This article presents methods for the automatic retrieval of motion and motion compositions in movies. We introduce a user-friendly sketch-based query interface that enables the user to describe desired motion compositions. Based on this abstract description, a tolerant matching scheme extracts shots from a movie with a similar composition. We investigate and evaluate two application scenarios: the retrieval of motion compositions and the retrieval of matching motions (a technique in continuity editing). Experiments show that the developed methods accurately and promptly retrieve relevant shots. The presented methods enable new ways of searching and investigating movies.

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