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Title: Videoface
Faculty: Prof. John R. Kender, Computer Science Dept., Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Short Description: Graphical Display and Analysis of Scene/Actor/Location information. The information is provided in a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file, called a "ShotSpreadSheet". Intended application: analysis of SitCom-type film series.
Tools used: Java 1.3 (Swing)
Platforms: Any Java compliant platform
Date: February 2001 - May 2001
   
 


VideoFace is a tool that attempts to graphically represent interactions between actors, given a detailed outline of location and actor information. This tool was originally intended for SitCom type of shows, but it may be used for virtually any interaction entity, as long as the interactions between sub-entities are enumerated as pairs, sequentially one at a time.

The goal of this research topic is to find some systematic and graphically representable way of categorizing sitcoms and to come up with a set of rules that can be applied to any such sitcom, in order to summarize the plot in a neat structure. Using this structure, we hope to devise a method of searching for episodes based on vague user-provided information.

The goal of this first version was to generate some virtual representation of actor interactions, which has been accomplished in two separate graphical layouts - 1. a summarized graph, 2. a table of sub-graphs. From the former graphs, we are primarily able to get a rough idea of important and less important interactions between given actors. Provided that we have several of these graphs available, we could already sort them based on this information. Using the latter graph and with some more investigation into the graphical information, we are able to extract information about the most important sub-plots of this SitCom or film by isolating certain interactions and finding a pattern or frequency at which the interactions appear throughout the collection of graphs.