Response to scene transitions in films based on establishing shot type
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1
Ithaca College, Psychology, United States
The goal of this research is to investigate the efficacy of a film editing technique known as the “establishing shot,” or the practice of prefacing a scene with a long, wide shot of the location in which the scene will take place. Establishing shots can depict the actors in the space in which they will be acting, the exterior of the building or vehicle where the scene will take place, or the larger geographic context of the scene, such as a cityscape. These variations in content constitute three distinct establishing shot types. The purpose of the establishing shot is to help the viewer become acclimated to a new location (Bordwell, 2002; Cutting, Brunick, & Candan, 2012; Cutting & Iricinschi, 2015). While the use of establishing shots is considered to be standard practice for setting up new locations in films, some argue that establishing shots are not particularly helpful for achieving their intended purpose (Bordwell, 2002). The proposed study seeks to investigate the relative ability of the three types of establishing shots to help cue viewers to a shift to a new location. These comparisons will be made with respect to transitions in which an establishing shot is not present. We plan on having 80 subjects total in the final study. Participants will be shown a film in which different variations of the establishing shot will be paired with scene transitions. Four separate films were created, and each will be shown to a different group of participants. The films are identical in content, but employed different combinations of scene - establishing shot pairings to create a counterbalanced repeated measures experimental design. Participants will be assessed for the following variables: time spent looking at the scene’s background, pupil dilation, blink rate, and prefrontal cortex activity. Eye movements will be measured using the MangoldVision eye tracking system, as will pupil dilation as a measure of arousal and cognitive load and blink rate as a measure of cognitive load. Oxygen levels in the brain will provide an additional measure of cognitive load assessed through a Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) system developed by the Biopac Corporation. We expect to see that scene transitions are accompanied by transient increases in pupil dilation and oxygenation levels during the following scene, suggesting increased cognitive load and arousal. We also hypothesize that scene transitions will increase the amount of time spent looking at backgrounds, suggesting a need to extract more information about the scene’s location. Participants will experience less cognitive load, less arousal, and fewer saccades to/fixations on the background after a transition to a new scene when that scene has been prefaced with an establishing shot. We predict that these effects will be greatest for establishing shots that depict the actor(s) that will be present in the following scene. Preliminary analyses suggest that average oxygenation levels are significantly lower in scenes following an establishing shot with actors when compared to scenes following establishing shots that display the larger geographic context of the setting, (t(11)=2.203, p = .05). Also, minimum oxygenation values for scenes following establishing shots depicting the actors were significantly lower than for scenes following a geographic establishing shot (t(11) = 2.212, p = .049). Our tentative conclusion is that establishing shots that contain actors do indeed increase the ease of processing location changes. However, further analyses are required to verify these initial results. Complete results will be available by May 2018.
References
Chen, S., & Epps, J. (2014). Using task-induced pupil diameter and blink rate to infer cognitive load. Human-Computer Interaction, 29, 390–413. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2014.892428
Cutting, J. (2014). Event segmentation and seven types of narrative discontinuity in popular movies. Retrieved from http://people.psych.cornell.edu/~jec7/pubs/CuttingActa14.pdf
Cutting, J. E., Brunick, K. L., & Candan, A. (2012). Perceiving event dynamics and parsing Hollywood films. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 38(6), 1476–1490. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027737
Herff, C., Heger, D., Fortmann, O., Hennrich, J., Putze, F., & Schultz, T. (2014). Mental workload during n-back task - quantified in the prefrontal cortex using fNIRS. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00935
Izzetoglu, K., Bunce, S., Onaral, B., Pourrezaei, K., & Chance, B. (2004). Functional optical brain imaging using near-infrared during cognitive tasks. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 17, 211–227.
Keywords:
Film,
functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS),
eye tracking,
establishing shot,
cognitive workload,
Arousal
Conference:
2nd International Neuroergonomics Conference, Philadelphia, PA, United States, 27 Jun - 29 Jun, 2018.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Neuroergonomics
Citation:
Brighter
GM
(2019). Response to scene transitions in films based on establishing shot type.
Conference Abstract:
2nd International Neuroergonomics Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2018.227.00145
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Received:
10 Apr 2018;
Published Online:
27 Sep 2019.
*
Correspondence:
Mr. Grant M Brighter, Ithaca College, Psychology, Ithaca, NY, 44149, United States, gmb1001@gmail.com