A piece in Nautilus by Tom Vanderbilt called “The Pleasure and Pain of Speed” isn’t just about movies but our perception of what measure of time “now” encompasses. But movies are a part of it:
Whatever protests we have made to the march of modernity, notes the historian Stephen Kern, “the world opted for speed again and again.” If Kern is right, and we do like it fast, then there is a natural place to look for evidence: film. It is consumed for pleasure, and therefore a direct indication of our tastes; and also readily quantified, recorded, compared, and reexamined.
…
If we take the human “now” to be, metaphorically, an individual cut of a film—a temporal interlude representing some kind of aesthetic consciousness—life is getting vertiginously fast. In the 2007 thriller The Bourne Ultimatum, as the critic Michael Phillips has noted, the set piece in which Bourne must...
Whatever protests we have made to the march of modernity, notes the historian Stephen Kern, “the world opted for speed again and again.” If Kern is right, and we do like it fast, then there is a natural place to look for evidence: film. It is consumed for pleasure, and therefore a direct indication of our tastes; and also readily quantified, recorded, compared, and reexamined.
…
If we take the human “now” to be, metaphorically, an individual cut of a film—a temporal interlude representing some kind of aesthetic consciousness—life is getting vertiginously fast. In the 2007 thriller The Bourne Ultimatum, as the critic Michael Phillips has noted, the set piece in which Bourne must...
- 2/1/2014
- by MaryAnn Johanson
- www.flickfilosopher.com
There is something about the rhythm and texture of early cinema that has a very different feel than modern films. But it's hard to put one's finger on just what that something is. New research may help explain this elusive quality.
Cognitive psychologist (and film buff) James Cutting of Cornell University, along with his students Jordan DeLong and Christine Nothelfer, decided to use the sophisticated tools of modern perception research to deconstruct 70 years of film, shot by shot.
They measured the duration of every shot in every scene of 150 of the most popular films released from 1935 to 2005.
The films represented five major genres - action, adventure, animation, comedy and drama. Using a complex mathematical formula, they translated these sequences of shot lengths into "waves" for each film.
What these researchers looked for were patterns of attention. Specifically, they looked for a pattern called the 1/f fluctuation.
The 1/f fluctuation is a concept from chaos theory,...
Cognitive psychologist (and film buff) James Cutting of Cornell University, along with his students Jordan DeLong and Christine Nothelfer, decided to use the sophisticated tools of modern perception research to deconstruct 70 years of film, shot by shot.
They measured the duration of every shot in every scene of 150 of the most popular films released from 1935 to 2005.
The films represented five major genres - action, adventure, animation, comedy and drama. Using a complex mathematical formula, they translated these sequences of shot lengths into "waves" for each film.
What these researchers looked for were patterns of attention. Specifically, they looked for a pattern called the 1/f fluctuation.
The 1/f fluctuation is a concept from chaos theory,...
- 2/24/2010
- by IANS
- DearCinema.com
Washington, Feb 24 – There is something about the rhythm and texture of early cinema that has a very different feel than modern films. But it’s hard to put one’s finger on just what that something is. New research may help explain this elusive quality.
Cognitive psychologist (and film buff) James Cutting of Cornell University, along with his students Jordan DeLong and Christine Nothelfer, decided to use the sophisticated tools of modern perception research to deconstruct 70 years of film, shot by shot.
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Cognitive psychologist (and film buff) James Cutting of Cornell University, along with his students Jordan DeLong and Christine Nothelfer, decided to use the sophisticated tools of modern perception research to deconstruct 70 years of film, shot by shot.
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- 2/24/2010
- by realbollywood
- RealBollywood.com
[Click Photo to Enlarge]
Do you ever get the feeling that big Hollywood blockbusters are just heartless products following an established formula to maximize profits? Well, that assessment may be more true than you think. The folks at physorg.com have published an article explaining how “Hollywood movies have found a mathematical formula that lets them match the effects of their shots to the attention spans of their audiences.”
Surprised? I’m certainly not. Here’s an excerpt from the piece:
Psychologist Professor James Cutting and his team from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analyzed 150 high-grossing Hollywood films released from 1935 to 2005 and discovered the shot lengths in the more recent movies followed the same mathematical pattern that describes the human attention span. The pattern was derived by scientists at the University of Texas in Austin in the 1990s who studied the attention spans of subjects performing hundreds of trials. The team then converted...
Do you ever get the feeling that big Hollywood blockbusters are just heartless products following an established formula to maximize profits? Well, that assessment may be more true than you think. The folks at physorg.com have published an article explaining how “Hollywood movies have found a mathematical formula that lets them match the effects of their shots to the attention spans of their audiences.”
Surprised? I’m certainly not. Here’s an excerpt from the piece:
Psychologist Professor James Cutting and his team from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analyzed 150 high-grossing Hollywood films released from 1935 to 2005 and discovered the shot lengths in the more recent movies followed the same mathematical pattern that describes the human attention span. The pattern was derived by scientists at the University of Texas in Austin in the 1990s who studied the attention spans of subjects performing hundreds of trials. The team then converted...
- 2/24/2010
- by Eric M. Armstrong
- The Moving Arts Journal
Physorg has an interesting article about how Hollywood movies follow a mathematical formula that "lets them match the effects of their shots to the attention spans of their audiences." Here is an excerpt: "Psychologist Professor James Cutting and his team from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analyzed 150 high-grossing Hollywood films released from 1935 to 2005 and discovered the shot lengths in the more recent movies followed the same mathematical pattern that describes the human attention span." ... "Cutting made his discovery by measuring the length of every shot in 150 comedy, drama and action films, and then converted the measurements into waves for every movie. He found that the more recent the films were, the more likely they were to obey the 1/f fluctuation, and this did not just apply to fast action movies. Cutting said the significant thing is that shots of similar lengths recur in a regular pattern ...
- 2/23/2010
- by Peter Sciretta
- Slash Film
London, Feb 19 – An expert is of the opinion that contemporary Hollywood filmmakers have mastered the art of grabbing viewers’ attention with the correct lengths of each shot based on a mathematical pattern.
James Cutting, a psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York analyzed 150 movies to reach the conclusion.
In the 1990s, the attention span of moviegoers was first measured into a series of waves using a mathematical trick called a Fourier transform.
It was observed that particular length of attention spans in the viewers often recurred at regular.
James Cutting, a psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York analyzed 150 movies to reach the conclusion.
In the 1990s, the attention span of moviegoers was first measured into a series of waves using a mathematical trick called a Fourier transform.
It was observed that particular length of attention spans in the viewers often recurred at regular.
- 2/19/2010
- by News
- RealBollywood.com
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