Recently I've been interested in the neurology of storytelling. As a writer, it's only prudent for me to attempt to learn as much as possible about how my readers' brains are processing the stuff I write. Perhaps someday it will be possible to quantify what makes good writing, so that even billboard ads and Twitter updates will be like perfect little haikus.
Or not.
I ran across a recent article on PhysOrg about how the distribution of shot lengths within a film tend to fit a Fourier transform model. (I'm no mathematician myself so I had to take that part on pure faith.) To simplify: the length of the shots correlates inversely with their number, along a particular curve. So a film has lots of quick cuts, a smaller number of longer shots, and then very few really long uninterrupted shots. Action movies are the best fit, while noir films of the 1940s appear to diverge the most in their distribution of shot lengths.
At first glance, this suggests a "magic formula" for moviemaking: plan out your shots so they fall along a Fourier transform curve, and you're golden, right? Well, maybe not. If you follow the link at the bottom of the PhysOrg press release, and read the original paper, the authors reach a different conclusion. Their work is descriptive, not prescriptive. They have discovered how moviemakers have made films, but this doesn't mean it's the right way to make films. After all, Revenge of the Sith, which inspired a lot of complaints, is among the best fits to the Fourier transform curve, while the classic noir film Detour is among the worst.
This suggests that the Fourier transform doesn't necessarily map how audiences perceive the films, so much as how film editors' brains work. Apparently a director or editor cutting the final print of a film tends to think "that looks right" when the film's distribution of shot lengths is close to a Fourier transform -- but of course moviemakers learn their craft by watching other people's movies. Naturally they're going to think that a movie with lots of long shots has "too many." Whether or not this has any objective reality to it, or is just an artifact of the movie business, remains to be seen.
Someday -- quite soon, probably -- some enterprising producer is going to hire a test audience, wire them up to EEG shower caps or put them in MRI machines, and try to find out how their brains actually respond as they watch a film. That producer will be able to make movies the audience can't ignore, movies which will fit their brain functions like a key in a lock. The audience won't be able to look away; their emotions will be perfectly in synch with what's on the screen.
. . . and in a few weeks all the avid moviegoers will starve to death because they won't leave their theater seats.
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