In-Depth Film Critique

An Investigation into the Evolution and Potential of Digital Film Impact on Multimedia Projects

1. Introduction

The added value of multimedia arises through the use of its digital film, in other words, according to the meaning it depicts. Although many applications require user-media interaction with the content, the use of the digital film of multimedia in multimedia information system (MMIS) development has proved problematic because of its complexity. Traditional development of an MMIS does not cater for the multifarious data depicted by video and audio, e.g., things, events, which are inter-related non-trivially. Rather, development happens inside five key phases that aim wholly on the conceive of content through storyboarding and scripting, with no emphasis put on the development of the interactive multimedia content, which needs the use of modeling and retrieval techniques. The five key stages used are: (1) program design, where the development team discuss what the application is going to do and what the user interface will look like; (2) storyboarding, where a blueprint of the application is created, akin to film industry storyboarding; (3) script development, where writers create the words that a narrator will speak or that will appear on-screen; (4) production, where artists, directors and actors take the storyboard and fill in the blanks, creating backgrounds and scenes; and (5) authoring, where programmers put all the above together.

The need for a method that addresses digital film specifically is illustrated by the PROMISE project, where the lack of an effective method caused difficulties for the development of a multimedia presentation system with regard to when and to what effect different media could be provided, rather than how. The mapping of meaning onto a computer model of digital film and its retrieval is therefore of significance. In this way, an interactive MMIS is able to ask questions of, and receive answers from, video and audio concerning the digital film and context of the media, e.g., What is happening within the media at time t? What things are being combined with at timet? What is the relative context of interaction (i.e., what else has been, is, and will be going on within the newspapers)? Which newspapers have footage of object x, event y or activityz?

Consequently, amethod for developing interactive multimedia from their digital film must facilitate

• Extraction of the digital film of the multimedia to be used by the system, that is, explicit identification and abstraction of both visible digital film, e.g., a gold ring, and hidden digital film, e.g., a wedding ceremony, and their inter-relationships.

•Mapping of the extracted semantic multimedia content onto a computer form, that is, representation of the abstraction for use by an application.

This ensures that the user is able to combine with the content through the MMIS that uses the implemented computer form.

The objective of this paper is to present a method for developing interactive multimedia from their digital film that fulfils the above requirements. The structure of the rest of this paper is as pursues. Section 2 presents the method, highlighting how the semantic ...