Interactive Analysis of Time in Film Stories

Abstract

In this work we propose some principles that regulate temporal anchorages by means of which the spectator places the events of the story on the temporal axis of the fabula, the structure where the causality and the order of the events of a story are recorded. The approach adopted for the segmentation of the story of a film uses both syntactic elements, such as the scene and the sequence, and semantic elements, such as the events of the story, defined as actions that occur in a determined interval of time (diegetic). The base representation, chosen for the analysis of the time in a story, is a particular formulation of spectator beliefs, in which the time (explicit) is present both as the element that determines the variation of spectator beliefs during the vision of the film, and also as object of belief. In this paper, we propose also a system that supplies an interactive aid (as an example to a generic expert of cinema) in order to annotate the events of the story of a film. This system supplies in addition an aid in the analysis of the flashbacks, the forwards and the repetitions of events, and may apply temporal reasoning rules to order, both partially and totally, the events of the story.