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Published on: January 7, 2019
Perceiving event dynamics and parsing Hollywood films
James E Cutting1, Kaitlin L Brunick, Ayse Candan
1Department of Psychology, Uris Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-7601, USA. jec7@cornell.edu
Summary
Movie viewers can identify film events, or subscenes, with high agreement using visual cues. Visual variables explain 30% of event parsing, increasing to 50% with place/time changes, demonstrating strong perceptual information in filmmaking.
Area of Science:
- Film Studies
- Perceptual Psychology
- Computational Audiovisual Analysis
Background:
- Film editing relies on viewer segmentation of continuous footage into discrete events or subscenes.
- Understanding how viewers parse films is crucial for analyzing cinematic language and viewer experience.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the visual information viewers use to segment films into events.
- To quantify the contribution of visual variables to event perception in cinema.
Main Methods:
- A corpus of 24 Hollywood films (1940-2010) was analyzed.
- Eight viewers segmented films into events (subscenes) by noting the start frame number for each event during a second viewing.
- Viewer agreement on event boundaries was assessed, and visual variables (shot transitions, duration, scale, motion, luminance, color) were analyzed in relation to these boundaries.
Main Results:
- Viewers demonstrated high agreement (approximately 90%) in identifying event boundaries.
- Visual variables alone accounted for about 30% of the variance in viewer-defined event segmentation.
- Incorporating changes in place and/or time increased the explained variance to approximately 50%.
Conclusions:
- Filmmakers provide ample perceptual information through visual cues, enabling viewers to parse films into events.
- Event segmentation can occur based on visual information, independent of narrative comprehension (actor intentions/goals).
- Visual structure plays a significant role in how audiences perceive and organize cinematic narratives.
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