Shot Durations, Shot Classes, and the Increased Pace of Popular Movies

Cutting, James E.; Candan, Ayşe

doi:10.3167/proj.2015.090204

Cited by 36 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Salt (2009) reported a linear decrease of average shot length. Cutting and Candan (2015) could use his data and added nuances to the general linear decrease trend that they replicated. One was that different slopes for shot classes obtained, especially in the post 1940s' Hollywood films, another that shot scale, in particular increasing use of wide angle shots, contributed considerably to the decrease in shot duration.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A psychology of the film

Tan

2018

Palgrave Commun

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The cinema as a cultural institution has been studied by academic researchers in the arts and humanities. At present, cultural media studies are the home to the aesthetics and critical analysis of film, film history and other branches of film scholarship. Probably less known to most is that research psychologists working in social and life science labs have also contributed to the study of the medium. They have examined the particular experience that motion pictures provide to the film audience and the mechanisms that explain the perception and comprehension of film, and how movies move viewers and to what effects. This article reviews achievements in psychological research of the film since its earliest beginnings in the 1910s. A leading issue in the research has been whether understanding films is a bottom-up process, or a top-down one. A bottom-up explanation likens film-viewing to highly automated detection of stimulus features physically given in the supply of images; a top-down one to the construction of scenes from very incomplete information using mental schemata. Early film psychologists tried to pinpoint critical features of simple visual stimuli responsible for the perception of smooth movement. The riddle of apparent motion has not yet been solved up to now. Gestalt psychologists were the first to point at the role of mental structures in seeing smooth movement, using simple visual forms and displays. Bottom-up and top-down approaches to the comprehension of film fought for priority from the 60s onwards and became integrated at the end of the century. Gibson's concept of direct perception led to the identification of low-level film-stylistic cues that are used in mainstream film production, and support film viewers in highly automated seamless perception of film scenes. Hochberg's argument for the indispensability of mental schemata, too, accounted for the smooth cognitive construction of portrayed action and scenes. Since the 90s, cognitive analyses of narration in film by film scholars from the humanities have revolutionised accounts of the comprehension of movies. They informed computational content analyses that link low-level film features with meaningful units of film-story-telling. After a century of research, some perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that support our interaction with events in the real world have been uncovered. Today, the film experience at large has reappeared on the agenda. An integration of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms is sought in explaining the remarkable intensity of the film experience. Advances are now being made in grasping what it is like to enjoy movies, by describing the absorbing and moving qualities of the experience. As an example, a current account of film viewers' emotional experience is presented. Further advances in our understanding of the film experience and its underlying mechanisms can be expected if film psychologists team up with cognitive film studies, computer vision and the neurosciences. This collaboration is also expected to allow for researc...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A psychology of the film

Tan

2018

Palgrave Commun

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“…This is valid because conversations are typically filmed with medium close-ups and without music. Finally, there is an association between shot duration and motion ( r = .46, t = 5.13, d = 1.04), with shorter duration shots on average having proportionately more motion across frames than longer durations shots, a result supported by the analyses of Cutting, DeLong, Brunick, Iricinschi, and Candan (2011b). …”

Section: Part 4: Dimensionalizing Movie Narrationmentioning

confidence: 80%

“…I began with aspects of data gathered previously about shot durations (Cutting, DeLong, & Nothelfer, 2010; Cutting, DeLong, Brunick, Iricinschi, & Candan 2011b); shot transitions (Cutting, Brunick, & DeLong, 2011b, 2012); motion (Cutting, Brunick, & DeLong, 2012; Cutting, DeLong, & Brunick 2011a); luminance and music (Cutting, Brunick, & Candan, 2012); shot types (Cutting & Candan, 2015); and narrative shifts from one scene to the next (Cutting, 2014; Cutting & Iricinschi, 2015), although some of these were recalculated for this set of studies.…”

Section: General Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For most studies I present a plot of the movie medians for 100 or of 20 consecutive equal-duration bins of data. This is not to assume that movies do not differ from one another or that they have not changed over time; they do and have (Cutting & Candan, 2015; Cutting, DeLong, & Brunick 2011a; Cutting, DeLong, Brunick, Iricinschi, & Candan, 2011). Nonetheless, those differences and changes are not the focus of this investigation, and they are generally removed by normalization (but see Study 9).…”

Section: General Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Narrative theory and the dynamics of popular movies

Cutting

2016

Psychon Bull Rev

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Popular movies grab and hold our attention. One reason for this is that storytelling is culturally important to us, but another is that general narrative formulae have been honed over millennia and that a derived but specific filmic form has developed and has been perfected over the last century. The result is a highly effective format that allows rapid processing of complex narratives. Using a corpus analysis I explore a physical narratology of popular movies—narrational structure and how it impacts us—to promote a theory of popular movie form. I show that movies can be divided into 4 acts—setup, complication, development, and climax—with two optional subunits of prolog and epilog, and a few turning points and plot points. In 12 studies I show that normative aspects in patterns of shot durations, shot transitions, shot scale, shot motion, shot luminance, character introduction, and distributions of conversations, music, action shots, and scene transitions reduce to 5 correlated stylistic dimensions of movies and can litigate among theories of movie structure. In general, movie narratives have roughly the same structure as narratives in any other domain—plays, novels, manga, folktales, even oral histories—but with particular runtime constraints, cadences, and constructions that are unique to the medium.

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“…The acquisition of skill is partly a trial-and-error process of exploring and developing technique, and the rules that govern the execution of the work are often more tacit than explicit (Polanyi, 1966). Collectively, editing also depends on cultural transmission, here across generations of the relatively closed society of filmmakers (Cutting & Candan, 2013, 2015). Or, more colorfully, as Walter Murch noted, “You pick up the good things that other editors are doing and you metabolize those approaches into what you are doing, and vice versa” (Ondaatje, 2002, p. 62).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The evolution of pace in popular movies

Cutting

2016

Cogn. Research

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Movies have changed dramatically over the last 100 years. Several of these changes in popular English-language filmmaking practice are reflected in patterns of film style as distributed over the length of movies. In particular, arrangements of shot durations, motion, and luminance have altered and come to reflect aspects of the narrative form. Narrative form, on the other hand, appears to have been relatively unchanged over that time and is often characterized as having four more or less equal duration parts, sometimes called acts – setup, complication, development, and climax. The altered patterns in film style found here affect a movie’s pace: increasing shot durations and decreasing motion in the setup, darkening across the complication and development followed by brightening across the climax, decreasing shot durations and increasing motion during the first part of the climax followed by increasing shot durations and decreasing motion at the end of the climax. Decreasing shot durations mean more cuts; more cuts mean potentially more saccades that drive attention; more motion also captures attention; and brighter and darker images are associated with positive and negative emotions. Coupled with narrative form, all of these may serve to increase the engagement of the movie viewer.

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Shot Durations, Shot Classes, and the Increased Pace of Popular Movies

Cited by 36 publications

References 22 publications

A psychology of the film

A psychology of the film

Narrative theory and the dynamics of popular movies

The evolution of pace in popular movies

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