BBC - Mark Kermode's film blog

Sunday 9 October 2011

Media World

You have a roving eye Plotting static gaze points onto a single frame of the movie allows us to see what viewers were looking at in a particular frame, but we don’t get a true sense of how we watch movies until we animate the gaze on top of the movie as it plays back. Here is a video of the entire sequence from TWBB with superimposed gaze of 11 viewers.

There Will Be Blood with gaze locations of 11 viewers from TheDIEMProject on Vimeo.

The most striking feature of the gaze behaviour when it is animated in this way is the very fast pace at which we shift our eyes around the screen. On average, each fixation is about 300 milliseconds in duration. (A millisecond is a thousandth of a second.) Amazingly, that means that each fixation of the fovea lasts only about 1/3 of a second. These fixations are separated by even briefer saccadic eye movements, taking between 15 and 30 milliseconds! Looking at these patterns, our gaze may appear unusually busy and erratic, but we’re moving our eyes like this every moment of our waking lives. We are not aware of the frenetic pace of our attention because we are effectively blind every time we saccade between locations. This process is known as saccadic suppression. Our visual system automatically stitches together the information encoded during each fixation to effortlessly create the perception of a constant, stable scene. In other experiments with static scenes, my colleagues and I have shown that even if the overall scene is hidden 150milliseconds into every fixation, we are still able to move our eyes around and find a desired object. Our visual system is built to deal with such disruptions and perceive a coherent world from fragments of information encoded during each fixation.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Having talked about Magic Bullet as a plug in here is a Super-Slow motion plug in called Twixtor, here is a tutorial on how to use it:

Twixtor Tutorial Part One : Incendium from Elliott.G.Montello on Vimeo.

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Soundlapse from Fruit Bonus on Vimeo.

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1 comment:

  1. will, can you please try to come to studios tomorrow (tues AM) as have important info re WBL report and for MP update.
    thanks
    simon

    ReplyDelete