• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.279-292
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• 2011

Movie is a representative media that can transmit stories to audiences. Basically, a story is described by characters in the movie. Different from other simple videos, movies deploy narrative structures for explaining various conflicts or collaborations between characters. These narrative structures consist of 3 main acts, which are beginning, middle, and ending. The beginning act includes 1) introduction to main characters and backgrounds, and 2) conflicts implication and clues for incidents. The middle act describes the events developed by both inside and outside factors and the story dramatic tension heighten. Finally, in the end act, the events are developed are resolved, and the topic of story and message of writer are transmitted. When story information is extracted from movie, it is needed to consider that it has different weights by narrative structure. Namely, when some information is extracted, it has a different influence to story deployment depending on where it locates at the beginning, middle and end acts. The beginning act is the part that exposes to audiences for story set-up various information such as setting of characters and depiction of backgrounds. And thus, it is necessary to extract much kind information from the beginning act in order to abstract a movie or retrieve character information. Thereby, this paper proposes a novel method for extracting the beginning boundaries. It is the method that detects a boundary scene between the beginning act and middle using the accumulation graph of characters. The beginning act consists of the scenes that introduce important characters, imply the conflict relationship between them, and suggest clues to resolve troubles. First, a scene that the new important characters don't appear any more should be detected in order to extract a scene completed the introduction of them. The important characters mean the major and minor characters, which can be dealt as important characters since they lead story progression. Extra should be excluded in order to extract a scene completed the introduction of important characters in the accumulation graph of characters. Extra means the characters that appear only several scenes. Second, the inflection point is detected in the accumulation graph of characters. It is the point that the increasing line changes to horizontal line. Namely, when the slope of line keeps zero during long scenes, starting point of this line with zero slope becomes the inflection point. Inflection point will be detected in the accumulation graph of characters without extra. Third, several scenes are considered as additional story progression such as conflicts implication and clues suggestion. Actually, movie story can arrive at a scene located between beginning act and middle when additional several scenes are elapsed after the introduction of important characters. We will decide the ratio of additional scenes for total scenes by experiment in order to detect this scene. The ratio of additional scenes is gained as 7.67% by experiment. It is the story inflection point to change from beginning to middle act when this ratio is added to the inflection point of graph. Our proposed method consists of these three steps. We selected 10 movies for experiment and evaluation. These movies consisted of various genres. By measuring the accuracy of boundary detection experiment, we have shown that the proposed method is more efficient.

• Journal of Korea Entertainment Industry Association
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.155-167
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• 2020

The stage manager role of "Our Town"(1938), a representative work of Thornton Wilder(1897-1975), is a unique theatrical device that presents a wide range of interesting and diverse perspectives in the actor's acting approach, the director's stage-shape methodology, and the audience's theater experience. Why did Wilder call stage manager role a stage manager, not just a simple narrator? Because "Our Town" intentionally lacks the basic elements that dramas must have, it needed a more self-reliant and omnipotent role in creating the margins of dramatic writing, including boldly omitted time and space, with infinite imagination. For this reason, stage manager role plays a much more complex and multi-functional role than a narrator. In response, this paper accurately articulates the concept of theatrical style and theatrical convention on the premise of the stage manager role in "Our Town," followed by making theatrical convention, the director of scene progress and scene change, the messenger of the writer's thoughts, and dramatic rhythm control.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.81-96
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• 2013

Video information retrieval has become a very important issue because of the explosive increase in video data from Web content development. Meanwhile, content-based video analysis using visual features has been the main source for video information retrieval and browsing. Content in video can be represented with content-based analysis techniques, which can extract various features from audio-visual data such as frames, shots, colors, texture, or shape. Moreover, similarity between videos can be measured through content-based analysis. However, a movie that is one of typical types of video data is organized by story as well as audio-visual data. This causes a semantic gap between significant information recognized by people and information resulting from content-based analysis, when content-based video analysis using only audio-visual data of low level is applied to information retrieval of movie. The reason for this semantic gap is that the story line for a movie is high level information, with relationships in the content that changes as the movie progresses. Information retrieval related to the story line of a movie cannot be executed by only content-based analysis techniques. A formal model is needed, which can determine relationships among movie contents, or track meaning changes, in order to accurately retrieve the story information. Recently, story-based video analysis techniques have emerged using a social network concept for story information retrieval. These approaches represent a story by using the relationships between characters in a movie, but these approaches have problems. First, they do not express dynamic changes in relationships between characters according to story development. Second, they miss profound information, such as emotions indicating the identities and psychological states of the characters. Emotion is essential to understanding a character's motivation, conflict, and resolution. Third, they do not take account of events and background that contribute to the story. As a result, this paper reviews the importance and weaknesses of previous video analysis methods ranging from content-based approaches to story analysis based on social network. Also, we suggest necessary elements, such as character, background, and events, based on narrative structures introduced in the literature. We extract characters' emotional words from the script of the movie Pretty Woman by using the hierarchical attribute of WordNet, which is an extensive English thesaurus. WordNet offers relationships between words (e.g., synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, antonyms). We present a method to visualize the emotional pattern of a character over time. Second, a character's inner nature must be predetermined in order to model a character arc that can depict the character's growth and development. To this end, we analyze the amount of the character's dialogue in the script and track the character's inner nature using social network concepts, such as in-degree (incoming links) and out-degree (outgoing links). Additionally, we propose a method that can track a character's inner nature by tracing indices such as degree, in-degree, and out-degree of the character network in a movie through its progression. Finally, the spatial background where characters meet and where events take place is an important element in the story. We take advantage of the movie script to extracting significant spatial background and suggest a scene map describing spatial arrangements and distances in the movie. Important places where main characters first meet or where they stay during long periods of time can be extracted through this scene map. In view of the aforementioned three elements (character, event, background), we extract a variety of information related to the story and evaluate the performance of the proposed method. We can track story information extracted over time and detect a change in the character's emotion or inner nature, spatial movement, and conflicts and resolutions in the story.