Who is the director of this movie? Automatic style recognition based on shot features
This work addresses the challenge of movie authorship attribution for film analysis and cross-disciplinary research, though it is incremental as it builds on existing feature extraction methods.
The study tackled the problem of automatically recognizing a director's style in art movies using low-level shot features like duration and scale, finding that these features are distinctive and non-random across 120 movies from six directors, with sequential patterns being as important as distributions.
We show how low-level formal features, such as shot duration, meant as length of camera takes, and shot scale, i.e. the distance between the camera and the subject, are distinctive of a director's style in art movies. So far such features were thought of not having enough varieties to become distinctive of an author. However our investigation on the full filmographies of six different authors (Scorsese, Godard, Tarr, Fellini, Antonioni, and Bergman) for a total number of 120 movies analysed second by second, confirms that these shot-related features do not appear as random patterns in movies from the same director. For feature extraction we adopt methods based on both conventional and deep learning techniques. Our findings suggest that feature sequential patterns, i.e. how features evolve in time, are at least as important as the related feature distributions. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study dealing with automatic attribution of movie authorship, which opens up interesting lines of cross-disciplinary research on the impact of style on the aesthetic and emotional effects on the viewers.