Cinemetrics: visualizing movie data

Cinemetrics, a Bachelors project from Frederic Brodbeck, 'is about measuring and visualizing movie data, in order to reveal the characteristics of films and to create a visual “fingerprint” for them. Information such as the editing structure, color, speech or motion are extracted, analyzed and transformed into graphic representations so that movies can be seen as a whole and easily interpreted or compared side by side.' (via FilmmakerIQ)

He's got pieces of his Python code available, and some nice pictures, but no working demo.


cinemetrics from fb on Vimeo.

50 Documentaries To See Before You Die

Update: Current TV has excerpts from their broadcasts of 2011.

Documentarian Morgan Spurlock hosts 50 Documentaries To See Before You Die, a Current TV series on the documentaries released in the past 25 years. The doc ignores favorites like Connections, Ali Mazrui's The Africans: A Triple Heritage, Koyaanisqatsi, Baraka, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, or The Merchants Of Cool, but the series looks like fun:

nsequence-browser: a free AE script

nsequence-browser is an AE script that serves as an alternative sequence browser for Adobe After Effects. (via)

For other alternatives, see Immigration and COB_SSD-Sequence Section Destroyer from AE Scripts.

Attention and movies

For a discussion of movies and attentional blindspots, see What You See Is What You Get at the New York Times, which explores ideas that circulated in February from David Bordwell who now adds comments on fast pop movies and slow festival films. Bordwell was mentioned here on AEP previously on these and related matters.

Note also that Norman Hollyn posted a link (3 years ago) to an awareness test that was almost the same.

Free Lower Thirds plus... [now on PVC]

For some Free Lower Thirds plus Additional Resources to leverage Photoshop, Premiere, and After Effects, see the roundup at AE Portal on PVC.

Effects A-Z tip: Card Wipe

From here, life goes on at PVC...

The After Effects: Effects A-Z tip series from Motionworks continues with guest host James Zwadlo demoing the Card Wipe transition effect in After Effects.  Card Wipe (AE Help) and Matrix (from AE Scripts) are both easier to use than the Card Dance effect.

Update: here's the latest ones available in the series...

• The CC Flo Motion Effect January 30, 2012
• The Channel Blur Effect December 10, 2011 by maltaannon
• The Change Color Effect October 24, 2011 by Jack Grundy
• The Cell Pattern Effect October 8, 2011 by John Dickinson (makes rocks!)
• The Caustics Effect October 5, 2011 by Eran Stern
• The Cartoon Effect August 16, 2011 by Zola
• The CC Bender and Bend It Effects July 5, 2011 by Quba Michalski

Here's the list of previous posts on the Effects A-Z tip series from Motionworks.

'How To Do It' tutorial secrets

Before I start my series on design, here's some sage advice on tutorials, via Jim Feeley: