In class on Tuesday we watched Man With A Movie Camera, a silent Russian documentary with no real plot. I thought it was crazy how the editing style was so new in the early 1900's and how the film was criticized for its short frames. It seems like short shots are a lot more mainstream nowadays! We also split up into groups and made a collage of lines shapes that had to either feel anxious or calm. When we had to guess the feelings of the collages the first things I looked at were colors. Cool colors always seem calm and warm colors always seem more exciting. However it seemed like a lot of people were looking at the shapes first, simple and smooth being calm, and busy and jagged being anxious. The rest of class we spent collaging our figure drawings which I really enjoyed because we had a lot of freedom which makes it easier for me to work. That night we read Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, a book I am also reading for my freshman seminar. It worked out well because Chapter 4 was my next assigned reading for my seminar too! The most interesting part was when McCloud talked about how time can be showed in a single frame just from the movement of one's eyes. I also liked how he remade the Muybridge photograph below with his cartoon character.
On Thursday we finished up our collages and discussed everyone's piece. It was interesting to see how different everyone's collages were and whether people had planned an idea for their collage or if things had just flowed.
Questions:
1. How have shot lengths changed throughout movie making history?
2. Why does our brain associate different colors with different emotions and feelings?
I decided to research average shot lengths (ASL) and how shot lengths have changed throughout movie making history. I did this because the ASL in Man With A Movie Camera was way shorter than the average movie in the early 1900's and it was criticized because of this. I counted the shot lengths in Man With A Movie Camera, like I showed before, and then looked at something most people watch nowadays on TV. It seemed that most shows had a similar ASL as did Man With A Movie Camera, so something tat was once highly criticized is now becoming mainstream. I started off by looking up music videos to see if the has been a decrease in ASL over time. When I looked up "Music Videos" Lady GaGa's Bad Romance was the first thing that came up. Wow it was scary... I hadn't really listened to the song and I don't really watch music videos so it was quite surprising. Anyhow, in this music video the shots are mostly between one and three seconds long.
Then I looked at the first music videos from the 1980's. Their ASL's seemed to be around 8-13 seconds. An example I used for that was Talking Head's Once In A Lifetime.
Average Shot Lengths seem to be getting shorter and shorter. I looked up a database on line that documented ASL's from a bunch of different movies over time but the database was kind of confusing and I'm not sure how accurate it was but it showed that the longer shot lengths were from older movies in the mid 1900's and the shorter shot lengths were more in the present. http://www.cinemetrics.lv/database.php.
I also looked at how these short shots have been linked to attention problems such as Attention Deficit Disorder. "In contrast to the way real life unfolds and is experienced by young children, the pace of TV is greatly sped up." says Christakis. His research appears in the April 2004 issue of Pediatrics. Quick scene shifts of video images become "normal," to a baby "when in fact, it’s decidedly not normal or natural." Christakis says. Exposing a baby’s developing brain to videos may overstimulate it, causing permanent changes in developing neural pathways."
"In the study of more than 2,000 children, Christakis found that for every hour watched at age one and age three, the children had almost a ten percent higher chance of developing attention problems that could be diagnosed as ADHD by age 7. A toddler watching three hours of infant television daily had nearly a 30 percent higher chance of having attention problems in school."
The decrease in ASL could also be an explanation to why there are a lot more attention problems in children then there have ever been.
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