are commented on, presenting how all the work is currently closely connected between pre-production, shooting, and post-production and analyzing its potential in different fields. Full article

Science fiction (SF) developed as a self-identified genre in Japan in the 1950s and quickly underwent a boom in the 1960s. Throughout this period, SF literature, film, and television were tightly intertwined industries, sharing production personnel, textual tropes, and audiences. As these industries entered global circulation with the hope of finding recognition and success in the international SF community, however, they encountered the contradictions of the Cold War liberal cultural system under the US nuclear umbrella. Awareness of the discursive marginalization of Japanese SF in the Euro-American dominated global SF scene manifested in Japanese texts in the twin tropes of apocalypse and anxiety surrounding embodiment. Through a close reading of two SF films—The X from Outer Space (Uchū daikaijū Girara, 1967) and Genocide (Konchū daisensō, 1968), both directed by Nihonmatsu Kazui for Shochiku Studios—and Komatsu Sakyō’s 1964 SF disaster novel Virus: The Day of Resurrection (Fukkatsu no hi), I argue that, largely excluded from discursive belonging in the global community of SF producers and consumers, Japanese authors and directors responded with texts that wiped away the contemporary status quo in spectacular apocalypses, eschatological breaks that would allow a utopian global order, as imagined by Japanese SF, to take hold. Full article

Drones, as mobile media of the present day, increase the operational and narrative capabilities of television and accelerate the logistics of shooting. Unmanned aerial vehicles with a camera properly steered by a pilot are able, to some extent, to replace a jimmy jib/crane and a dolly; basic technical devices, used in the studios, enabling the creation of narrative systems of pictures in film and television. Television is more and more often using drone footage to report events, broadcast live, as well as create coverage and television documentaries. In many productions, the pilot of the drone simultaneously acts as the drone camera operator, which can improve the effectiveness of shooting, but also carries some risks related to flight safety. The article describes and presents in the form of processed footage the real conditional ties of a Visual Line of Sight (VLOS) flight faced by pilots filming with a drone. VLOS is a type of air operation, which requires maintaining eye contact with the drone. In many countries, a drone visibility flight is legally sanctioned as VLOS Operation. An experiment was conducted to investigate the interactions between a human and a machine in airspace steered using a controller with a touchscreen. The drone pilot was considered an integral part of the drone’s flight system control Experimental data was collected with the use of a mobile eye-tracker, video cameras, surveys, and pilot declarations. During the experiment, eight television drone pilot operators recaptured a model shot under the regime of VLOS flight at low altitudes. They all show that both advanced and beginner pilots did not look at the UAV for over half the time of shot execution. The experiment allowed establishing two coefficients related to the effectiveness of a VLOS flight aiming at filming from the drone. The results point to clear differences in screen perception styles used by drone television pilots. The coefficients were described in the form of mathematical formulas and their limit values were determined. The research also determines the limits of pilots’ perception, within which they can film with a drone. The outcomes may help to optimize the process of aerial filming with the use of a drone, carried out for television, film, and other media, as well as in a simulation of such a flight for research and training. From the perspective of media science and social communication, the presented study included a technological component that can be accessed through information science, using statistical models and variable distributions. Media scholars can study the impact of the media without having to look into the metaphorical black box. Computer science opens up this possibility. Full article

We have come to a point where the field of fan studies must acknowledge darker, more pathologized and potentially more sinister forms of fandom than we have heretofore. Serial killer fandom is, simultaneously, one of the most visible and least-academically discussed form of fandom, despite a general recognition that certain serial killers are, undeniably, celebrities. Serial killer fanfic is relatively rare, but it certainly exists. In this article, I build on some of the work I have already done on Real Person Fiction, specifically importing the lenses of metalepsis and multimodality as well as the self-conscious intersection between fiction and reality, to look at an example of serial killer fanfic on three platforms—Ao3, Tumblr and Wattpad. The article asks what we can learn from applying a fan studies approach to this phenomenon. Is there anything uniquely problematic about serial killer fanfiction, or is it the same process as what so many already do as a mainstream cultural practice, hypothesizing and imagining the ‘backstage’ of famous serial killers, as we do with all other celebrities? I compare the 2019 film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile which focuses on Bundy’s private relationship with his long-time girlfriend, his circus-like televised murder trial and his eventual death sentence, with a selection of Ted Bundy fanfiction. Of course, the film does not call itself fanfiction (though several critics have considered it to glorify its subject). I will argue that the distinction between ‘serial killer fanfiction’ and authorized, industrialized and popular forms of serial killer media, actually, has very little to do with the content of the text, and is based on a complex network of assumptions regarding its author, context and modes of production and reception. If this is so, the questions we should ask of serial killer fanfic are, in fact, much broader questions regarding our cultural fascination with serial killer media, challenging the pathologization of a specific, feminine-coded and extremely stigmatized fannish practice. Full article

Animals play a significant role in the production of film and television in Australia and globally. Given this, regulating and monitoring their welfare on- and off-set is imperative. We therefore aim to compare Australia’s state and territory-based legislation and regulation to those in the United States and the United Kingdom and assess regulations against the Five Domains Model of animal welfare. Historical examples of animal incidents in Australian film are used to illustrate potential deficiencies. We reviewed archived media for animal welfare incidents on and off production sets. We demonstrate a lack of uniformity, with 37.5% (3/8) of states and territories providing targeted Codes of Practice for animals in filmed media, and partially addressing behavioural interactions or mental state within the Five Domains Model. Three themes of welfare concerns were identified including incidents on-set, incidents off-set, and effects of portrayal on perception or ownership of specific species. This highlights the need for standardised national legislation and improved monitoring and regulation. Further research should quantify the number of animals used in productions, describe the type and duration of the work the animals undertake, investigate the frequency of animal welfare incidents, and explore alternative methods to the use of live animals in film and television. Full article

Research on media sustainability has a long tradition of criticising climate change and environmental issues, mainly through content, and while it is important to do so, it seems that the sector is oblivious to the impact that it itself generates. Moreover, sustainability is often (and wrongly) only related to environmental impact, and very little research exists on how the audio-visual sector can be sustainable not only from an environmental standpoint, but also from a socio-cultural and economic one. This article constitutes a relatively new area that has emerged from the notion of Green Shooting, a term used to describe all the practices ranging from the pre-production, production and post-production to the publicising of an audio-visual product: Documentary, television series (including those of streaming platforms), videogame, film, festival or an advertisement. There has been little previous evidence of an academic article that brings together all the practices that several companies and initiatives worldwide have already implemented as emerging solutions to mitigate their impact, including new roles such as eco-assistant. The authors aim to develop an overarching theoretical framework of what already exists in the practical field, and make it available to the academic community. Full article

This article examines how magic and nature become representations of both “the Sami” and “Sami shamanism” in animation films Frozen 2 and Klaus, in the television crime series Midnattssol (Midnight Sun) and in three Eurovision Song Contest contributions partly by Sami artists, containing joik. With a methodological ludism approach and with material theory, the article asks how “the Sami” and shamanism are made relevant as spiritual or religious categories within popular cultural products, and how (and why) spirituality is being constructed and communicated on a more general level in a time of eco-crisis, where there is a growing global interest in perceived shamanistic and animistic perceptions of the world, nature, and ourselves. Full article

To enrich the form of film and television production, improve the level of film and television production, and satisfy the film-watching experiences of audiences, based on Virtual Reality (VR) and the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, with the help of S3 Studio Max and Photoshop software, a VR film-watching system is built, which realizes the interaction with users on different devices through somatosensory interaction sensors. In addition, by utilizing Twirling720, the panoramic sound recording is achieved. Through this system, a smart IoT platform between users, films, and devices is built. Finally, this platform is utilized to produce the film and television work Van Gogh in Dream, which is evaluated and analyzed through questionnaires. The results show that the technology system of this set of film and television production is complete, and the production level of film and television works have been significantly improved. The audience recognition of film and television production based on this technology is 55%, and the impression evaluation is over 56%. However, knowledge acquisition is only 20%, and historical understanding is above 50%. These dimensions show that compared with traditional film production, artificial intelligence films can bring a better experience to audiences, but knowledge acquisition is less. Therefore, professional knowledge will be improved at the later stage. The above results provide a theoretical basis for the application of artificial intelligence technology in film production and production mode. Full article

In order to reduce some of the problems of technological restructuring and insufficient expansion in the current film and television production mode, the application of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), and Internet of Things (IoT) in the film and television industry is introduced in this research. First, a topical crawler tool was constructed to grab relevant texts about “AI”, “VR”, and “IoT” crossover “film and television”, and the grasping accuracy rate and recall rate of this tool were compared. Then, based on the extracted text, the data of recent development in related fields were extracted. The AdaBoost algorithm was used to improve the BP (Back Propagation) neural network (BPNN). This model was used to predict the future development scale of related fields. Finally, a virtual character interaction system based on IoT-sensor technology was built and its performance was tested. The results showed that the topical crawler tool constructed in this study had higher recall rate and accuracy than other tools, and a total of 188 texts related to AI, VR, and IoT crossover television films were selected after Naive Bayes classification. In addition, the error of the BPNN prediction model based on the AdaBoost algorithm was less than 20%, and it can effectively predict the future development scale of AI and other fields. In addition, the virtual character interaction system based on IoT technology constructed in this study has a high motion recognition rate, produces a strong sense of immersion among users, and can realize real-time capture and imitation of character movements. In a word, the field of AI and VR crossover film and television has great development prospects in the future. Therefore, the application of IoT technology in building the virtual-character interaction system can improve the effect of VR or AI film and television production. Full article

In 1973, Analívia Cordeiro produced the videodance M3x3. Filmed in a Brazilian television studio and choreographed by Cordeiro with a computer, the work explores the limits of the human body through abstraction and its inhabitation of a new media landscape. Tracing the genealogy of M3x3 to the history of videodance, German and Brazilian art, and Brazilian politics, the article spotlights the media central for its conceptualization, production, and circulation to argue for how the video theorizes the posthuman as the inextricable entanglement of the body and technology. Full article

Trauma theorists foreground the unrepresentability of trauma; however, with modern innovations in visual representation, such as the photograph and cinema, depictions of trauma have begun to circulate across different mediums for a variety of audiences. These images tend to problematically present the traumatic event rather than the effects of trauma, such as traumatic memory. Specifically, some contemporary Hollywood popular films and television series that include rape as their subject matter often include a rape scene that can evoke affects such as disgust or empathy, and while these affects can last the duration of the film, they fail to shift popular discourses about rape because affect is more productive when it focuses on effects instead of events. As trauma studies has shifted to memory studies in the Humanities, and rape has become more prominent in popular culture through the circulation of personal testimony on social media and memoir, depictions of rape in cinema have slowly started to change from presentations of rape scenes to representations of rape trauma that highlight different affects, such as shame. Using Monster (2003), Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Room (2015), and the television series, 13 Reasons Why (2017) and Sharp Objects (2018) as case studies, this paper argues that, for an audiovisual depiction of rape to shift popular discourses about rape, it would have to function rhetorically to widen the cultural understanding of rape trauma beyond the event, and demonstrate that rape trauma should be understood as part of the personal, unconscious, cultural, and visual mediation of traumatic memory. Full article

The documentary film, History Made for Tomorrow: Hakka Tulou was an October 2010 release by History Channel International. This film is an in-depth study on the green building techniques and sustainable lifestyle of the Hakka people of Southern China with a focus on the ancient Tulou rammed earth structures. The television program follows West Virginia University research professor, Ruifeng Liang, as he initiates scientific studies to back claims that the rammed earth Tulou structures are “the greenest buildings in the world”, and Canadian architect, Jorg Ostrowski, of Autonomous Sustainable Housing Inc., who has been researching the ecological footprint of Hakka communities since August 2007, to promote them as “eco-villages” of best practices for planet Earth’s sustainability. The author is credited as Director, Writer, and Producer of this film. This paper is based on the script of the production. Full article