MovieClouds

Movies are one of the biggest sources of entertainment, in individual and social contexts. By combining diverse symbol systems, such as images, texts, music and narration to tell stories, they often engage the viewers perceptually, cognitively and emotionally. Advances in digitalization and networking are enabling the access to enormous collections of videos and movies over the Internet, in social media, and through video on demand services on iTV. The development of video content-based analysis and classification techniques is also allowing the access to more information about or contained in the movies, demanding for new ways to search, browse and view videos and movies in this scenario. In this paper, we present and evaluate MovieClouds, an interactive web application designed to access, explore and visualize movies based on the information conveyed in the different tracks or perspectives of its content, especially audio and subtitles where most of the semantics is expressed, and with a special focus on the emotional dimensions expressed in the movies or felt by the viewers. For the overview, analysis, and exploratory browsing of the movies collection and the individual movies, it adopts a tag cloud unifying-paradigm, that gained popularity in Web 2.0, with the aim to extend to movies the power, flexibility, engagement and fun usually associated with clouds.