Shot scale distribution in art films

The scale of shot, i.e. the apparent distance of the camera from the main subject of a scene, is one of the main stylistic and narrative functions of audiovisual products, conveying meaning and inducing the viewer’s emotional state. The statistical distribution of different shot scales in a film may be an important identifier of an individual film, an individual author, and of various narrative and affective functions of a film. In order to understand at which level shot scale distribution (SSD) of a movie might become its fingerprint, it is necessary to produce automatic recognition of shot scale on a large movie corpus. In our work we propose an automatic framework for estimating the SSD of a movie by using inherent characteristics of shots containing information about camera distance, without the need to recover the 3D structure of the scene. In the experimental investigation, the comparison of obtained results with manual SSD annotations proves the validity of the framework. Experiments conducted on movies by Michelangelo Antonioni taken from different stylistic periods (1950–57, 1960–64, 1966–75, 1980–82) show a strong similarity in shot scale distributions within each period, thus opening interesting research lines regarding the possible aesthetic and cognitive sources of such a regularity.