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By Kellan Davidson
ITHACA, N.Y.—Viewers file in to have their tickets taken at the Regal Cinemas at the Ithaca Mall. When they enter the theater they sit silently enthralled as the movie begins and patrons cling to their seats throughout. James E. Cutting, psychology professor at Cornell University, aimed to explore the phenomenon of what keeps viewer’s eyes pinned to the silver screen.
Cutting says there are two dimensions in film: shot length and camera motion. The first paper that Cutting released in the journal of Psychological Science was a study on shot length.
Cutting was interested in comparing the patterns of shot length in film to a trend line called one over frequency, or simply 1/f. One over f is a function that was determined by a study performed by professor of psychology at University of Texas David L. Gilden. The study was designed to test reaction time over a certain duration.
The study involved people performing a menial task over a period of time, Cutting used people pushing a button to determine whether or not a group of letters forms a word as an example. “People can decide usually in about 500 milliseconds on average, but sometimes they are fast and they can do it in 350 and sometimes they just seem to be sitting there for a second or a second and a half,” Cutting said.
“If you look at the pattern of all of those over about 500 trials you get this incredibly jagged response,” said Cutting. This is 1/f, a line that is essentially a visual representation of human’s allocation of attention over time. Cutting was intrigued by the study and wondered if the shot lengths in film followed this same pattern of human attention.
Cutting, along with 3 graduate students, took a look at the average shot length of 150 films spanning in 15-year intervals between 1935 and 2005. “The movies were chosen to represent, as best as we could, 5 genre so there’s action films, adventure films, comedies, dramas and animations,” said Cutting. There were roughly 20 to 35 films in the study from each genre, with the exception of animations where there were only 10.
The shot lengths were gathered by using a computer algorithm designed by one of Cutting’s graduate student researchers, Jordan DeLong. The algorithm caught 98 percent of all the cuts in the movies, which cut down on a lot of man-hours for the project.
“Though it took sometimes as much as 10 hours for the algorithm to run, we weren’t busy, it would just run overnight, and then we could come in do it much faster than if we started from scratch and went through the films frame-by-frame,” Cutting said.
The 2000 film “Perfect Storm” was one of several exceptions that did not respond well to the algorithm. Though the shot lengths are an average of a reasonable 5 seconds or so, the intense amount of splashing water in the film confused the algorithm. So the team was forced to go through the film frame-by-frame, a tedious 4-hour process.
As with anything else, a sufficient sample size was necessary to compare the films to the 1/f trend line. Cutting says it takes a minimum of 500 shots before he can say confidently that a movie follows 1/f. There is a great deal of variance in shot length, much of which depends on the era they were produced. “Older movies have in the lower ranges of 500 or 600 shots, if the shot length is 2 and a half seconds or so they can easily be upwards of 2,000 shots,” said Cutting.
In the end what Cutting discovered was that from 1950 to the present more and more films are closer to the 1/f trend line. What makes this so interesting is that 1/f is studied in physics, economics and biology, amongst others, but film may be the only domain where there is a visible evolution of the pattern. So this means that over time movies have become increasingly synchronized with the way we as humans think.
Given that this information was not readily available before, the question is how did this happen?
Hollywood editors are an elite and rather small group that thrive on selective borrowing. By viewing other movies and recycling the shot structure and pacing that proved successful in the past, editors have inadvertently shaped films around the pattern of human thought through trial and error.
The evolution of the film industry into a big business may also have had large implications on the shift toward the 1/f line. Now that studios can afford to put more film stock into each film production a given scene or sequence can be shot from upwards of 10 angles. These different takes then provide more options for the editor in terms of ways they can cut the scene and alter the amount of shots in a given sequence.
Cutting has been in contact with an editor in Hollywood to find out the process by which the scenes are cut, to further understand the pattern. He was told that the editor would determine the pacing of the cuts for a given scene and keep it more or less uniform throughout, then switch it in the next sequence, a trend which just so happens to follow 1/f.
The next study Cutting is in the process of researching is the effects of the other dimension of filmmaking on the brain: camera motion. Cutting is using a different algorithm to measure the deviation in motion between each frame and the frame proceeding it using a separate algorithm. This deviation will once again be set against the 1/f line to see if the erratic shooting style used in movies like “Cloverfield,” that Cutting likes to call “queasy cam” has any correlation.
As viewers file out of the dark theater, their eyes glazed over and the air thick with conversation about the film, it seems that 1/f is the last thing on their minds. Whether they know it or not, however, their mind has just been subjected to one of the most stunning evolutions of humanity’s adaptation to their own thought process.
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