A computable film structure model

Automatic parsing of film structure is one of the basic techniques in film browsing and retrieval. In this paper, we propose a computable film-structure model: the nine-plot model, which parses an entire film into three hierarchical semantic levels: act, plot and scene. The model has been motivated by systemic analysis on “Hollywood mode” and generic narrative structure of movie story. Also, a set of modeling methods for film-making rules based on scene segmentation and classification are proposed. The experimental results on 7 full-length Hollywood movies demonstrate the effectiveness of the model.