Horror film genre typing and scene labeling via audio analysis

We examine localised sound energy patterns, or events, that we associate with high level affect experienced with films. The study of sound energy events in conjunction with their intended affect enable the analysis of film at a higher conceptual level, such as genre. The various affect/emotional responses we investigate in this paper are brought about by well established patterns of sound energy dynamics employed in audio tracks of horror films. This allows the examination of the thematic content of the films in relation to horror elements. We analyse the frequency of sound energy and affect events at a film level as well as at a scene level, and propose measures indicative of the film genre and scene content. Using 4 horror, and 2 non-horror movies as experimental data we establish a correlation between the sound energy event types and horrific thematic content within film, thus enabling an automated mechanism for genre typing and scene content labeling in film.

Identifying film takes for cinematic analysis

In this paper, we focus on the ‘reverse editing’ problem in movie analysis, i.e., the extraction of film takes, original camera shots that a film editor extracts and arranges to produce a finished scene. The ability to disassemble final scenes and shots into takes is essential for nonlinear browsing, content annotation and the extraction of higher order cinematic constructs from film. In this work, we investigate agglomerative hierachical clustering methods along with different similarity metrics and group distances for this task, and demonstrate our findings with 10 movies.

IMCE : integrated media creation environment

We discuss the design and implementation of an integrated media creation environment, and demonstrate its efficacy in the generation of two simple home movies. The significance for the average user seeking to create home movies lies in the flexible and automatic application of film principles to the task, removal of tedious low-level editing by means of wellformed media transformations in terms of high-level film constructs (e.g. tempo), and content repurposing powered by those same transformations added to the rich semantic information maintained at each phase of the process.

Indexing narrative structure and semantics in motion pictures with a probabilistic framework

This work constitutes the first attempt to extract an important narrative structure, the 3-Act story telling paradigm, in film. This narrative structure is prevalent in the domain of film as it forms the foundation and framework in which the film can be made to function as an effective tool for story telling, and its extraction is a vital step in automatic content management for film data. A novel act boundary likelihood function for Act 1 is derived using a Bayesian formulation under guidance from film grammar, tested under many configurations and the results are reported for experiments involving 25 full length movies. The formulation is shown to be a useful tool in both the automatic and semi-interactive setting for semantic analysis of film.

Role of shot length in characterizing tempo and dramatic story sections in motion pictures

Motivated by existing cinematic conventions known as film grammar, we proposed a computational approach to determine tempo as a high-level movie content descriptor as well as means for deriving dramatic story sections and events occurring in movies. Movie tempo is extracted from two easily computed aspects in our approach: shot length and motion. Story sections and events are generally associated with changes in tempo, and are thus identified by edges located in the tempo function. In this paper, we analyze our initial founding of the tempo function on the basis that the distribution of both shot length and motion in movies is normal. Given that the distribution of shot length is approximately Weibull as confirmed in our experiments, we examine the impact of modelling and modifying the contributions of shot length to tempo. We derive an appropriate normalization function that faithfully encapsulates the role of shot length in tempo perception, and analyze the changes to the story sections identified in films.

Situated event bootstrapping and capture guidance for automated home movie authoring

This paper describes a novel interactive media authoring framework, MediaTE, that enables amateurs to create videos of higher narrative or aesthetic quality with a completely mobile lifecycle. A novel event bootstrapping dialog is used to derive shot suggestions that yield both targetted footage and annotation enabling an automatic Computational Media Aesthetics-aware editing phase, the manual performance of which is typically a barrier to the amateur. This facilitates a move away from requiring a prior-conception of the events or locale being filmed, in the form of a template, to at-capture bootstrapping of this information. Metadata gathered as part of the critical path of media creation also has implications for the longevity and reuse of captured media assets. Results of an evaluation performed on both the usability and delivered media aspects of the system are discussed, which highlight the tenability of the proposed framework and the quality of the produced media.

Automated film rhythm extraction for scene analysis

This paper examines film rhythm, an important expressive element in motion pictures, based on our ongoing study to exploit film grammar as a broad computational framework for the task of automated film and video understanding. Of the many, more or less elusive, narrative devices contributing to film rhythm, this paper discusses motion characteristics that form the basis of our analysis, and presents novel computational models for extracting rhythmic patterns induced through a perception of motion. In our rhythm model, motion behaviour is classified as being either nonexistent, fluid or staccato for a given shot. Shot neighbourhoods in movies are then grouped by proportional makeup of these motion behavioural classes to yield seven high-level rhythmic arrangements that prove to be adept at indicating likely scene content (e.g. dialogue or chase sequence) in our experiments. Underlying causes for this level of codification in our approach are postulated from film grammar, and are accompanied by detailed demonstration from real movies for the purposes of clarification.

Multimedia authoring : human-computer partnership for harvesting metadata from the right sources

This chapter takes a look at the task of creating multimedia authoring tools for the amateur media creator, and the problems unique to the undertaking. It argues that a deep understanding of both the media creation process, together with insight into the precise nature of the relative strengths of computers and users, given the domain of application, is needed before this gap can be bridged by software technology. These issues are further demonstrated within the context of a novel media collection environment, including a real- world example of an occasion filmed in order to automatically create two movies of distinctly different styles. The authors hope that such tools will enable amateur videographers to produce technically polished and aesthetically effective media, regardless of their level of expertise.

Visual networking : keeping television on the box

The Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) is the largest infrastructure project ever proposed in Australia (NBN, 2010). Its Fibre to the Home open access network will see a new generation of telecommunications services providing the basis for technologies and services to be combined. Homes connected to the network will have access to new digital media and high-speed internet among other applications. Taking an Australian perspective, this paper focuses on the capacity for fast broadband to allow features and technologies to be combined that were once separate, but now have converged including computing, telephony, free-to-air (FTA) television, direct-to-home satellite broadcasting, radio, and the internet and the implications. Specifically, future services for digital television are going to be more akin to app-based functions that are currently available on mobiles and tablets but on the television screen rather than the PC. Against such a background, this article examines the future of television arguing that faster broadband and internet-enabled televisions to watch movies and shows when it suits the audience are the keys to the television’s survival.

Visual networking : Australia's media landscape

Australia is in the midst of a massive transformation of its communication infrastructure. The AUD43 billion Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) to be set up by the wholly Federal government-owned NBNCo Limited (NBNCo), is the largest infrastructure project ever proposed in Australia (NBN, 2010). It has the capacity to combine features and technologies that were once separate, but now have converged, including computing, telephony, free-to-air (FTA) television, direct-to-home satellite broadcasting, radio and the internet. This means that current thinking about these media technologies, developed through the process of convergence as well as regulation, requires review. Future services for digital television are going to be more akin to app-based functions currently available on mobiles and tablets but accessed via the television screen rather than the PC. Against such a background, this article examines the Australian ‘televisual’ space, arguing that faster broadband and internet-enabled televisions for movies, shows, communication and more, when it suits the audience, are the keys to television’s survival through visually networked possibilities.

Alt.film.au(2) : Blogging at the margins in Australian retrospective 2012

In 1972 Albie Thoms wrote: ‘In Australia it has been impossible to elicit much sympathetic appraisal from critics who seem distressed by the relation of personal film to amateur movies. Even those proselytizing for the New cinema have underrated the personal film as a worthy antidote to the market assumptions of Hollywood.’ (Thoms 1978, p. 146) The question now is, of course, is anything different in 2012? The answer is of course yes and no. Although the politics remains frustratingly familiar the digital has progressed further to the point that where in the 60s every one picked up a guitar, now we pick up a video camera. A postscript relates those films in the program not available for inclusion in the original 90s rant- (i.e. they did not exist) I have further annotated this re-play of old wounds and victories with commentary on some of the films in the screening program.

Learning from ordered sets and applications in collaborative ranking

Ranking over sets arise when users choose between groups of items. For example, a group may be of those movies deemed 5 stars to them, or a customized tour package. It turns out, to model this data type properly, we need to investigate the general combinatorics problem of partitioning a set and ordering the subsets. Here we construct a probabilistic log-linear model over a set of ordered subsets. Inference in this combinatorial space is highly challenging: The space size approaches (N!/2)6.93145N+1 as N approaches infinity. We propose a split-and-merge Metropolis-Hastings procedure that can explore the state-space efficiently. For discovering hidden aspects in the data, we enrich the model with latent binary variables so that the posteriors can be efficiently evaluated. Finally, we evaluate the proposed model on large-scale collaborative filtering tasks and demonstrate that it is competitive against state-of-the-art methods.

Semantic photo synthesis

Composite images are synthesized from existing photographs by artists who make concept art, e.g., storyboards for movies or architectural planning. Current techniques allow an artist to fabricate such an image by digitally splicing parts of stock photographs. While these images serve mainly to “quickly”convey how a scene should look, their production is laborious. We propose a technique that allows a person to design a new photograph with substantially less effort. This paper presents a method that generates a composite image when a user types in nouns, such as “boat”and “sand.”The artist can optionally design an intended image by specifying other constraints. Our algorithm formulates the constraints as queries to search an automatically annotated image database. The desired photograph, not a collage, is then synthesized using graph-cut optimization, optionally allowing for further user interaction to edit or choose among alternative generated photos. An implementation of our approach, shown in the associated video, demonstrates our contributions of (1) a method for creating specific images with minimal human effort, and (2) a combined algorithm for automatically building an image library with semantic annotations from any photo collection.

Emergent effects in massive agent swarms in real-time game environments

 Computational efficiency and hence the scale of agent-based swarm simulations is bound by the nearest neighbour computation for each agent. This article proposes the use of GPU texture memory to implement lookup tables for a spatial partitioning based k-Nearest Neighbours algorithm. These improvements allow simulation of swarms of 220 agents at higher rates than the current best alternative algorithms. This approach is incorporated into an existing framework for simulating steering behaviours allowing for a complete implementation of massive agent swarm simulations, with per agent behaviour preferences, on a Graphics Processing Unit. These simulations have enabled an investigation of the emergent dynamics that occur when massive swarms interact with a choke point in their environment. Various modes of sustained dynamics with temporal and spatial coherence are identified when a critical mass of agents is simulated and some elementary properties are presented. The algorithms presented in this article enable researchers and content designers in games and movies to implement truly massive agent swarms in real time and thus provide a basis for further identification and analysis of the emergent dynamics in these swarms. This will improve not only the scale of swarms used in commercial games and movies but will also improve the reliability of swarm behaviour with respect to content design goals.

Outcomes of a knowledge translation strategy

In this paper we describe how an Australian health promotion agency combined short information sheets and ‘micro-movies’ to encourage the uptake of evidence associated with a food security initiative. Although commended by intended users for being innovative, a follow up study of the dissemination approach produced few tangible examples of learnings being translated into action. The paper provides an overview of the general rationale underlying the mixed-media research dissemination strategy and identifies barriers that resulted in low engagement with the information resources. Furthermore, we offer some general lessons for program planners and researchers who are interested in applying novel reporting methods to encourage evidence uptake.