Determining dramatic intensification via flashing lights in movies

Movie directors and producers worldwide, in their quest to narrate a good story that warrants repeated audience viewing, use many cinematic elements to intensify and clarify the viewing experience. One such element that directors manipulate is lighting. In this paper we examine one aspect of lighting, namely flashing lights, and its role as an intensifier of dramatic effects in film. We present an algorithm for robust extraction of flashing lights and a simple mechanism to group detected flashing lights into flashing light scenes and analyze the role of these segments in story narration. In addition, we demonstrate how flashing lights detection can improve the performance of shot-based video segmentation. Experiments on a number of video sequences extracted from real movies yields good results. Our technique detects 90.4% of flashing lights. The detected flashing lights correctly eliminates 92.7% of false cuts in these sequences. In addition, data support is compiled to demonstrate the association between flashing light scenes and certain dramatic intensification events such as supernatural power, crisis or excitement.