CineScale: A dataset of cinematic shot scale in movies

We provide a database containing shot scale annotations (i.e., the apparent distance of the camera from the subject of a filmed scene) for more than 792,000 image frames. Frames belong to 124 full movies from the entire filmographies by 6 important directors: Martin Scorsese, Jean-Luc Godard, Béla Tarr, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Ingmar Bergman. Each frame, extracted from videos at 1 frame per second, is annotated on the following scale categories: Extreme Close Up (ECU), Close Up (CU), Medium Close Up (MCU), Medium Shot (MS), Medium Long Shot (MLS), Long Shot (LS), Extreme Long Shot (ELS), Foreground Shot (FS), and Insert Shots (IS). Two independent coders annotated all frames from the 124 movies, whilst a third one checked their coding and made decisions in cases of disagreement. The CineScale database enables AI-driven interpretation of shot scale data and opens to a large set of research activities related to the automatic visual analysis of cinematic material, such as the automatic recognition of the director’s style, or the unfolding of the relationship between shot scale and the viewers’ emotional experience. To these purposes, we also provide the model and the code for building a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture for automated shot scale recognition. All this material is provided through the project website, where video frames can also be requested to authors, for research purposes under fair use.