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In this paper we present an application designed to improve the quality of amateur video production. The majority of home movie material is negatively impacted by two factors: lack of narrative content- "what to shoot?", and the absence or inappropriate use of cinesthetic elements for effective reinforcement of content - "how to shoot?". We leverage the age-old communicative powers of Story to answer the what For the second problem, the how, we turn to the corpus of aesthetic principles that constitute the film profession, which impact both technical and cinematic considerations for a given project.

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.

Capturing devices, while continually becoming smaller and easier to use, have increased in capacity. They are also more connectable and interoperable, and their propensity to show up where they are least expected is surprising. Despite these advances, the video-capture experience is still frustrating. To achieve success, two issues need consideration. One is to determine what to capture and how, and how to handle the ensuring process required to transform the raw captured footage into a presentable multimedia artifact. Continual query on discourse theory, domain distinctives such as media aesthetics, human-computer interface issues, and multimedia data description standards is also important.

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.

This paper addresses the challenge of bridging the semantic gap that exists between the simplicity of features that can be currently computed in automated content indexing systems and the richness of semantics in user queries posed for media search and retrieval. It proposes a unique computational approach to extraction of expressive elements of motion pictures for deriving high-level semantics of stories portrayed, thus enabling rich video annotation and interpretation. This approach, motivated and directed by the existing cinematic conventions known as film grammar, as a first step toward demonstrating its effectiveness, uses the attributes of motion and shot length to define and compute a novel measure of tempo of a movie. Tempo flow plots are defined and derived for a number of full-length movies and edge analysis is performed leading to the extraction of dramatic story sections and events signaled by their unique tempo. The results confirm tempo as a useful high-level semantic construct in its own right and a promising component of others such as rhythm, tone or mood of a film. In addition to the development of this computable tempo measure, a study is conducted as to the usefulness of biasing it toward either of its constituents, namely, motion or shot length. Finally, a refinement is made to the shot length normalizing mechanism, driven by the peculiar characteristics of shot length distribution exhibited by movies. Results of these additional studies, and possible applications and limitations are discussed.

This thesis presents work aimed at exploiting the grammar of film for the purpose of automated film understanding, and addresses the semantic gap that exists between the simplicity of features that can be currently computed in automated content indexing systems and the richness of semantics in user queries posed for media search and retrieval. The problem is set within the broader context of the need for enabling technologies for multimedia content management, and arises in response to the growing presence of multimedia data made possible by advances in storage, processing, and transmission technologies. The first demonstration of this philosophy uses the attributes of motion and shot length to define and compute a novel measure of film tempo. Tempo flow plots are defined and derived for a number of full length movies, and edge analysis is performed leading to the extraction of dramatic story sections and events signaled by their unique tempo. In addition to the development of this computable tempo measure, a study is conducted as to the usefulness of biasing it toward either of its constituents, namely motion or shot length. Thirdly, a refinement is made to the shot length normalizing mechanism, driven by the peculiar characteristics of shot length distribution exhibited by movies. The next aspect of film examined is film rhythm. In the rhythm model presented, 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 adept at indicating likely scene content (e.g., dialogue or chase sequence). The second part of the investigation presents a novel computational model to detect editing patterns as either metric, accelerated, decelerated, or free.It is also found that combined motion and editing rhythms allow us to determine that the media content has changed and hypoth

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.