Cut detection experiment

If you have a spare 45 minutes and fancy reflecting on how you watch movies please take part in my student, Yvonne's on-line experiment:

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychology/psychologyexperiments/experiments/cutdetection/startup.php?rid=53

You'll be shown a series of film clips from movies and asked to detect cuts. Just press the spacebar every time you see a cut. It's that simple!

Or is it?

Cognitive Film Theory bibliography

I just stumbled across Nick Redfern's wonderful bibliography of Cognitive Film theory on-line and thought I had to share:

http://nickredfern.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/nick-redfern-cognitivefilmtheorybibliography2-04.pdf

This is a great starting point for anybody trying to get a feel for the research area.

UCL Festival of the Moving Image

This Sunday (12th February 2012) I will be giving an intro to my work on film cognition and a live eyetracking demonstration as part of the UCL Festival of Moving Images 2012: http://movingimage.im/

The evening will begin with a screening of Tarsem Singh's The Fall (2006), a beautiful digital fairytale that exemplifies Tarsem's use of digital compositions and mise en scene.

This will be followed by Richard Linklater's rotoscoped philosophical dream journey, Waking Life (2001).



Both films explore issues related to the fantasy of reality (and vice versa) and it will be my task to bridge the two with some demonstrations of exactly how illusory our experience of the real-world is.

The event is free but space is limited so please come along early if you are interested in attending.

Gazing at Blade Runner on BBC Film 2012

The legendary BBC film review program, Film 2012 honoured me with a visit a couple of weeks ago and the piece they filmed aired last Wednesday (1st Feb 2012, 23:30). If you're in the UK you can view it on the BBC iPlayer for seven days:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b01br115/?t=23m01s

The piece represented a personal journey for the presenter, Danny Leigh who wanted to understand the psychology of film viewing. Using Blade Runner (1982) as our sample film, Danny and I discussed how filmmakers capitalise on our natural interest in simple visual features such as motion and more complex details of scenes such as social cues and faces to guide our attention within the frame and across cuts. By eyetracking Danny with a Tobii TX300 I was able to compare his viewing behaviour to that of other viewers and show how similar they were for the majority of the clip.

To get an idea of the attentional synchrony (i.e. clustering of gaze) between all viewers you can take a look at the video below. This represents the gaze location and resulting heatmap of seven people watching the clip at different times.

I'd like to thank Danny Leigh, Suniti Somaiya and the BBC Film team for making the filming so enjoyable. I look forward to working with them again.