Lights, camera, action: the role of editing and framing on the processing of filmed events

ABSTRACT

Filmmakers use various cinematic techniques in an effort to guide attention to certain aspects of these events. The present study was conducted to investigate how framing and editing can guide viewers’ attention toward character actions during event segmentation. Participants watched and segmented a movie that simultaneously showed two actors engaged in two related activities. Participants watched one of three versions of the movie: Static center version that did not foreground any character; Static off-center version that foregrounding one of the characters, and an edited version with a mix of shots that foregrounding both characters. Participants engaged in an event partonomy task in which they were asked to identify the boundaries between the events that were depicted in the movie. After watching the movie, they were asked to recall the events. The results showed converging evidence between the event segmentation and recall data, which both indicated that cinematic devices affect the perception and memory of the event structure depicted in the film.

KEYWORDS:

• Flim
• event segmentation
• comprehension

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The raw data and stimuli are available at https://osf.io/nbpur/.

Notes

1 In a career spanning four decades, Tom Ackerman has created a diverse portfolio including documentaries, commercials, music videos, and iconic motion pictures including Back to School, Beetlejuice, Christmas Vacation, Jumanji, and Anchorman http://www.imdb.com/name/ nm0005630/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1). In addition to teaching at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, School of Filmmaking, he remains professionally active.

2 Due to experimenter error, we have age information for only 120 of the participants. Of those participants, the average age was 19 years (min = 18, max = 39). Also, gender information was obtained for only 92 participants (all of which were in the edited condition). Of those participants, 67 identified as female and 25 as male.

3 Some of the previous work on event segmentation has manipulated segmentation grain (e.g., large vs small events). We did not manipulate that here given that we did not have specific hypotheses about how segmentation grain would interact with editing and cinematography.