We selected 24 Hollywood movies released from 1940 through 2010 to serve as a film corpus. Eight viewers, three per film, parsed them into events, which are best termed subscenes. While watching a film a second time, viewers scrolled through frames and recorded the frame number where each event began. Viewers agreed about 90% of the time. We then analyzed the data as a function of a number of visual variables: shot transitions, shot duration, shot scale, motion, luminance, and color across shots within and across events, and a code that noted changes in place or time. We modeled viewer parsings across all shots of each film and found that, as an ensemble, the visual variables accounted for about 30% of the variance in the data, even without considering the soundtrack. Adding a code recording place and/or time change increases this variance to about 50%. We conclude that there is ample perceptual information for viewers to parse films into events without necessarily considering the intentions and goals of the actors, although these are certainly needed to understand the story of the film.
We measured 160 English-language films released from 1935 to 2010 and found four changes. First, shot lengths have gotten shorter, a trend also reported by others. Second, contemporary films have more motion and movement than earlier films. Third, in contemporary films shorter shots also have proportionately more motion than longer shots, whereas there is no such relation in older films. And finally films have gotten darker. That is, the mean luminance value of frames across the length of a film has decreased over time. We discuss psychological effects associated with these four changes and suggest that all four linear trends have a single cause: Filmmakers have incrementally tried to exercise more control over the attention of filmgoers. We suggest these changes are signatures of the evolution of popular film; they do not reflect changes in film style.
This article investigates historical trends of mean shot durations in9,400English-languageand1,550non-English-languagemoviesreleased between1912and2013.For thesound-eramoviesofbothsets thereislittle evidence indicating anything other than a linear decline plotted on a logarithmic scale, with the English-language set providing stronger results. In a subsampleof24English-languagemoviesfrom1940 to2010 thedeclinein shotdurationisuniformacross15shotclasses,aresultthatsupportsabroad "evolutionary" account of film change.The article also explores the proportionsoftheseshotclassesacrossyearsandgenres,withtheresultsshowing that25percentofthedeclineinshotdurationisduetoashiftawayfromshot classeswithlonger-than-averageshotdurationstowardsthosewithshorterthan-averagedurations,and8percentofthedeclineisduetotheincreased useofshotscalesinwhichcharactersappearlarger.
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