Abstract
Today’s popular tv series tend to develop continuous, complex plots spanning several seasons, but are often viewed in controlled and discontinuous conditions. Consequently, most viewers need to be re-immersed in the story before watching a new season. Although discussions with friends and family can help, we observe that most viewers make extensive use of summaries to re-engage with the plot. Automatic generation of video summaries of tv series’ complex stories requires, first, modeling the dynamics of the plot and, second, extracting relevant sequences. In this paper, we tackle plot modeling by considering the social network of interactions between the characters involved in the narrative: substantial, durable changes in a major character’s social environment suggest a new development relevant for the summary. Once identified, these major stages in each character’s storyline can be used as a basis for completing the summary with related sequences. Our algorithm combines such social network analysis with filmmaking grammar to automatically generate character-oriented video summaries of tv series from partially annotated data. We carry out evaluation with a user study in a real-world scenario: a large sample of viewers were asked to rank video summaries centered on five characters of the popular tv series Game of Thrones, a few weeks before the new, sixth season was released. Our results reveal the ability of character-oriented summaries to re-engage viewers in television series and confirm the contributions of modeling the plot content and exploiting stylistic patterns to identify salient sequences.
Highlights
These past ten years, tv series became increasingly popular: for more than half of the people we polled in our user study, watching tv series is a daily occupation, and more than 80% watch tv series at least once a week
Modern tv series come in various flavors: whereas classical tv series, with standalone episodes and recurring characters, remain well-represented, they are by far not as popular as tv serials, with recurring characters involved in a continuous plot, usually spanning several episodes, when not several seasons: for 66% of the people we polled, tv serials are preferred to series with standalone episodes
Shot size, background music and social relevance are combined in a single weighting scheme, and relevant Logical Story Units are iteratively selected according to the alg;orithm detailed in Subsection 4.2, resulting in the final summary shown on Fig 2
Summary
These past ten years, tv series became increasingly popular: for more than half of the people we polled in our user study (described in Subsection 4.1), watching tv series is a daily occupation, and more than 80% watch tv series at least once a week. Whereas discussing with friends is a common practice to help remember the plot of the previous seasons (used by 49% of the people polled), the recaps available online are extensively used to fill such a need: before viewing a new season, about 48% of the people read textual synopsis, mainly in Wikipedia, and 43% watch video recaps, either “official” or hand-made, often on YouTube. None of these ways of reducing the “cognitive loading” that the new season could induce excludes the others, and people commonly use multiple channels of information to remember the plot of tv serials.
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