The Economics Of Attention

The Economics Of Attention

As Facebook, Twitter and the like spawn millions of amateur critics, Anton Bitel explains how social media is becoming an effective tool for predicting box-office performance.

Dr Bernardo Huberman may hardly be a household name, but as consulting professor of applied physics at Stanford University and director of the Social Computing Lab at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Hollywood has certainly been taking notice of his recent research into attention and influence in the new online social media. “Our whole recent focus is at the intersection of information technology and social behaviour—the notion of social attention, and how attention is allocated to content—if only because information is now so plentiful and free, but attention is so scarce,” he tells movieScope. “As part of that, I always had this notion that where attention goes, you can predict the future in a sense, if only because so many people are focused on that. And the reason I chose movies is because you can predict something very concrete, which is box-office revenue.”.

Huberman’s co-authored article ‘Predicting the Future With Social Media’, published in March 2010, demonstrates a direct, measurable correlation between the number of ‘tweets’ referencing a given film title in any week, and the film’s box-office takings the following weekend. Indeed, the predictions of his analytic model, which were further fine-tuned when the sentiments (positive, negative or neutral) of the tweets were taken into account, proved considerably more accurate than pre-existing predictive models, including the industry’s gold standard, the Hollywood Stock Exchange. And while the study has taken Twitter as its focus, Huberman is quick to point out that “this can be done in any social medium.”

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Richard Morrison – A Man Of Entitlement

Richard Morrison - A Man Of Entitlement

As a titles designer with over three decades in the business, Richard Morrison has seen plenty of changes in the industry. Here he discusses how credits have become part of the filmgoing experience. Text: Chris Patmore

Although the majority of cinema-goers leave their seats as soon as the end credits start to roll, the opening titles have become an unmissable part of the film-viewing experience. One of the pioneers of integrated credits sequences is the highly-respected British designer Richard Morrison who, over more than 30 years, has created opening titles for more than 130 films; among them such memorable movies as Ghandi, Brazil, A Passage To India, Batman, High Fidelity and Sweeney Todd. It’s surprising to learn, then, that Morrison didn’t set out to be a titles designer.

“I was a graphic designer-painter-photographer, then a friend of my father, who was a film editor, said, ‘Do you fancy doing a stint at a trailer company near Pinewood?’” he recalls. “So I said I could do that, and I bumped into Maurice Binder [designer of the iconic Bond titles]. That was in the days of rostrum cameras, film opticals – an organic way of creating stuff. He showed me a few things and said I should have a go at it myself. The first one that I did was Quadrophenia.”

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