Sunday, February 21, 2010
Hollywood movies follow a mathematical formula
Physorg.com: "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 the measurements of their attention spans into wave forms using a mathematical technique known as the Fourier transform."
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14 comments:
While it's interesting to now know that their is a mathematical way to help ensure that movie will remain interesting, I am not really sure that this article really grasps the interesting part of this study. The fact that we now have a number is nice, but the fact that successful directors already knew this number without ever really needing to mathematically analyze their work is the more interesting part. I guess this is just more proof that if you are really good at your job, you instinctively do things that you should have been doing all along.
It really bothers me that there is a mathmatical formula now for creating good movies. Film, like theater is an art that when broken down into mathmatical parts ruins the art of it. It isn't art then. Its math. I am sure there are movies that are sucessful that dont follow this theory or ideasl proposed mathmatically. I just hate it when people try to look at art and solve its creation mathmatically. It isn't math but teams of people solving a creative problem, using imagination and skills- not math!
I find that this is an absolutely fascinating discovery, and will be very beneficial to moviemakers. I disagree with Bryce that this is no longer art-- all kinds of artistry have to do with math at their core, and the manipulation of such makes them beautiful or grotesque.
Now that the industry men know when their audiences are most attentive, they can insert key plot points where they know they'll be listened to, and the less than exciting exposition elsewhere in the film. I think this is a wonderful tool, and should be used to the fullest.
I think that actually finding this formula was unnecessary. It is obviously very inherent, since movies had been following it long before the pattern was actually discovered. I do like that this highlights how the pace of the movie can be determined on a very small scale. It made me a little sad to see the recommendation at the end of the article that the pattern should be followed more for audience engagement. That makes film seem more like mindless entertainment to occuy time and give the brain something to analyze, versus something that has artistic consideration.
One must remember that editors are humans too. They cut their shots based on their own attention spans and therefore, they follow the model. I agree with Kael and disagree with Bryce that math is not art. Everything is made of math because everything can be quantified to some degree. Music is math, painting is math. EVERYTHING IS MATH.
I think a good editor is not going to let a formula guide him in how to cut the movie, but I think it will serve as a measurement for him to be aware of. I will find it interesting if this type of meter gets built into the next release of final cut pro.
I wonder if the filmmakers are aware of this formula or if the editing styles have just developed to follow the attention spans of the people watching. I believe that the filmmakers are probably just seeing how people are reacting to the shots in previous films and using their observations to create their films. It is very interesting that the film correlate so closely. This shows how much of a science that art actually is. Artists know how to modify their work so that the audience will have a certain reaction. In short, I am not sure how much the art is a product of the math and how much the math is a product of the art.
I have to disagree with Bryce as well. I took a really interesting class my senior year of highschool called "The Nature of Math". The number of things that we find pleasing to the eye that are mathematically proven to work are incredible. From perfect spirals in nature to the golden rectangle. It really comes down to who intuitively makes art this way. Those are the truly talented people.
I am not at all surprised that a mathematical formula has been comprised from shots in films, because nearly everything can be broken down into a mathematical formula! This doesn't mean that directors are going to begin using the formula to plan how they will film, but that the way they inherently film a movie tends to follow that formula simply based on our attention span. This is a very interesting concept and unique study, and I wonder what other formulas are out there that nobody knows about yet but everyone seems to follow.
1/F noise is a topic of much discussion in one of my elective classes (robotic sensing systems.) It is a phenomenon that is well documented, but still poorly eplained. Basically, this pattern of variation exists in all sorts of natural experiments, but for lots of different, seemingly independent reasons. This seems liek another in a long list of patterns that can be added to http://www.nslij-genetics.org/wli/1fnoise/index-by-category.html . I also wouldn't say this is so much about a formula for making good movies, so much as a model that characterizes a lot of folks' attention spans. It is correllated with poplarity (which definitely can't be a good criteria for quality,) but definitely isn't created intentionally. It simply appears that many artists' instinct follows the same natural trend of your heartbeat or dripping faucet.
I don't think that directors should plan on cutting a movie according to this mathematical formula just to interest more audience members. The art of cutting movies shouldn't be focused on a rigid set of numbers, but rather it should follow the logical transition between characters as they interact. Also, I think that using this formula could kill any artisic vision that a film cutter and director apply to a film. The variation of lengths of shots can be just as interesting as all of the shots being similar in length.
It's probably safe to say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and that certainly seems to apply to the mathematics in this article. It's been a long-held principle that most random items tend to follow a harmonic, self-similar pattern - in other words, the longer or larger something is (more precisely the larger its deviation from the mean) the less frequently the occurrence. I do not accept that the correlation between the values implies any causality in this case, the random distribution happening on its own forms the pattern, the older movies could just represent cases where the directors or editors made a conscious decision to deviate from the random distribution for artistic reasons.
We always talk about movies following the same formula, but to finally put numbers to that formula is both fascinating and horrifying. Everything in our world has a basis is math. Even art!
While there are qualities that we assign to objects, we still look at our world in a comparative way, and while a whole is definitely more than the sum of its parts, it is also the sum of its parts. While it is not a surprising fact that similar trends are found, it is quite amazing that the correlation in so strong. These movies have become basic fill in the blanks for success. While this does lead to “good” films, it also does something dangerous.
This formula eliminates the need to search for other formulas that might be just as successful. There is no need to try something new (and risk the investment) if doing it the proven way guarantees returns.
While I think this is an interesting piece of info, and backs up the claim that you can find math in everything, all this really seems to be is some interesting research. Not to belittle the authors of the study, but I have to agree with earlier comments that all this really goes to show is that talented directors already know what they need to do for certain shots, and that's part of the reason they are good at their job. I feel like deliberately trying to use a math formula like this in planning shot is taking away something from the artistic direction of piece. Maybe that's me being naive, but I feel like the idea that something like this should be used to help a film make more money is a little ridiculous.
I think there's a few students in the Business school and the Psych school here currently researching just this. They're doing surveys where the participants watch films, and the surveyors measure their interest by the frequency of snack eating. It's a pretty interesting mixture of statistics, psychology, and film. I think that theatre could do the same as well.
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