An Information System for the Analysis of Color Distributions in MovieBarcodes

Abstract

We present an ongoing project from the field of quantitative film studies, sometimes also referred to as Cinemetrics (Tsivian, 2009). Most of the related work in this area is focused on quantitative analyses of shot lengths and distributions. In this paper, we suggest color as an additional quantitative parameter for movie analysis and describe an information system that allows scholars to search for movies via their specific color distribution. As a source of condensed movie color information, we make use of the MovieBarcode database. A MovieBarcode is created by skewing each frame of a movie to be only 1 pixel wide. Lining up all these frames in a row creates a barcode-like visualization of the most dominant colors in a movie (fig. 1). Our information system makes use of the color diff 4 library to map more than 1,500