Kaitlin L. Brunick

Quicker, faster, darker: Changes in Hollywood film over 75 years.

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.

Perceiving Event Dynamics and Parsing Hollywood Films

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.

Temporal fractals in movies and mind

Fractal patterns are seemingly everywhere. They can be analyzed through Fourier and power analyses, and other methods. Cutting, DeLong, and Nothelfer (2010) analyzed as time-series data the fluctuations of shot durations in 150 popular movies released over 70 years. They found that these patterns had become increasingly fractal-like and concluded that they might be linked to those found in the results of psychological tasks involving attention. To explore this possibility further, we began by analyzing the shot patterns of almost twice as many movies released over a century. The increasing fractal-like nature of shot patterns is affirmed, as determined by both a slope measure and a long-range dependence measure, neither of which is sensitive to the vector lengths of their inputs within the ranges explored here. But the main reason for increased long-range dependence is related to, but not caused by, the increasing vector length of the shot-series samples. It appears that, in generating increasingly fractal-like patterns, filmmakers have systematically explored dimensions that are important for holding our attention—shot durations, scene durations, motion, and sound amplitude—and have crafted fluctuations in them like those of our endogenous attention patterns. Other dimensions—luminance, clutter, and shot scale—are important to film style but their variations seem not to be important to holding viewers’ moment-to-moment attention and have not changed in their fractional dimension over time.