The evolution of pace in popular movies

Abstract

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.

Who is the Film's Director? Authorship Recognition Based on Shot Features

“…Movies have changed dramatically over the last century, with several reflections on film style, especially on the increased shot pace, on motion, and luminance [39]. However, if we restrict the analysis to the shot duration of our GT data, there is no much evidence of such trend (see Figure 10).…”

“…Verified the possibility to recognize the director by relying on manually annotated features, we then repeat the classification by fully automatic means, with no drop in performance. Since different studies [38], [39] suggest a severe correlation between features and the movie period, we highlight how for the considered movies the feature set is director specific and not dependent from the stylistic period. As a last contribution, we propose a method for shot scale recognition based on deep neural networks which outperforms existing state-of-the-art.…”

“…Shots are here categorised into seven classes according to their duration t d (in seconds), as in Table I. This subdivision is obtained by fitting a log-normal probability density function on GT shot duration data, thus achieving a finer granularity in proximity of the mode. To account for the evolution of pace along years, we consider studies in [39], [41], which report that the average shot duration for a sample of movies from 1960 to 1985 is 7.0 s, while in contemporary movies decreases to 4.3. As an example of the ability of Very Short (VS)…”

Exploration of the Characteristics of Emotion Distribution in Korean TV Series: Common Pattern and Statistical Complexity

“…Cutting and Candan [38] found a trend in both English and non-English movies that shot lengths were shortened in the sound movie era (1930-2015). Cutting [39] inspected the difference in mean shot duration among three periods: , and 1990-2015. Baxter, Khitrova, and Tsivian [40] explored the cutting structure, based on shot lengths, in the movies of three directors.…”

A Review of Evidence on the Role of Digital Technology in Shaping Attention and Cognitive Control in Children

“…Movies and television content, however, have changed dramatically over the last few decades, guided in part by insights from psychological research. In particular, technological advances in the industry have led to changes in video style characterised by shorter shot durations, enhanced motion and greater luminance changes, in an attempt to increase viewer engagement over longer periods of time (Cutting, 2016). The growing use of computer animation in child-directed content since the 80s has also led to an increase in the average frames per second to 75-120, compared to 15 frames in traditional hand-drawn cartoons (Rick, 2012).…”