The way films feel: Aesthetic features and mood in film.

Abstract

Audiences often speak of the "atmosphere," "tone," or "mood" of films, and scholars have suggested that a film's mood is related to its aesthetic presentation. In this exploratory study, we investigated how aesthetic features of film relate to one another and contribute to film mood. Participants assessed 14 film clips according to their perceived mood as well as 27 aesthetic features: 13 so-called low-level features related to specific stylistic devices of film and 14 high-level abstract features general to all art forms. We found impressions of beauty and pleasantness to be similarly related to several stylistic devices, whereas interest was mostly related to temporal aspects of style, such as rhythm. Of the 2 categories of aesthetic features, low-level features were the better predictors of mood ratings; valence ratings were strongly predicted by brightness alone, whereas the prediction of arousal ratings involved a more complex set of features. The results indicate that low-level features can be used to predict the mood of film scenes with moderate success even in the absence of any other information about the scene, such as genre, plot, or theme.

The evolution of pace in popular movies

“…Many other laboratory studies have shown that motion also captures attention (see, for example, Franconeri & Simons, 2003), which has also been shown for people watching sections of movies (Mital, Smith, Hill, & Henderson, 2011). Still other controlled studies have shown that we have positive associations to brightness and negative associations to darkness (Valdez & Mehrabian, 1994), a finding also found for people watching short movies (Tarvainen, Westman, & Oittinen, 2015). Rapid transients (cuts), motion changes, and luminance changes have been endemic to movies for a century, and they are components of what film editors call pace .…”

“…It has been shown that people have positive associations to brightness and negative associations to darkness (Valdez & Mehrabian, 1994). More importantly, this has also been found for people watching short movies (Tarvainen et al, 2015). Thus, the empirical foci of this paper are those correlated with filmmakers’ notions of pace: shot duration, motion, and luminance.…”

Film Mood and Its Quantitative Determinants in Different Types of Scenes

“…Also, valence, energetic arousal, and tense arousal ratings of music and speech have been found to be greater in the case of loud samples than quiet ones [21]. The results of our earlier preliminary study on the determinants of film mood echo these findings by indicating that stylistic attributes in particular are related to film mood [22].…”

“…However, since this concept of an "art mood" has only recently gained popularity in film studies [10], [11], there is not much precedent in the use of dimensional affect models in the assessment of film mood. One exception is our earlier study [22], which used the UWIST Mood Adjective Checklist [26]. In this method, mood is assessed indirectly by way of 24 descriptive terms such as "happy" and "depressed", and the item ratings can then be transformed to mood ratings in the HT, EA, and TA dimensions.…”

“…1) Film clips: The stimulus set consisted of 12 film clips between 1-2.5 minutes in duration (Table II), for a total duration of 22 minutes. They were taken from our earlier set of 14 clips, whose selection process is detailed in [22]. The clips were from mainstream films made between 1958 and 2009.…”