New Patterns Prom Dresses

When we talk about cinema, all of us usually talk about how the filmmaker guides us through the journey all round, and through each graphic he or she presents. We talk about the movements, the equipment and lighting and the focus, and how which evokes moods and tendencies in us, the moviegoer. (Have a look at Alison Nastasi’s Framed for some of this debate.)

But a wildly cool new series on Jesse Bordwell’s Website on Cinema spins the attention to the viewer. Not necessarily the overall reactions, mind you — the actual shocked faces, intent seems to be and emotional reactions — but the way our eyes absorb a scene. By following the eyes of a number of readers watching a scene through ‘There Will Be Blood,’ mental researcher Tim Smith attempts to discuss the importance of staging, as well as what, exactly, our efforts are drawn to as we enjoy a scene.

Evolving from your discussion on how eyes scan sample images, Smith followed the eye movements as a group of viewers watched a landscape from Paul Thomas Anderson’s film. The first sees round areas follow each pair of sight as they ingest the landscape, while the next takes people roving eyes and creates heat places that only show the parts of the scene most visitors are paying attention to. The more face on a particular spot, the larger, hotter and more clear that will space is.

The eye paths:

There Will Be Blood with eyes locations of 11 visitors from TheDIEMProject on Vimeo.

The heat places:

There Will Be Blood + eye movements peekthrough from TheDIEMProject on Vimeo.

Smith creates:

The most striking feature in the gaze behaviour when it is animated in this way is the very fast speed at which we shift each of our eyes around the screen. Typically, each fixation is about 300 milliseconds in duration. …

Looking at these styles, our gaze may appear uncommon busy and erratic, but we’re moving our eye like this every moment individuals waking lives. We are not conscious of the frenetic pace of our interest because we are effectively blind every time we saccade between spots. This process is known as saccadic suppression. The visual system automatically stitches together the information encoded during each fixation to effortlessly create your perception of a constant, stable scene.

It’s a dense go through, but a wildly great one full of funky research and a few experiments you can test yourself. Check it out.

[via The Daily What]