Computationally deconstructing movie narratives: An informatics approach

In general, popular films and screenplays follow a well defined storytelling paradigm that comprises three essential segments or acts: exposition (act I), conflict (act II) and resolution (act III). Deconstructing a movie into its narrative units can enrich semantic understanding of movies, and help in movie summarization, navigation and detection of the key events. A multimodal framework for detecting such three act narrative structure is developed in this paper. Various low-level features are designed and extracted from video, audio and text channels of a movie so as to capture the pace and excitement of the movie's narrative. Information from the three modalities is combined to compute a continuous dynamic measure of the movie's narrative flow, referred to as the story intensity of the movie in this paper. Guided by the knowledge of film grammar, the act boundaries are detected, and compared against annotations collected from human experts. Promising results are demonstrated for nine full-length Hollywood feature films of various genres.