Automatic movie analysis and summarisation

Automatic movie analysis is the task of employing Machine Learning methods to the field of screenplays, movie scripts, and motion pictures to facilitate or enable various tasks throughout the entirety of a movie’s life-cycle. From helping with making informed decisions about a new movie script with respect to aspects such as its originality, similarity to other movies, or even commercial viability, all the way to offering consumers new and interesting ways of viewing the final movie, many stages in the life-cycle of a movie stand to benefit from Machine Learning techniques that promise to reduce human effort, time, or both. Within this field of automatic movie analysis, this thesis addresses the task of summarising the content of screenplays, enabling users at any stage to gain a broad understanding of a movie from greatly reduced data. The contributions of this thesis are four-fold: (i)We introduce ScriptBase, a new large-scale data set of original movie scripts, annotated with additional meta-information such as genre and plot tags, cast information, and log- and tag-lines. To our knowledge, Script- Base is the largest data set of its kind, containing scripts and information for almost 1,000 Hollywood movies. (ii) We present a dynamic summarisation model for the screenplay domain, which allows for extraction of highly informative and important scenes from movie scripts. The extracted summaries allow for the content of the original script to stay largely intact and provide the user with its important parts, while greatly reducing the script-reading time. (iii) We extend our summarisation model to capture additional modalities beyond the screenplay text. The model is rendered multi-modal by introducing visual information obtained from the actual movie and by extracting scenes from the movie, allowing users to generate visual summaries of motion pictures. (iv) We devise a novel end-to-end neural network model for generating natural language screenplay overviews. This model enables the user to generate short descriptive and informative texts that capture certain aspects of a movie script, such as its genres, approximate content, or style, allowing them to gain a fast, high-level understanding of the screenplay. Multiple automatic and human evaluations were carried out to assess the performance of our models, demonstrating that they are well-suited for the tasks set out in this thesis, outperforming strong baselines. Furthermore, the ScriptBase data set has started to gain traction, and is currently used by a number of other researchers in the field to tackle various tasks relating to screenplays and their analysis

Analysing film content : a text-based approach

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Smashed Typewriters and Sour Smoke: A Historical Poetics of the Screenplay

Screenplays typically provide the starting point for film development and production. They also draw on a rich history of literary conventions and aesthetic traditions that well exceed their technical blueprint function, as emergent attention being given to screenplays as reading matter by both casual and scholarly readers suggests. This dissertation proposes a historical poetics of screenwriting as a way of working through these conflicting ideas about the screenplay: what it is, how to read it, and how these concepts have evolved over time. It pursues an intensive analysisfrom the silent era scenario to the present-day master-scene scriptthrough several frames, including the historical implications of discourse for the screenplay concept, the linkages between screenwriting and earlier forms of lens-based prose, narrative voice and the rhetoric of the possible performance, and the closet, made-to-read screenplay as a class of literary fiction. Engaging theoretical traditions of narratology, authorship, and adaptation studies, the research illuminates how to read a screenplay aesthetically, invoking the fictional blueprint metaphor as a new interpretive strategy that views the script as independent and complete, outside any actual production reality

Aesthetics, Innovation, and the Politics of Film-Production at Lenfil'm, 1961-1991

This thesis examines the relationship between Lenfil´m film-studio and the Soviet Party-state apparatus in the context of successive reformist projects and shifting repertory strategies pursued by filmmakers and executives. Drawing upon archival records, cinema-historical scholarship, professional testimonies, and feature-films, it demonstrates a studio-specific approach to the institutional relations that shaped late-Soviet cinema as an artistic process, an industry, and a political sphere. In 1961, significant reorganizations of production at Lenfil´m assured an unprecedented devolution of executive responsibilities – commissioning, development, shoot-supervision – to new, cineaste-led production-units. These artistic cohorts were afforded sufficient license to shape their professional profiles around distinctive repertory policies, which reflected the artistic interests of their filmmakers, but were also compelled to adapt these proposals to the thematic categories fixed by late-Soviet cinema’s central administrative structures. This thesis asks how Lenfil´m cineastes negotiated ideological screening and pursued aesthetical innovation in filmmaking, towards which the administrative system was consistently suspicious or outright hostile. It then considers how the studio’s repertory profile changed in response to resurgent official orthodoxies in the 1970s, only to incorporate renewed privileging of art-cinema into this response by the end of that decade. In the 1980s, with perestroika, attempts at democratization and market-focused reform found these production-units to be the irreducible professional nuclei of late-Soviet cinema. Their structures, artistic identities, and decision-making prerogatives persisted beyond all practicality of adherence to an inflexible administrative system and a collapsing film-distribution network. Through production-histories, analysis of Communist Party policies, and detailed examinations of the reforms that modified studio-structures, this thesis argues that the final three decades of the USSR saw filmmakers and studio-level administrators develop heterogenous repertory innovations, despite the crudeness of official ideological oversight. Lenfil´m became the bastion of late-Soviet auteurism within an industrial system that ought, by its own measure, to have precluded this possibility