From the pespective of temporal sturcture, a movie would has a hierachical structure:
- frame -> shot -> (thread ->) scene -> movie
Shot is a series of frames that runs for an uninterrupted period of time. It is also the minimal visual unit of a movie. A movie would usually contains hundreds of shots.
Scene is a sequence of continued shots that are semantically related. Usually a scene would tell about one event in the movie. A movie would contains tens of scenes.
Thread shows the pattern of the shot arrangement in a scene. But note that not all scenes would contain threads.
Take a typical dialog scene as an example. Suppose there are two persons A and B in the dialog scene, they would be alternately shown, the pattern of which can be represented as ABABAB...". So there are two threads in this dialog scene, namely A and B. To capture the hierarchical structure of a movie is important for movie understanding.
From the perspective of content structure, movie is an art of storytelling.
In terms of story, a movie contains three key elements, namely person, place and action.
In terms of art, each shot in a movie would contain specific cinematic style, e.g. the view scale and the camera movement.
All the data and annotations in MovieNet are built based on these two pespectives.