All posts tagged: dialogue

Drake Bell was sexually assaulted by dialogue coach, revealing Nickelodeon abuse of its child stars

Drake Bell was sexually assaulted by dialogue coach, revealing Nickelodeon abuse of its child stars

Drake Bell, the star of Nickelodeon’s sitcom “Drake & Josh,” has publicly opened up about being sexually abused by Nickelodeon dialogue and acting coach Brian Peck. Bell spoke about his experience in “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV” — an upcoming docuseries from Investigation Discovery about the alleged toxic culture behind some of TV producer Dan Schneider’s most iconic children’s shows. “Brian and I became really close because we had a lot of the same interests, which looking back, I think that was probably a little calculated,” Bell, now 37, recounted in the docuseries. Bell met Peck in 2000, after the former landed an acting job on Nickelodeon’s “The Amanda Show” in 1999. During the show’s second season, Peck grew closer to Bell and would invite him to his house for acting lessons. According to the documentary, the actor’s father Joe Bell felt uncomfortable with Peck but was dismissed by the production team when he brought up his concerns. Joe Bell said he eventually “backed off” after feeling “ostracized” on set. Peck …

Drake Bell alleges he was sexually abused by Nickelodeon dialogue coach

Drake Bell alleges he was sexually abused by Nickelodeon dialogue coach

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Former Nickelodeon star Drake Bell is speaking out for the first time about the alleged sexual abuse he says he suffered at the age of 15. In the forthcoming Investigation Discovery series Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, Bell alleges that he was a victim of abuse at the hands of actor Brian Peck. Peck worked as a dialogue coach on Nickelodeon’s All That and The Amanda Show. Bell starred in the latter show from 1999 to 2002 before going on to take the lead role in his own Nickelodeon series in 2004, Drake & Josh. In August 2003, Peck was arrested on more than a dozen charges related to sexual abuse allegations involving an unnamed minor. In May 2004, Peck pleaded no contest to performing a lewd act with a 14 or 15-year-old and to oral copulation with a minor under 16. Peck was …

‘We will not accept fake Patois’: Jamaican linguist on dialogue in Bob Marley biopic | Bob Marley

‘We will not accept fake Patois’: Jamaican linguist on dialogue in Bob Marley biopic | Bob Marley

When the Jamaican linguist Dr Joseph Farquharson agreed to consult on the Bob Marley biopic One Love, there was one major motivating factor: wanting to avoid another Cool Runnings. The 1993 comedy about the real-life Jamaican Olympic bobsled team is a well-loved classic in many parts of the English-speaking world but has also become a cautionary tale about what happens when Hollywood attempts to “globalise” the Jamaican accent and distinct language. For Farquharson, who worked as an adviser for the One Love dialogue coach, Brett Tyne – who in turn advised Kingsley Ben-Adir, who plays Marley – the dialogue in the film needed to be authentic, era-appropriate and not slip into anything other than Jamaican Patois. “We stated up front if this was going to be another Cool Runnings, we weren’t going to do it,” said Farquharson, a senior lecturer in linguistics at the Jamaican language unit in the University of the West Indies. The Cool Runnings director, Jon Turteltaub, said he was under huge pressure from Jeffrey Katzenberg, then chair of Walt Disney Studios, …

Plato’s Dialogue Gorgias Gets Adapted into a Short Avant-Garde Film

Plato’s Dialogue Gorgias Gets Adapted into a Short Avant-Garde Film

The word sophis­ti­cat­ed may sound like praise today, but it orig­i­nat­ed as more of an accu­sa­tion. Trace its ety­mol­o­gy back far enough and you’ll encounter the sophists, itin­er­ant lec­tur­ers in ancient Greece who taught sub­jects like phi­los­o­phy, math­e­mat­ics, music, and rhetoric — the last of which they mas­tered no mat­ter their osten­si­ble sub­ject area. Their rep­u­ta­tion has passed down to us our cur­rent under­stand­ing of the word sophistry as “sub­tly decep­tive rea­son­ing or argu­men­ta­tion.” A sophist may or may not have known what he was talk­ing about, but he knew how to talk about it in the way his audi­ence want­ed to hear. It is in the com­pa­ny of sophists that Pla­to places Socrates in the dia­logue Gor­gias, a sec­tion of which has been adapt­ed into the short film above. An “exper­i­men­tal video essay from Epoché mag­a­zine,” as Aeon describes it, it “com­bines some­what cryp­tic archival visu­als, a haunt­ing, dis­so­nant score, and text from an exchange between Socrates and the tit­u­lar Gor­gias on the nature of ora­to­ry.” The lat­ter describes ora­to­ry as his “art,” which …

EU’s von der Leyen urges ‘dialogue’ as farmers continue protests

EU’s von der Leyen urges ‘dialogue’ as farmers continue protests

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, speaks during a joint press conference in Sarajevo, Bosnia, January 23, 2024. ARMIN DURGUT / AP The EU needs to overcome “polarisation” in its agri-food sector through dialogue, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen urged on Thursday, January 25, as farmers in several countries stage protests over rising costs. “We all have the same sense of urgency that things have to improve,” von der Leyen said as she opened an EU strategic dialogue to balance farmers’ complaints with Europe’s green transition. “There is an increasing division and polarisation” in the sector, she acknowledged. “I’m deeply convinced that we can only overcome this polarisation that we all sense by dialogue.” Farmers in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Romania are in revolt over a litany of complaints, including rising costs to meet carbon-cutting targets, fuel prices, inflation and Ukrainian grain imports diverted into the EU because of Russia’s war. Read more Article réservé à nos abonnés European leaders attempt to defuse farmers’ anger Many farmers have taken to …

Mercedes launches ‘dialogue partner’ voice assistant

Mercedes launches ‘dialogue partner’ voice assistant

LAS VEGAS : Mercedes-Benz launched a new virtual assistant at the CES electronics trade fair on Monday capable of providing context-based suggestions and engaging in dialogue with users, signalling another step forward in the use of artificial intelligence in cars.     The assistant can speak in different tones of various emotions and ask intelligent questions to clarify what exactly is being asked, the company said. “The car is your dialogue partner. You can ask questions, have a conversation, be productive,” Mercedes’ chief technology officer, Markus Schaefer, said at a press roundtable in Las Vegas.     The assistant will be rolled out in vehicles including the new concept CLA class, an all-electric take on the carmaker’s smaller four-door model, premiering in North America at the trade show. With electric-vehicle hardware less complex and variable than that of combustion-engine cars, carmakers are looking to set themselves apart on their software offerings. Voice assistant technology in cars is becoming increasingly sophisticated, from the use of personalised avatars to generative AI technology. Volkswagen presented its first vehicles featuring a …

Why the President of Iran Does Not Deserve Dialogue

Why the President of Iran Does Not Deserve Dialogue

Last week, the Council on Foreign Relations invited me to a roundtable discussion it will be hosting Tuesday with the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, who will be in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. As a longtime member of the council, I wrote back to decline the invitation and published a brief statement about why I believe that Raisi, a man who ought to be behind bars for mass murder, must not be accorded this legitimacy. Last year, a court in Sweden found a prison official guilty of war crimes in one of the worst atrocities ever committed in the history of modern Iran. That verdict directly implicated Raisi, who was a central enforcer of the policy of exterminating prisoners of conscience, which resulted in thousands of executions carried out over about five months starting in July 1988. This judicial finding mirrored the result of an earlier prosecution in Germany, where a court ruled that Iran’s top leaders were responsible for the state-sponsored assassination of four regime opponents in Berlin in 1992. …

Li Shangfu: China’s defence minister at Shangri-La Dialogue warns of ‘cold war mentality’ in digs at US | China

China’s defence minister, Li Shangfu, has said a cold war mentality is resurgent in the Asia-Pacific region, but Beijing seeks dialogue over confrontation. The remarks came after Li refused to formally meet the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. Speaking at the dialogue, Asia’s top security summit, on Sunday, Li took thinly veiled digs at the US, repeating familiar grievances and accusing “some countries” of intensifying an arms race and interfering in the internal affairs of others. “A cold war mentality is now resurgent, greatly increasing security risks,” he said. “Mutual respect should prevail over bullying and hegemony.” Li, a general of the People’s Liberation Army, has been under US sanctions since 2018 over the purchase of combat aircraft and equipment from Russia’s main arms exporter, Rosoboronexport. The general told the dialogue audience that China would not tolerate attempts by Taiwan independence forces or external forces to separate Taiwan from China. Taiwan is a self-governed island that considers itself independent. China’s president, Xi Jinping, has made it a goal to …

Can’t watch without subtitles? Prime Video’s new feature makes dialogue easier to hear

Can’t watch without subtitles? Prime Video’s new feature makes dialogue easier to hear

Can’t hear the TV anymore? You’re not alone. TV dialogue has gotten harder to understand over the years, leading everyone to turn subtitles on while watching. Today, that problem is top of mind as Amazon Prime Video introduces a new feature that may make subtitles no longer necessary — at least on some titles. It’s debuting “Dialogue Boost,” an option that allows Prime Video viewers to boost the volume of spoken dialogue relative to the background music and effects. The feature will first become available on select Amazon Original programs globally, including “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” “Harlem,” “The Big Sick,” “Being the Ricardos,” and “Beautiful Boy,” among others. Similar features to increase the volume of dialogue are available on other platforms, like high-end theater systems, specialized audio equipment, and some smart TVs and streaming media devices. Roku, for example, offers something called “speech clarity” which also boosts dialogue content relative to other sounds, like background music or louder sound effects, like car crashes. But Amazon notes that it’s the first global …

Ubisoft’s new AI tool automatically generates dialogue for non-playable game characters

Ubisoft’s new AI tool automatically generates dialogue for non-playable game characters

Ubisoft, the developer behind popular games like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, announced that it’s using an AI “Ghostwriter” tool to write dialogue for some of its games with the aim of keeping NPCs (non-playable characters) individually interesting and realistic with less manual work. The company says tool isn’t replacing video game writers, but instead will alleviate the task of writing barks, which are phrases or sounds made by NPCs during a triggered event. Ghostwriter generates first drafts of barks in order to give scriptwriters more time to focus on the general narrative. “Crowd chatter and barks are central features of player immersion in games – NPCs speaking to each other, enemy dialogue during combat, or an exchange triggered when entering an area all provide a more realistic world experience and make the player feel like the game around them exists outside of their actions,” Ubisoft wrote in a blog post.“However, both require time and creative effort from scriptwriters that could be spent on other core plot items. Ghostwriter frees up that time, but still …