AI Case Study
20th Century Fox and IBM Research reduce movie marketing production time by using machine learning to select scenes for a movie trailer
20th Century Fox implemented IBM Research to select scenes for inclusion in a movie trailer for a feature-length horror film. This process can take a month manually, but was reduced to 24 hours using machine learning from start to finish.
Industry
Consumer Goods And Services
Entertainment And Sports
Project Overview
IBM Research "trained a system on the trailers of 100 horror movies by segmenting out each scene from the trailers. Once each trailer was segmented into “moments”, the system completed the following:
* A visual analysis and identification of the people, objects and scenery. Each scene was tagged with an emotion from a broad bank of 24 different emotions and labels from across 22,000 scene categories, such as eerie, frightening and loving;
* An audio analysis of the ambient sounds (such as the character’s tone of voice and the musical score), to understand the sentiments associated with each of those scenes;
* An analysis of each scene’s composition (such the location of the shot, the image framing and the lighting), to categorize the types of locations and shots that traditionally make up suspense/horror movie trailers.
The analysis was performed on each area separately and in combination with each other using statistical approaches. The system now “understands” the types of scenes that categorically fit into the structure of a suspense/horror movie trailer."
The team then "fed the system the full-length feature film, “Morgan”. After the system “watched” the movie, it identified 10 moments that would be the best candidates for a trailer."
Reported Results
"From a 90-minute movie, our system provided our filmmaker a total of six minutes of footage. From the moment our system watched “Morgan” for the first time, to the moment our filmmaker finished the final editing, the entire process took about 24 hours."
Technology
The project was done using "experimental" Watson APIs
Function
Marketing
Creative And Brand
Background
"Traditionally, creating a movie trailer is a labor-intensive, completely manual process. Teams have to sort through hours of footage and manually select each and every potential candidate moment. This process is expensive and time consuming –taking anywhere between 10 and 30 days to complete."
Benefits
Data
Training set of 100 horror movie trailers