Novel approach to determining tempo and dramatic story sections in motion pictures

This paper presents an original computational approach to extraction of movie tempo for deriving story sections and events that convey high level semantics of stories portrayed in motion pictures, thus enabling better video annotation and interpretation systems. This approach, inspired by the existing cinematic conventions known as film grammar, uses the attributes of motion and shot length to define and compute a novel continuous measure of tempo of a movie. Tempo flow plots are derived for several full-length motion pictures and edge detection is performed to extract dramatic story sections and events occurring in the movie, underlined by their unique tempo. The results confirm reliable detection of actual distinct tempo changes and serve as useful index into the dramatic development and narration of the story in motion pictures.

Film grammar based refinements to extracting scenes in motion pictures

To enable high-level semantic indexing of video, we tackle the problem of automatically structuring motion pictures into meaningful story units, namely scenes. In our recent work, drawing guidance from film grammar, we proposed an algorithmic solution for extracting scenes in motion pictures based on a shot neighborhood color coherence measure. In this paper, we extend our work by presenting various refinement mechanisms, inspired by the knowledge of film devices that are brought to bear while crafting scenes, to further improve the results of the scene detection algorithm. We apply the enhanced algorithm to ten motion pictures and demonstrate the resulting improvements in performance.

Juvenile delinquency (motion pictures) Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary.

Mode of access: Internet.

El Cine és de les dones... i dels homes, però això ja ho sabem = El Cine es de las mujeres... y de los hombres, pero eso ya lo sabemos

En aquest monografic dedicat al cine hem recollit articles de directores de dues generacions perque ens expliquin la seva experiencia de fer pel.licules i també hem convidat a un crític perque ens parli, des de la seva diferencia de ser home, del cinema fet per dones

La Asignatura Metodología de la investigación mediante el cine sobre violencia contra la mujer

El cine es una de las recreaciones humanas más extraordinarias que se conoce desde la perspectiva de la comunicación. En el contexto del cine como recurso formativo, se inscribe la asignatura optativa Metodología de la Investigación mediante el cine, que ya cuenta con seis ediciones en la Diplomatura de Enfermería (Universidad de Barcelona). En cada edición se ha escogido, como objeto (sujeto) de estudio, un problema de salud diferente: cáncer, trastornos de la nutrición, Violencia Contra la Mujer (VCM), etc. La VCM es la expresión de un orden social basado en la desigualdad, que deriva de la asignación de roles diferentes a los hombres y a las mujeres, en función de su sexo. El cine como ficción muestra la realidad de la VCM de diversas formas, pero hace falta trascender el simple visionado de las imágenes para escuchar y mirar la VCM científicamente. Este trabajo describe el plan docente de la optativa Metodología de la Investigación mediante el cine, que incluye el taller: Análisis cinematográfico aplicado a la VCM. Este taller se considera como la intervención correspondiente a un diseño preexperimental de comparación con grupo estático y cuyos resultados se presentan en este trabajo

Una mirada masculina cap el cinema de dones: Katharine Hepburn també feia cinema de dones

Reflexió sobre el cinema de dones

Betty Friedan speaks at "Films and Women" meeting about violence against women in motion pictures

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Buzz in motion pictures : what is buzz and how can marketing create it?

In the movie industry, the extraordinarily successful theatrical performance of certain films is largely attributed to buzz. Despite longstanding commentary about the role of buzz in successful movie marketing and the belief that it accelerates new product diffusion, limited scholarly evidence exists to support these assertions. This is primarily due to the lack of conceptual distinction of buzz from word-of-mouth, which is often used as the main basis for conceptualising buzz. However, word-of-mouth does not fully explain the buzz surrounding films such as 'Gone With The Wind', 'The Dark Knight' and 'Avatar'. Informed by valuable insights from key experts who have launched some of the most successful movies in box office history, as well as a range of moviegoers, this thesis developed a deeper understanding of what buzz is and how it is created. This thesis concludes that buzz is not the same as word-of-mouth.

Men and women differ in their cardiovascular responses to affective pictures

Empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that emotional states might contribute to cardiovascular disease and health through multiple pathways. To the extent that the acute cardiovascular response to emotional events plays a role in cardiovascular health and disease, an essential step in order to understand this possible link is to define the hemodynamic response to affective challenges. This was the aim of the present study. We assessed blood pressure (BP), heart rate (HR), stroke volume (SV), cardiac output, and total peripheral resistance (TPR) in response to 13 picture series in 18 men and 19 women (mean age 26) in order to investigate their hemodynamic responses associated with activation of the appetitive and defensive motivational systems underlying emotional experience. The hemodynamic parameters were recorded by finger-cuff photoplethysmography with Finometer™ (FMS Finapres Medical Systems, Amsterdam) and electrocardiography with the Lifeshirt system (VivoMetrics Inc., Ventura, California). Participants rated self-perceived pleasantness and arousal for each series. In men, BP and SV, but not TPR, increased with increasing self-rated arousal both for appetitive and defensive activation, whereas in women these relationships were almost absent, especially, for defensive activation. HR decelerated more in response to negative than positive and neutral pictures, and more so in men than women. These findings indicate striking sex differences. In particular, it is suggested that the sympathetic inotropic effect to the heart increases with increasing self-rated arousal strongly in men but only weakly in women. Regardless of sex differences, the modulation of the cardiovascular response to affective pictures along the dimensions of pleasantness and arousal is primarily myocardial, and the pattern of cardiovascular response is consistent with a configuration of cardiac sympathetic-parasympathetic coactivation. One possible implication of the observed sex differences concerns the link between affective states and cardiovascular health and disease. Men have a higher incidence of cardiovascular diseases than premenopausal women, and exaggerated sympathetic reactivity to emotional events is a potential pathophysiological mechanism. These findings extend current knowledge showing that under several acute behavioral challenges men demonstrate stronger cardiovascular reactivity than women.

A probabilistic framework for extracting narrative act boundaries and semantics in motion pictures

This work constitutes the first attempt to extract the important narrative structure, the 3-Act storytelling paradigm in film. Widely prevalent in the domain of film, it forms the foundation and framework in which a 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. The identification of act boundaries allows for structuralizing film at a level far higher than existing segmentation frameworks, which include shot detection and scene identification, and provides a basis for inferences about the semantic content of dramatic events in film. A novel act boundary likelihood function for Act 1 and 2 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 result proves to be a useful tool in both the automatic and semi-interactive setting for semantic analysis of film, with potential application to analogues occuring in many other domains, including news, training video, sitcoms.

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.