Ambient Multi-Camera Personal Documentary

Polymnia is an automated solution for the creation of ambient multi-camera personal documentary films. This short paper introduces the system, emphasising the rule-based documentary generation engine that we have created to assemble an edited narrative from source footage. We describe how such automatically generated media can be integrated with and augment personally-authored images and videos as a contribution to an individual’s personal digital memory

Planning the digitisation, storage and access of large scale audiovisual archives

This paper presents ongoing work in PrestoSpace on how broadcast archives can plan large-scale, long-term digitization and storage projects. In our approach, carrier decay, technical obsolescence, and rapidly falling costs of mass storage are represented as a series of statistical and predictive models. The models include ongoing migration within a digital archive. The objective is to allow archive managers to investigate the trade-offs between how many items to transfer, the cost of transfer and storage, how long it will take, what quality can be achieved, how much will be lost, and what digital storage solutions to adopt over time. The process and models are based on digitization projects conducted by large broadcast archives that are currently migrating their collections into digital form. Whilst our focus is on broadcast archives, our findings should be readily transferable to other scenarios where there is a need to store large volumes of digital data over long periods of time

A Feature-Augmented Grammar for Automated Media Production

The IST Polymnia project is creating a fully automated system for personalised video generation, including content creation, selection and composition. This paper presents a linguistically motivated solution using context-free feature-augmented grammar rules to describe editing tasks and hence automate video editing. The solution is media and application independent

Realism And Fantasy In Motion Pictures: Transportation Under Debate

Transportation is commonly presented in the context of realistic narratives. An important facet of transportation, which means being absorbed into the written narrative flow of a story, relies on its capacity to influence individuals’ beliefs. This research examines whether (i) the effects of transportation is replicable with movies; (ii) an individual difference, such as fantasy proneness, shapes the relationship between the realism of the movie and the transportation level of the individual. Two studies show that (a) movies have an impact on individuals’ transportation; (b) realistic movies have a greater impact on transportation than fantastic movies; (c) fantasy proneness increases the level of transportation; (d) transported individuals better evaluate movies