<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>In the history of cinematography there is a noticeable tradition to deliberately highlight the elements that accentuate space and spatiality in the shots. At the same time, there is also a contrary tradition, i.e. the conscious reduction of spatiality with the help of artistic tools in order to evoke a feeling of alienation. In this article I will argue that it is highly likely that the visual reinforcement of depth has become one of a cinematographer’s most frequently used tools, because it plays an important role in the audience’s perceived empathy towards onscreen characters. Since the practices of art-making – e.g. cinematography – represent a way that the empirical experience accumulated in professional practices reflects underlying neural processes, this article will first draw upon evidence from the common tenets of cinematography and reflect on how these correspond to the respective phenomena in human perception and cognition. The second part of the article examines the theory of the para-dramatic and eso-dramatic factors established by Gal Raz and Talma Hendler as it applies to cinematography; thereby suggesting possibilities for broadening the theoretical foundations of the twofold division of the causes for the viewers’ empathetic responses. The article will also introduce the results from a pilot experiment. However, I will not argue that the rendering of cinematographic space and drawing attention to certain areas are superior tools for creating filmic empathy. I will rather point out that they are often used by cinematographers when they want to create an immersive experience, and therefore, there is reason to believe that a connection exists between emotional empathy and the usage of these cinematographic tools.</abstract>

Exploring the Ways Cinematography Affects Viewers’ Perceived Empathy towards Onscreen Characters

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>This article provides a survey of Soviet animation and analyses the thematic and stylistic course of its development. Soviet animated film emerged and materialised in synch with the fluctuations of the region’s political climate and was directly shaped by it. A number of trends and currents of Soviet animation also pertain to other Eastern European countries. After all, Eastern Europe constituted an integrated cultural space that functioned as a single market for the films produced across it by filmmakers who interacted in a professional regional network of film education, events, festivals, publications etc.Initially experimental, post-revolutionary Russian animation soon fell under the sway of the Socialist Realist discourse, along with the rest of Soviet art, and quickly crystallised as a didactic genre for children. Disney’s paradigm became its major source of inspiration both in terms of visual style and thematic scope, despite the fact that Soviet Union was regarded as the ideological opposite of the Western way of life and mindset. The Soviet animation industry was spread across different studios and republics that adopted slightly varied production practices and tolerated different degrees of artistic freedom. Studios in the smaller republics, such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in particular, stood out for making films that were more ideologically complicated than those produced in Moscow.</abstract>

On the Topics and Style of Soviet Animated Films

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> Aki Kaurismäki is arguably the best-known Finnish filmmaker, owing largely to his feature films such as Crime and Punishment (Rikos ja rangaistus, Finland, 1983), Calamari Union (Finland, 1985), Shadows in Paradise (Varjoja paratiisissa, Finland, 1986), Hamlet Goes Business (Hamlet liikemaailmassa, Finland, 1987), Ariel (Finland, 1988), The Match Factory Girl (Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö, Finland, 1990), I Hired a Contract Killer (Finland/ Sweden, 1990), La vie de bohéme (Finland/France/ Sweden/Germany, 1992), Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana (Pidä huivista kiinni, Tatjana, Finland/Germany, 1994), Drifting Clouds (Kauas pilvet karkaavat, Finland, 1996), Juha (Finland, 1999), The Man Without a Past (Mies vailla menneisyyttä, Finland, 2002), Lights in the Dusk (Laitakaupungin valot, Finland, 2006) and Le Havre (Finland/France, 2011). A large body of his work has been made in Finland, but also in countries like France and Great Britain. Besides feature films, he has also made documentaries and short films, as well as musical films with the group Leningrad Cowboys. In a broader context, Kaurismäki has a unique place in Finnish and international film history, as well as in media and communication culture. Kaurismäki’s cultural context includes elements that have been turned into national and transnational symbols of social communication and narrative interaction by his stylisation. The director’s cinematic strategy investigates and makes choices evoking a social understanding of characters that has special communicative value. Kaurismäki’s films have been scrutinised for over thirty years.</abstract>

Slowly Moving Bodies: Signs of Pictorialism in Aki Kaurismäki’s Films

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>In the digital game industry, micro-transactions (MTXs) have been introduced as a new vehicle for profit generation. MTXs are small sum payments for additional virtual content beyond the content players obtain through game-play and progression, which impose new structural limitations and opportunities for game participation on the players. This article explores the perspectives of players on corporate commodification strategies of gameplay. The empirical work consists of semi-structured focus group interviews of players and interviews of podcast hosts. All informants are players of various online games.By adopting Sayer’s (2004, 2007, 2017) concept of moral economy and de Certeau’s (2011) concept of tactics in everyday life, this study draws two conclusions. First, virtual items and goods obtained through in-game activities or MTXs are a means to communicate skill level, taste, and experience between players as a fundamental part of the moral economy of establishing fair ground for competition. With regard to MTXs, players distinguish among three levels in which agency is maintained or limited. Second, players negotiate these models of commodification and agency limitation in ambivalent ways, both resisting and embracing economic values in the moral economy of play. Furthermore, because of this negotiation, players are generally concerned about the invasive nature of economic values taking priority over the values that guide the practices of play. In other words, there is a moral concern regarding how norms and values in play are compromised or overridden by outside economic pressures.</abstract>

The Moral Economy of Micro-Transactions in Digital Games

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<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This article examines the representation of mental health issues in the computer role-playing game <italic>Disco Elysium</italic> by using Albert Camus’ theory of the absurd as a basis. Through his daily work routine as a detective, the protagonist Harry DuBois’ trauma unfolds through the course of the game while simultaneously revealing the psychosocial aspects of trauma. Interpreting Harry’s existential struggles as those of an absurd hero supports the idea that finding (greater) meaning is not a necessity when coping with trauma.
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“Making Sense in a Senseless World”: <italic>Disco Elysium</italic>’s Absurd Hero

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> Stemming from the concept of active audiences and from Henry Jenkins’ (2006) idea of participatory culture as the driving force behind the transformation of public service broadcasting into agencies of public service media (Bardoel, Ferrell Lowe 2007), this empirical study explores the attitude and behaviour of the audiences of two crossmedia projects, produced by the public service media of Finland (YLE) and Estonia (ERR). This empirical study aims to explore the behaviour, wants and needs of the audiences of cross-media productions and to shed some light on the conditions that support the dynamic switching of the engagement with cross-media. The study’s results suggest that audiences are neither passive nor active, but switch from one mode to another. The findings demonstrate that audience dynamism is circumstantial and cannot be assumed. Thus, thinking about active audiences and participation as the lymph of public service media becomes problematic, especially when broadcasters seek generalised production practices. This work demonstrates how television networks in general cannot be participatory, and instead, how cross-media can work as a vehicle of micro participation through small acts of audience engagement (Kleut et al. 2017).</abstract>

Exploring Cross-Media Audience Practices in Two Cases of Public Service Media in Estonia and Finland

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<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Within the academic domain focused on the artistic practice of screenwriting, this exploratory study assesses the presence of emotional transportation and character identification processes within the solitary screenwriter’s creative imagination during the writing process. Screen-writing research is facing a dichotomy of the screenwriter who embodies both the role of a narrative specialist and that of a visual storytelling poet. Screenwriters often work in isolation, even in collaborative projects, leading to a tension between solitary work and collaborative roles. Narrative theories in screenwriting have mainly centered on identification of the audience, neglecting the screenwriter’s perspective. However, screenwriting can serve as a platform for experimentation and a reflection of new ideas, insights, and hands-on experience, meeting the demand for a systematic understanding of the writer’s processes. The results of this study provide preliminary insights into the mechanisms of emotional transportation, identification, and eureka moments in screenwriting practice. The study suggests that the transportation effect in writers is induced by a feeling of security, which arises from the limitations of the assignment. The data also suggests that pressure can lead to more original dramaturgical solutions. As such, this experimental pilot study already sheds light on the screenwriter’s artistic process. Yet, it has limitations, including a small number of informants and the novelty of the research method.
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Emotional Transportation and Identification in Screenwriting: A Pilot Study

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<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This paper engages with research on embodiment, cognition, and figurative meaning in cinema to develop a system for categorizing the cinematic cues that viewers use to gauge character affective experience. Many film theorists whose work is primarily focused on affective experience consider the relationship between the spectator and the character’s facial and bodily expressions. However, films often convey the affective states of characters by integrating bodily expressions with cinematic techniques, such as lighting, framing, and editing. These cinematic techniques can provide insight into a character’s affective states through their figurative associations with represented moods, feelings, and emotions. By exploring the metonymic, metaphoric, and similative properties of cinematic representations of affect, we can better understand how cinematic representations are understood by a community of viewers. Throughout this paper, I put forth the framework of “embodied affective cues” and identify behavioral, physical, and environmental cues to address how a character’s affective experience is represented by cinematic cues external to their body.
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Embodied Figuration and Character Emotion in Cinema: The Role of Embodied Affective Cues

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<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This paper explores cinematic editing within Ronald Langacker’s cognitive grammar (CG) framework, analyzing the structural and conceptual aspects of film language. By examining the juxtaposition of shots, from a linguistic perspective, the study identifies recurring schematic patterns across expressive instances. Emphasizing grammatical constructions, it delves into the connections between shots, especially in sequences involving a character’s point of view (POV). The present investigation argues for the existence of a shared conceptual mechanism used in order to make sense of verbal and visual discourse. The study employs sequences from Buster Keaton and Michael Haneke, with a primary focus on hypothetical shot juxta-positions crafted to provide visual examples. To concretize the application of Langacker’s CG to cinema image analysis, a case study on the Kuleshov effect as experimented with by Hitchcock will be presented. The principal objective of this study is to construct a theoretical framework employing the analytical tools of CG to augment and refine Noël Carroll’s concept of <italic>erotetic narration</italic>. A subsequent claim is that the juxtapositions of shots are conceptual systems bound at several levels by circular loops. Several configurations of the system coexist and the viewer has the necessary executive control for implementing alternative meaning construals.
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Point-of-view Shots in Light of Cognitive Grammar

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<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This paper will address ethical concerns surrounding the representation of vulnerable groups as well as the methodological challenges inherent in using artificial intelligence and human-like computer-generated characters in human studies that involve representing such groups. Such concerns focus on consequences arising from the technological affordances of new systems for creating narratives, as well as graphical and audio representations that are capable of portraying beings with close resemblance to humans. Enacting such virtual representations of humans inevitably gives rise to important ethical questions: (1) Who has the right to tell certain stories? (2) Is it ethical to change the medium of a narrative and the identity of a protagonist? (3) Do such changes, or technological mediations, affect whether a vulnerable group will be fairly and accurately portrayed? (4) And what are the implications, either way? While the backdrop of the paper involves discussing the potential of virtual representation as a meditative tool for moral and social change, the ethical implications inherent in the use of new cutting-edge technologies, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Unreal Engine’s MetaHuman, to create human-like virtual character narratives call for theoretical scrutiny from a methodological perspective.
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Virtual Representations and Their Ethical Implications

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<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This article aims to highlight the role of embodied mental representations or embodied schemas in both perception and filmmaking/viewing by foregrounding three premises: (1) perception is inferential and relies on prior embodied schemas; (2) filmmakers (authors) do not merely reproduce reality but equally impose body-based schemas onto the parts of a film in order to convey meanings; and (3) these schemas, as presented by the formal design of the work, may enrich the viewers’ experience by allowing them a privileged look into the embodied creative-thinking processes of filmmakers. It will be argued that viewers are prompted to peek into these processes because the representational embodied concepts, as cued by the films, are grounded in shared sensory-motor capacities that scaffold all abstract thinking and reasoning.
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Shaping Films from the Inside Out: Embodied Mental Schemas in Filmmaking and Viewing

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<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The task of production design is to create locations where cinematic events occur. Since the subjective experiences of the characters in the film are mainly observable externally, the entire film practice aims to express them through secondary means, for example by design and cinematography. The filmmaker can choose what she brings to the foreground from the character’s experience and what aspects she emphasizes. In the case of production design, it is possible to express metaphorical correlations through the spatialization process of cinematic events while anticipating the embodied situatedness of the camera and the eventual film viewer. The notion of situated authorship is discussed through iconic design examples from <italic>Gone With the Wind</italic> and <italic>The Birds</italic>, which have historically shaped the concept of production design practice. In the case study referring to my work as a designer, I intend to evaluate the schemas used in the spatialization process in the context of Embodied Simulation Theory (EST) and Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). Here, I propose the idea of a dynamic staging scenario that indicates how cinematic movement – especially the action of the scene and the movement of the camera onset – is considered in spatialization. With the discussion, I conduct a design analysis with which the properties of the space can be evaluated based on the concepts of image schema, primary metaphor, and conceptual metaphor.
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Toward Production Design Metaphor: Implications of Situated Authorship and Meaning-Making

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> Theoretical and analytical considerations around the development of transmedia projects are evolving, but are still widely open, probably because transmedia storytelling is a relatively new subject that does not yet have its own specific methods and methodology of analysis. Moreover, transmedia projects are complex phenomena involving multiple dimensions, such as narrative, cultural context, marketing, business models, and legal framework. Currently, the usual approach gives place to methodologically separate analytical perspectives related to some of these dimensions. This article first discusses the elusive concept of transmedia storytelling and later presents analytical considerations outlining relevant aspects that can contribute to perceive the process of developing transmedia projects. The significance of these discussions is to address essential features of the design process behind transmedia projects and contribute to support the analytic needs of transmedia designers and the applied research in the interest of the media industry.</abstract>

Transmedia Project Design: Theoretical and Analytical Considerations

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>The article discusses some developments in the audio- visual media industry in Germany that became apparent during the pandemic. Tendencies in the production, distribution and consumption of film, television and streaming are examined. While streaming platforms and linear television are becoming more important, cinemas are facing some problems.</abstract>

Film and Television Production and Consumption in Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic – The Case of Germany

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> This article investigates the strategies behind the production of crossmedia content at Eesti Rahvusringhääling (ERR), Estonia’s public broadcaster. The empirical work that supports its analytic objectives consists of multiple methodologically varying sub-studies: a textual analysis of ERR’s existing online presence and crossmedia content; 32 semi-structured interviews with its various top- and mid-level managers; and a documentary analysis of its associated strategies, guidelines, and communications. The paper suggests that, despite ERR’s advanced presence on digital platforms, it notably lacks a more comprehensive strategy for crossmedia content production and for achieving better inter-organisational cooperation that would enable new production processes. Although a few more advanced crossmedia productions have taken place, these have tended to emerge ad hoc - out of initiatives from individual employees. The article, however, suggests that, despite the current lack of an organisational strategy, the experiences acquired by its employees are creating a timely momentum for using interpretative and adaptive approaches to developing its new crossmedia production strategies.</abstract>

Tallinn University Baltic Film and Media School

Strategic Management of Crossmedia Production at Estonian Public Broadcasting

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> Today, opera houses are confronted by new (global) digital media offers that enable people to remain outside the opera house while attending a live-opera, e.g. via livestreamed opera performances in the cinema. This is a challenge for media managers in these fields because they need to find new ways to work with these new opportunities. Within a cultural marketing context, branding is highly relevant. Based on the brand image approach by Kevin Lane Keller (1993), we use a complex qualitative-quantitative study in order to investigate if, and how, the brand images of live-opera performances and live-streamed operas differ between countries and cultural contexts. By comparing Estonia and Germany, we found that the perception of live-opera is rather a global phenomenon with only slight differences. Furthermore, the ‘classical’ opera performance in an opera house is still preferred, with a corresponding willingness to pay, while the live-streamed opera offer may provide a modern touch. The study may help media managers in adapting their brand management to include new digital product offers and to find targeted differentiation strategies for increasingly competitive markets.</abstract>

The Branding Potential for the Digital Transmission of Live-Operas to the Cinema: An International Comparison of Estonia and Germany

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Baltic Screen Media Review

 Why subscribe and read   Only journal in the Baltic Sea Region that focuses on all forms of audiovisual culture emerging from the region and approaches these from a...

 Why subscribe and read   Only journal in the Baltic Sea Region that focuses on all forms of audiovisual culture emerging from the...