I stumbled across this today - graduate student, Frederic Brodbeck, at the Royal Academy of Arts, Den Haag in The Netherlands has created a way to “fingerprint” movies. He’s dubbed the project Cinemetrics. It doesn’t look like much, the graphic at left, and reading through his explanation behind the idea and how it works didn’t do much for me either, but then I watched the video on his site.

 

Once you start seeing comparisons between various movies on screen at the same time, you can see how the fingerprint works. Comparisons between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Aliens are fascinating. You can see the action and movement in Aliens, almost as if the fingerprint were alive! He goes on to show comparisons between the original Solaris (1972) and the Soderbergh remake and different genres of film.

 

The site is a bit light on other examples, but it’s just a graduate project in the making at the moment. but I’ll be interested in seeing more results down the road!

 

http://cinemetrics.fredericbrodbeck.de/