Scholarly Article Analysis Essay

Scholarly Articles: An Example and Basic Analysis for Society Today
Millions people all around the world entertain themselves by watching animated movies and playing video games, but not all people know how exactly the movie/game was shot. There are many different ways to control and aim the “camera” to convey different aspects of a point of view, and there is a great deal of work involved in finding the best way to show that to the audience. In this essay I am going to explain how the scholarly article, “Declarative Camera Control for Automatic Cinematography” describes what work goes into the camera control in filming animated movies and video games, how placing a camera in a desired angle or distance can dramatically change the effect
of the scene being portrayed, and ultimately how scholarly articles such as this one can contribute to our community. First of all I need to describe what the structure of a scholarly article is.
A scholarly article is not the same as a regular or editorial article. A scholarly article is written for a specific audience of experts in a certain field of study to share and improve the knowledge of those professionals. The first part is called the abstract, which gives a basic general explanation of what the article is going to be about, and this part uses a vocabulary that is familiar and easy to understand for most people. Next is the introduction or background, which in this part introduces you to the topic that the author does research on, and it also gives the reason or motivation while also giving some extra background information on the topic. The next part is the method. This part includes the information that shows how the author conducted his/her research. So basically it shows the method that the author used and gives extra information on materials and procedure. The next part is the results, which show any tables or graphs that the author came out with, so basically statistics. The next part is the conclusion, which explains the outcome and any implications that the author gives that would try and continue the research. The last part of the article is the references, which gives credit to any sources the author used for the research, and often this part can reach several pages long, depending on the length of the
article. The article that I analyzed is “Declarative Camera Control for Automatic Cinematography” (Christianson et al., American Association for Artificial Intelligence, 1996). The Abstract section of the article is talking generally about how animations that are generated by interactive 3D computer graphics are usually shown from a particular character’s point of view or it’s from a small set of well-placed viewpoints. It says that they will describe the principles of cinematography and how it is formalized into DCCL to be used in video games and animated movies to portray the point of view. One of the sections is explaining what DCCL is. DCCL stands for Declarative Camera Control Language. DCCL is very important because it allows the computer systems to encode and implement film idioms to show and be used on the computer filming applications. The four parts that compose DCCL are fragments, views, placements, and movement endpoints, which basically give the details on how the camera moves at certain points and time intervals. The author then explains more into the process in great detail how the viewpoints get brought into life inside the video games. Then there are figures helping the information and a reference section almost one page long. The authors of the article have a number of main contributions that their paper can bring. The first contribution is “Surveying established principles from filmmaking that can be used in a variety of computer graphics applications.” This says that the article shows and proves to the audience that computer graphics applications use basic principles of making movies from cinematography and applies those to the making of video games and animated movies. The next main contribution they add is that their article “Describes a domain – independent heuristic evaluator that ranks the quality of a shot specification using detailed geometric information and knowledge of desirable focal lengths, shot durations, etc.” This is saying that they describe in great detail how they get the best camera angle and shot by using the Heuristic evaluator, which uses both geometric and cinematographic principles and applies them to the computer graphics applications.
There seems to be a great amount of people that believe that scholarly articles are pointless and that they don’t do anything but explain boring facts for no reason. Scholarly articles are extremely important because they can greatly improve the knowledge of people that want to be better at what they do for their careers. My article, for example, is about Cinematography. For someone that wants to create computer graphics for either video games or an animated movie, reading and evaluating this article can benefit them greatly by getting little details that explain one of the steps in creating these camera angles and points of view that they need to become successful in cinematography. There are thousands of possible careers all over the world that people want to do for their lives and everyone that wants to do these certain careers want to be the best at it. There are also thousands of scholarly articles out there that experts on a certain field write to share and improve the knowledge of other people in that field. So basically, scholarly articles are not entertaining and not easy to understand, but they are not meant to do those things. They are meant to greatly help and make everyone in that field knowledgeable and on the same page. We all know that we want to know as much as possible on our careers, and these articles are meant for just that. They are extremely important to society, and without them there wouldn’t be as many experts in a certain field as there are today.

Works Cited:

Christianson, David B. et al.. "Declarative Camera Control for Automatic Cinematography." AAAI '96 (1996): 8. Online.