Friday, February 03, 2012

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:


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.

1 comment:

Judith Allen said...

Just wondering if you've done/ are planning to do anything with stereoscopic 3D? I've recently spent a number of months working on a feature film which was shot in 3D, and considering the inter-ocular distances of the camera with the point of focus of the eyes, and the way the film is edited as a consequence (or, indeed, the way the film is shot as a pre-requisite for editing).

It's more of a professional curiosity than academic interest, but yours is the most relevant research I'm aware of - although I confess I'm still only scratching the surface of my reading list in the field.