“cinemetrics is about measuring and visualizing movie data, in order to reveal the characteristics of films and to create a visual “fingerprint” for them. Information such as the editing structure, color, speech or motion are extracted, analyzed and transformed into graphic representations so that movies can be seen as a whole and easily interpreted or compared side by side.”
I am curious what are the benefits of those visualizations for us to perceive/understand movies any better. Would be great to read the full thesis though. Here is the brief list of things come up to my mind when I look at the results:
- Average color-scale of the whole movie might give us a clue about the atmosphere and the mood of the movie.
- Dialogues can be extracted to make a tag cloud or list of frequently used words.
- We can visualize the flow of the soundtrack to see rising moments, tensions and relaxing scenes.
- We can analyze pace of the movie by looking at cut/transition frequencies.
- Repeating patterns might be visualized as well, gun-shots, car scenes, conversations, etc.
The list can grow however, I believe we should always keep in mind that the movie itself is a very different experience than its visualizations. Storytelling and audience feelings can’t be communicated enough with visualizations. More information and videos about the project is available on cinemetrics website.
