CINEMETRICS

October 13, 2011 9:39 AM

cinemetrics is about measuring and visualizing movie data, in order to reveal the characteristics of films and to create a visual “fingerprint” for them.
posted by mikoroshi (12 comments total)

The "fingerprints" are very pretty, but I just don't get it. What can be gleaned by putting the elements of a movie into a blender? The "frame colors" axis, for instance in The Shining, is interesting, especially that splotch of red at the end of act 2 and the cold blue of the climax. But the combined fingerprint (The Shining is penultimate) really tells me nothing, visually.
posted by Terminal Verbosity at 10:07 AM on October 13, 2011

So that's why Tarkovsky's Solyaris was better than Soderbergh's version!
posted by quoquo at 11:00 AM on October 13, 2011

blue and orange, blue and orange
posted by infinitewindow at 11:25 AM on October 13, 2011

Why are the fingerprints bent into a circle? Much more of the data would be visible (within the same bounding box) if they were displayed in a rectangular format.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 11:29 AM on October 13, 2011

Let me get this straight: this person opines that videos are difficult to easily characterize and encapsulate, so upon finishing his project he makes a video of the book summarizing his work in unreadable form?

Would a PDF have been too mundane?
posted by Mapes at 11:48 AM on October 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

That's really interesting. I kind of wish they were all also tagged by the same kinds of standard metrics used on IMDB. It would be neat to see the cinemetrics for every buddy cop movie ever, or compare and contrast huge blocks of single genres.
posted by heatvision at 12:07 PM on October 13, 2011

But the combined fingerprint ... really tells me nothing, visually.

Imagine the bot unleashed to sniff bittorrent traffic.
posted by fredludd at 12:19 PM on October 13, 2011

Interesting. He notes that:
cinemetrics is an experiment to find out if the data that is inherent in the movie can be used to make something visible that otherwise would remain unnoticed.

I see it as an experimental art project that takes film criticism to a different realm. I sort of get it when I see his 'fingerprints' of 2001 vs Alien. Smooth vs spikey.

He also has another project where he extracts a movie's core.
posted by Rashomon at 1:41 PM on October 13, 2011

These are pretty!

For those yearning for more rigor, you might check out the "original" cinemetrics site, which houses work concieved by the University of Chicago's Yuri Tsivian, originator of the idea of this type of film study. (Here's Tsivian and Brodbeck internet-meeting each other and talking about this project in its earlier stages).
posted by bubukaba at 2:06 PM on October 13, 2011

Not be be confused with cinemetrics.lv which is also a neat site, whereas those guys try to pin down the average shot length of various movies.
posted by bigendian at 2:42 PM on October 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

damn. my first comment and bubukaba beat me to it.
posted by bigendian at 2:43 PM on October 13, 2011

That logo, appropriately, looks like the Criterion tripped out and barfed.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 8:31 PM on October 13, 2011