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Abstract
Popular movies are constructed to control our attention and guide our eye movements across the screen. Estimates of fixation locations were made by manually moving a cursor and clicking over frames at the beginnings and ends of more than 30,000 shots in 24 English-language movies. Results provide evidence for three general filmmaking practices in screen composition. The first and overriding practice is that filmmakers generally put the most import content ‒ usually the center of a character’s face ‒ slightly above the center of the screen. The second concerns two-person conversations, which account for about half of popular movie content. Dialogue shots alternate views of the speakers involved, and filmmakers generally place the conversants slightly to opposite sides of the midline. The third concerns all other shots. For those, filmmakers generally follow important content in one shot by similar content in the next shot on the same side of the vertical midline. The horizontal aspect of the first practice seems to follow from the nature of our field of view and vertical aspect from the relationship of heads to bodies depicted. The second practice derives from social norms and an image composition norm called nose room, and the third from the consideration of continuity and the speed of re-engaging attention.
I investigated the number and locations of characters as they appear on the screen in 48 popular movies released from 1935 to 2010. Sampling an average of one of every 500 frames (∼20 s of film) I amassed data from almost 14 000 movie images. The number and placement of the characters in each image were digitally recorded and compared across years and across aspect ratios (the ratio of the width to the height of the image). Results show a roughly linear decrease in the number of characters on the screen across years. Moreover, the number of characters influences shot scale, shot duration, and mediates their direct effect on one another. The location of characters on the screen was measured by the bridge of the nose between the eyes. By this measure I found that framing varies widely across aspect ratios, but when each image is conformed to the same shape, the overlap of the locations of characters is remarkably constant across years and aspect ratios for images with one, two, and three characters. Together, these results exemplify both constancy and change in the evolution of popular movies.
Abstract
Over the course of a century, filmmakers of popular cinema have composed conversations between two characters in several ways. Here, I investigate three. The oldest but initially rare conversational format occurred in silent movies, placing single characters in alternating shots either at midframe or on the same side of the screen. Next, beginning about 1930, movies began to show dyads with the camera looking over the shoulder of one character, and then reversing to show the other over the shoulder of the first. And finally, by the 1950s they increasingly began to place characters in alternating shots on opposite sides of the screen. I assessed the relative frequencies of these three types in over 60,000 shots in 210 movies released from 1915 to 2015. Each of these yoked-shot pairings increased, and by about 1990 they encompassed more than a third of all shots in popular cinema. But their increases were not uniform and their relative prominence has continually changed almost to the present day. A relevant factor is that mean shot durations decreased from the 1960s into the 2000s. Strikingly, once the average shot duration declined to about 5 s by the 1990s, the durations of same-side character pairings became systematically shorter in duration than opposing-side pairings, likely because of constraints of eye movements.