Finding the Beat: An Analysis of the Rhythmic Elements of Motion Pictures

This paper forms a continuation of our work focused on exploiting film grammar for the task of automated film understanding. We examine film rhythm, a powerful narrative concept used to endow structure and form to the film compositionally and to enhance its lyrical quality experientially. Of the many, often complex, cinematic devices contributing to film rhythm, this paper investigates the rhythmic elements that are present in edited sequences of shots, and presents a novel computational model to detect shot structural rhythm as either metric, accelerated, decelerated, or free. Details of the algorithm for the extraction of these editing rhythm classes are presented, along with experimental results on real movie data. Following this we study the usefulness of combining the rhythmic patterns induced through both motion and editing in film. We show that, whilst detailed content identification via rhythm types alone is not possible by virtue of the fact that film is not codified to this ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: IJIG
• Authors: Brett Adams, Chitra Dorai, Svetha Venkatesh
• Keywords: IJIG 2002, Powerful Narrative Concept, Rhythm, Rhythmic Elements