Hacker Cinema
The Scent of Green Papaya
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1993 · Film · 104 min
Directed by Trần Anh Hùng
1950s Saigon through the eyes of Mui, a Vietnamese servant girl. At 10 years-old, Mui leaves her village to work for an affluent, troubled family. As she comes of age, Mui finds work in the household of a pianist she has admired since childhood, and finds their relationship growing in complexity.
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2 comments on Hacker News
a Film is a collection of shots, scenes and sequences. Shots are fairly easy to detect. Most editing software comes with built in shot detection.
This approach promises to detect scenes. I’m not enough of a coder to know if it is valid, but I can certainly imagine that it is a solvable problem. Most scenes are defined by location, and movies makers like each locatation to be distinct from the preceding one.
To my mind, sequences are where the action is at. Sequences are defined by narrative development... These can usually be defined by a trained human, but are probably tough to computationly define.
There is also a huge difference between film genres. The scenes and sequences of Finding Nemo are pretty easy to define. But you try the same approach on an art house film like The Scent of Green Papaya, and see how far you get.
https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/movie-storystructure/finding-nemo/
Movies like The Scent of Green Papaya and 2001: A Space Odyssey use this idea, but in reverse: the directors chose to have uncomfortably long sequences where the viewer notices that not much has happened in the last several minutes of viewing time, and it imparts on the viewer the desired sense (of loneliness, of boredom).