Taming the roving camera: a framework for creating professional home movies through narrative and cinesthetic elements

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 cinesthestic 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.