Seeing Spots

Thanks to David Bordwell for his very flattering comments about my presentation on his blog. David, and the rest of the Madison Communication Arts department were incredibly welcoming when I presented there last Monday (12^th March) and the session was an absolute pleasure.

Now that David has alluded to my findings and given a brief description of my presentation you’re probably interested in finding out more. Sadly, I’m going to have to ask you to watch this space just a while longer. As is the way in academia, the publication of academic papers takes a long time and the paper that describes my findings is not yet ready for public distribution…..I know, I know: I’m a big tease. I promise you it will be worth the wait and I’ll publish the paper on my blog as soon as it is available.

In the meantime I can give you a glimpse of the “little yellow dots” David refers to.

This image is a screengrab of a software tool I created called (rather cheesily) Gazeatron. The tool allows me to plot the gaze position of multiple viewers on to the video they were viewing. The image above illustrates where 17 people were looking during this frame of the film (the yellow spots were viewers who could hear the audio and the pink were viewers who could not). Gazeatron allows you to see the same data in real-time as the video plays. By observing the swarming behaviour of the gaze positions whilst multiple viewers watch a film you gain an incredibly detailed insight into the viewing experience. Gazeatron also provides automated analysis for features of the eye movements to provide objective measures in supplement to the subjective observations.

Existing eye tracking tools do not allow you to analyse film viewing in this way and, I would argue reducing viewer attention to a film to static screenshots or data points does not give you a feel for the dynamics of the viewing experience. I’ll work on posting a video of Gazeatron so you can all see what I mean.

A bit of background on eye tracking. Each spot in the image above represents the point where a single viewer is looking. This is important as it tells us, roughly the part of the visual field they are attending to and, therefore processing at any moment in time. You may think you are aware of the whole visual field but in fact you are only able to process a very small portion to a high degree of accuracy at any one time. When you want to process a new part of the visual field you shift your eyes (perform a saccadic eye movement) so that the light from the new target is projected into the region of highest sensitivity in the eye, referred to as the fovea. These saccadic eye movements are very quick and we are not aware of them as our brains “stitch” the images either side together to create the impression of a stable visual world. By recording these eye movements we can infer the moment-by-moment experience of a viewer.

Eye movements can be recorded using a technique known as Eye tracking. There a variety of ways to track somebody’s eyes such as sclera coil and dual-purkinje (some clearly more scary than others). The most common technique used today, and the one I use is Corneal-Reflection. These trackers shine infrared lights onto the eye and film the reflected image using an infrared camera. By locating the iris and the infrared light reflected off the cornea the gaze of the viewer can be calculated. The gaze is simply a vector pointing out from the viewer’s eye into space. Therefore, eye trackers can be used to tell us where people are looking on a computer screen, table top, real-world interaction or….whilst watching a film.

The eye trackers I use are the Eyelink II head-mounted and the Eyelink 1000 tower mounted tracker, both from SR Research. These trackers are located around the University of Edinburgh, mostly in John Henderson’s lab which I am part of.

Tracking a viewer’s eyes whilst they watch a film is not as simple as you might think. The Eyelink trackers all come with software that allows you to present videos but they do not, currently have accompanying tools for analysing the eye movement data in the way I’ve described above. Most other trackers do not provide assistance in presenting films and a lot of previous researchers have resorted to tracking viewers using a head-mounted real-world tracker and recording a video to see what they are looking at (a similar technique is used in driving studies). The only other tracker I have used that is suitable for presenting films is Tobii. This system is incredibly easy to use as it is focussed at usability studies and as a hands-free interface for disabled users. The Tobii eye trackers are incredibly well designed but their price, ~£17,000 puts them out of the reach of most users (the price issue is the same with all eye trackers). Their accuracy is also not as good as the Eyelink systems which is why most vision researchers don’t use them.

If you’re looking for a cheaper option there is the option of building your own eye tracker. Derrick Parkhurst has developed open-source software and instructions for how to construct the necessary hardware to build your own eye tracker. The openEyes project is a great idea although I’m yet to have a go. If you have a go, best of luck and tell me how it goes.

If anybody has any further questions about eye tracking and film please either post a comment below or e-mail me.

As for what I have found by eye tracking film viewers well……that’ll still have to wait. Sorry. For the time being I hope you enjoy the picture of little yellow and pink spots. Who’d have thought seeing spots could be so useful!

SCMS and State Street Brats

I am writing this blog post from a hotel room in Madison, Wisconsin (note: the picture above is not the hotel I’m staying in. That’s the Chicago Hilton; more later). Why am I in Madison? Other than the fact they have great frozen custard, Afghan, Mexican food and hotdogs (http://www.statestreetbrats.com/), I am here to present my eye tracking research to the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. If you are at all interested in Cognitive Film Theory you will be aware of Madison’s Comm. Arts department. They began teaching cognitive film theory before most of us were even aware that such an approach existed. People like Ben Singer, Jonathan Frome (now of Uni. Central Florida) and, of course the hugely influential David Bordwell (yes that guy who’s books you are always being told to read by your film teacher/lecturer/film geek friend/me). The department is so infused by cognitivist ideas that it was an absolute pleasure to present my research there. The intense discussion that my presentation invoked was incredibly invigorating. Its great to get such an intrigued and welcome reception of, what is essentially cognitive science research (although, research focussed on film). I look forward to many future exchanges with this group. I’m probably not supposed to mention this as I’m not sure if the details are finalised but, David Bordwell and the Department of Communication Arts will be hosting the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving-Images conference next Summer (2008) so I shall be eagerly returning to Madison next year. I also want to encourage as many other people interested in issues related to cognition and film, whether from arts, humanities, social sciences, sciences, or anywhere to attend this conference. It is going to be a hoot J.

Thanks to The Comm. Arts department for being so incredible hospitable, special thanks to Jeff Smith for being my guide and David Bordwell for being so receptive to my imposition.

Now some background: the reason why this visit to Madison was possible was because I was presenting at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference in Chicago last week. The conference is one of the foremost gatherings of Cinema, Television, and Media theorists from around the world. I attended two years ago when it was held in London and my appetite was whetted. This year I presented a paper about my recent eye tracking examinations of different editing techniques across a range of films. The paper was really well received and a lot of people were very intrigued by the potential for eye tracking as a tool in their analysis of film. The technology is getting close to the point that most researchers would be able to perform the kind of analysis I do on films. However, there are a couple of key components such as analysis and visualisation tools that are currently missing from most commercial eye tracking systems that would be required for the technique to really take off. I have developed my own tools that allow me to fill these blanks but most researchers would not be able to do this. And, of course the cost of most easy to use eye tracking systems is still prohibitive.

Who knows, maybe the technology will suddenly take both a cost and technological leap forward and it’ll become accessible to all. Watch this space……

Returning to SCMS, the conference was held in the Chicago Hilton (very swish….well the lobby is anyway; the conference presentation rooms/bedrooms are a tad odd). I was a complete conference geek, attending almost every session. Considering that the days ran 8:15am-8pm this is quite an achievement. The reason I attended so many sessions was because of the incredible range of interesting presentations. Everything from a bit of Cognitive Film Theory (Jonathan Frome, Joe Kickasola, Mark Minett), masses on New Media, Interactive Media, and Videogames, emotions and film, including discussion of automatic facial expression recognition (Kelly Gates), and even a presentation on the Queering of Kevin Smith (it doesn’t take much ;)…Carter Soles). This year there seemed to be a lot of presentations on the impact on-line distribution, web video, and interactive TV and media such as videogames were having on our classical theories of film and television. Fascinating stuff. One of my most satisfying panels was debating the implications of interfaces for interactive TV content e.g. TIVO and PVRs, and their effect on our relationship to the film/TV content. Does the interface, which is meant to empower the viewer by allowing them access to the content actually compete with the content itself?

So, all-in-all a great conference and trip to Madison. I look forward to coming back in 2008.

Examples of Automavision and a proposal for Automavision 2.0

Following on from my discussion of Lars Von Trier’s Automavision and Lookey I thought you would like to see some examples of Automavision. David Bordwell, the author of a phenomenal number of outstanding books on the subject of film has written a very interesting blog post on the subject here. He has had the good fortune of viewing The Boss Of It All, unlike myself and capturing some screenshots. The effect is intriguing. Automavision appears to create unmotivated, and classically imperfect framings which Von Trier accentuates by cutting rapidly between very similar shots. Bordwell notes that the result is that almost every cut is a Jump Cut, a violation of the 30 degree rule that causes the image to jump uncomfortably and creates ambiguous temporal relationships between the shots. The same effect occurred in Dancer in the Dark (see a video example here) and can be said to have contributed to the overall discomfort felt by viewers of the film.

What is most interesting about Von Trier’s use of Jump Cuts is that, whilst they abandon the classic continuity style’s preservation of temporal continuity within scenes they still retain a clear cohesion that allows the viewer to understand the action represented. It is almost as if Von Trier, in consciously violating the dimensions of continuity prescribed by the classic continuity style he is revealing extra dimensions of continuity that he uses to create extra significances within his films.

Also, as noted by Antithesis Boy in his comment on my last post the Automavision technique shares a lot of similarities with virtual camera control in videogames. Automavision uses a computer to randomly generate framings for the camera and the result is non-classical framings. Videogames often take place in a 3D virtual environment and require a virtual camera to follow the action within this space. This camera is computer controlled and the objective is to create the best framings possible (e.g. Jhala and Young, 2006) but the result is often unacceptable and bizarre framings. The difference between the two systems is that a Virtual Camera is positioned relative to the objects within a scene where as Automavision (as far as I can make out) does not care what the scene is. This is why Automavision loses significant objects off the edge of the screen or frames them oddly. In his blog post, Bordwell notes that Von Trier does not always choose the most outrageous framing generated by Automavision indicating that he realises that the unconventional framings have a particular effect on the viewer and should be mixed with more conventional compositions to create the intended viewing experience. If Automavision is truly random, as implied by Von Trier then there is no way to control the degree to which the resulting framings are unconventional. This means that Von Trier must keep refilming and regenerating framings with Automavision in order to get suitable shots.

The next generation Automavision system could improve its ability to generate unconventional framings by incorporating some of the intelligence of Virtual Cameras. If it is able to apply the classical framing conventions then it can knowingly violate them. This would also allow it to modify the conventionality of its framings by varying the relative influence of chance and the framing conventions. To do this it would need to begin processing the visual scene, which is no easy task and deciding where the significant objects should be positioned in the frame. An interesting reverse application of this technique would then be to apply Automavision 2.0 to a videogame. Anybody up for a game of Halo directed by Lars Von Trier?

It Lookey like Lars Von Trier is at it again.

Not content with creating a revolution in filmmaking by spearheading the Dogme 95 movement, Lars Von Trier is now experimenting with how his films are shot and how viewers engage with them. His new film, The Boss Of It All, is filmed using a new camera control technique developed by Von Trier called Automavision. The system removes the need for a human camera operator, replacing them with a computer which randomly selects camera shots and movements based around an initial camera position selected by the director. The system removes the usual control the director and cinematographer have over the composition of each shot and, specifically it’s framing. Lars Von Trier explains his desire for developing this technique:

“I am a man who likes to control things, and if I can't control them totally I will not control them at all. After doing Europa with very very fixed shots and camera movements, I was tempted to do something totally different. I started using a handheld camera and we invented a form of framing, or non-framing, called pointing of the camera, because I hate framing.” (guardian.co.uk)

This hand-held, almost haphazard method of framing combined with non-continuity editing had recently become Von Trier’s trade mark. Even after he deviated from the original strict edict of the Dogme 95 manifesto with Dancer in the Dark, Dogville and Manderlay he retained this style of framing. The style deliberately breaks with the traditions of the Hollywood continuity style by forcing the viewer to actively search each shot for the most significant elements. In the Hollywood style these elements, for instance a protagonist would be centred within the frame and lit in a way which made them highly salient even in busy scenes. In Von Trier’s recent films the protagonist is often cut off by the frame, visually diminished by other less important elements, or moving at odds with the hand-held camera movement. In combination with his often uncomfortable subject matter, this unpredictable framing technique often leads viewers to describe the experience of watching a Von Trier film as “hard work”.

In a series of recent eye tracking experiments I have shown that this difficulty in following the action of a Von Trier film can be very clearly seen in viewers’ eye movements. When watching a film composed according to the classic continuity style, all viewers will focus their attention on a small number of objects within a shot. In most shots there will only be one clear centre of attention, usually the face of a principle actor and it will be this that all viewers track within the shot and across cuts. By comparison, viewers watching Dancer in the Dark or Dogville distribute their attention across more of the screen and show less agreement of what they believe to be the most significant object. When a cut then happens (which they often do at unexpected moments in Von Trier’s films) viewers are not guided to the new centre of attention by the director so they have to actively search the scene. This active engagement with the visual constituents of the film creates a viewing experience that is completely counter to the normal smooth, direct, almost passive viewing experience of a classical continuity film.

Von Trier’s desire to create films that actively engage viewers can also be seen in his use of Brechtian theatrical technique. In Dogville and Manderlay the use of black backdrops, minimal props, and transparent scenery expose the artificiality of the film. Bertolt Brecht developed these techniques, amongst others, as a way of encouraging his theatre audiences to adopt a critical mindset. By actively counteracting the “suspension of disbelief” encouraged in classical Artistotelian theatre, Brecht was trying to engage his audience in the critical interpretation of the depicted action, the act of its construction, and its place within real-life. The application of these techniques to cinema by Von Trier also resulted in an extra level of visual engagement beyond that created by the non-framing camerawork. By populating the set with transparent scenery the director is unable to hide insignificant actions. All actors must be present on set at the same time and act even though their actions are not important to the current shot. These peripheral actions crowd in on the main action, drawing the viewer’s attention away from the main action and creating further disagreement between viewers.

However, the natural instinct for framing is hard to overcome and it appears that Von Trier realised that his desire for completely un-framed shots would not be possible so long as he or his camera operator were controlling the camera. A hand-held camera is often described as a visual prosthesis: an extension of the camera operator’s eye; seeing what they see. The movement of a hand-held camera may be rough and the framing imperfect but, like the human eye it will always eventually settle on the most important parts of a scene. If Von Trier is to create shots in which viewers are unable to predict what is the most significant part of a scene or how the camera is going to move he needs to take the human camera operator out of the equation. Hence, Automavision.

Automavision is not the only innovation in Von Trier’s new film, The Boss Of It All. Von Trier recently announced that he has embedded five to seven “Lookeys” in the film:

"For the casual observer, it's just a glitch or a mistake….For the initiated, it's a riddle to be solved. All Lookeys can be decoded by a system that is unique." (Von Trier quoted on Screendaily.com)

Von Trier is offering 30,000 Danish kroner (£2,700) to the first Danish viewer that identifies all the Lookeys. The Lookeys are described as “visual elements that are out of place” (www.lookey.dk) and are intended to turn the film into a “mind game”. By informing his viewers of the presence of these Lookeys Von Trier is again encouraging his viewers to actively engage with his films in a way in conflict with the normal film viewing. Spotting continuity errors, which is how these Lookey’s would be described if they were unintentional, has been an occupation of film viewers throughout the history of film. The pastime has escalated to such a level that there are even books and websites devoted to it. Continuity errors are typically mistakes made during production that are spotted by viewers on repeated viewings of a film. The most common errors are unintentional costume changes across shots or cigarettes and drinks that disappear or refill.

Finding errors is always good fun although it can often be very difficult. In my Ph.D. thesis I created a taxonomy of continuity errors that classifies them according to when they are made during the film’s production process and what is required to spot them (page 186 of my thesis). The detection of errors is very dependent on how the viewers watch the film. If the viewer looks at the parts of the screen the director wants them to look at they should never be aware of any continuity errors. The focal objects (those at the centre of attention) should never have errors as they would have been spotted by the director, cinematographer, or editor. Errors are more likely to be located in the periphery of the screen, areas where the production crew and the average viewer are unlikely to look. As film is a dynamic medium and a viewer can only focus their attention on one small part of the screen at any one time, peripheral errors should be missed as viewers are rationing their attention to the most significant parts of the screen.

In a traditional Hollywood film composed for continuity, errors are hard to spot as viewer attention is so carefully influenced by the director and editor. In a Von Trier film, as already discussed, the intention appears to be to encourage active search of the screen and disagreement between where different viewers look. With the addition of Automavision the likelihood that a viewer looks at a part of the scene that would traditionally be insignificant probably increases. This may mean that viewers of The Boss Of It All may be more likely to spot the Lookeys than if they had been included in a traditionally composed film.

However, without knowing exactly what form these Lookeys take (see page 186 of my thesis for a taxonomy of errors) or what expectations the viewer will have to have to realise that the Lookeys are errors we cannot know whether they are easier or harder to detect than traditional continuity errors. What we do know is that the experience of watching The Boss Of It All is, like in all Lars Von Trier films going to be unlike watching any other film.

Re-viewed

Last Monday (23/10/06) I had the good fortune of attending the opening of a new interactive art exhibit at the Leeds Metropolitan Gallery. The exhibit is called Re-possessed and presents a collection of interactive art installations inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Each installation takes a section of the film and provides the participants with novel ways of exploring the film, their experience of it, and the issues of power, gender, and voyeurism that are so prominent in the film. The exhibit runs until 18^th November and I highly recommend it if you are interested in film or just want to play with some highly innovative interactive exhibits.

The main reason I was invited down for the opening was because one of the artists, Richard Stevens had stumbled across my research whilst looking for references about applying eye tracking to film. His installation, Re-viewed uses a Tobii eyetracker to record viewer’s eye movements whilst watching scenes from Vertigo and then represents the eye movements using some very interesting visualisations that Richard and his students have created. These visualisations give the visitors an insight into their perceptual experience of film that they have never previously had. It also emphasises group differences such as between Male and Female viewers. Given that gender politics and the resulting power relationships are very prominent themes in Hitchcock’s work (see Laura Mulvey’s article on the Male Gaze in her 1975 book “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema”) this method of using eyetracking to extract the gender differences in the viewing experience could prove very informative.

The reason why Richard contacted me is because he and his collaborator, Tony Renshaw were uncertain how to interpret the eye movement data given that so little work has been done in relation to film. They also needed some clear way of expressing any group differences that they observed. Currently, Richard’s visualisations can display the moment by moment differences but in order to report and quantify these differences precise measurements are required. I have encountered similar problems with my own eye tracking work and have been developing suitable measurements. Hopefully I will be able to aid Richard and Tony in the analysis of their data and we will find some interesting group differences. We’ll then work towards publications based on the results. I’ll keep you posted if anything emerges.

I am very excited about this exhibit as, to my knowledge it is the first time eye tracking of film has been performed on such a large scale with a large cross-section of the population. Most eye tracking studies (all Psychology studies for that matter) are usually conducted on University undergraduates; the most easily accessible subject pool for university researchers. The number of subjects eye tracked is also usually less than 20 so there is no scope for exploring group differences. Hopefully, through the development of new measurement techniques and automation of the analysis we can extract some interesting results from this study which will further our understanding of the viewing experience.

So, if you are any where near Leeds in the next two weeks head down to the Leeds Met Gallery. You’ll be furthering scientific knowledge whilst having a fun and informative time.

End of an era + Catch up

Today I moved out of my PhD office. Even though I finished my thesis in January, graduated in June, and have been working on a completely different project (Le Active Math) since last October I had somehow managed to remain at my old desk. Today marks the start of Edinburgh University Fresher’s so new PhD students were coming to inhabit my office which meant that I finally had to cut my ties with my old desk. So sad….so many memories….and too many long hours spent at that desk.

My departure from the office was eased by the fact that most of the office mates I had shared it with during my Ph.D. had also left. Scott Nowson started his new life at Macquarie University in Sydney three weeks ago (you can check on his progress at http://nowsonexitmusic.wordpress.com/). Sarah Gingell finally finished her Ph.D. (after too long to record here) last year and has moved on to a real life. Colin Fraser went part-time on his Ph.D. and is now touring Europe promoting e-Democracy (you’ll have to ask Colin to explain what this entails). Zoe Bruce (and Morgan the Dog) left a couple of years ago to pursue a career in academic publishing (Zoe that is, not Morgan). We all had some great times together. In fact we may have had too many great times considering how long our research ended up taking J. Still, I wouldn’t have traded you guys in for anything. Thanks for keeping me company.

Now I find myself divided, literally. I’ve got a “hot desk” (what a cool name for what is essentially a desk that anybody can sit at) in the same building in Informatics which I shall be using most days for my Le Active Math work. I also have a very nice office all to myself in John Henderson’s lab in Psychology. That is where all the interesting blog-relevant work will take place. I’m really excited about starting full time over there but this won’t happen until January. In the meantime I have to run a MASSIVE evaluation of Le Active Math….. Wish me look.

Blog posts I should have written and still might:

• Cognitive Studies of the Moving Images Conference, Potsdam, Germany (20/7-23/7/06). Fantastic conference, great people, interesting research, and fabulous reception for my work. The future of Cognitive Film Theory is bright. See Bruce Hutchinson’s account of it at bdhutch.blogspot.com.

• Narrative and Interactive Learning Environments conference, Edinburgh (8/08-11/08/06). I really enjoy this conference as it attracts such a small, friendly, yet hugely intelligent group of people. I was one of the organisers this year and found myself stage managing and being sound and lighting engineer for a multimedia performance group called Palindrome. These guys do visionary things with motion capture and real-time music production. We were really lucky to have them take part in NILE.

• Active Vision workshop, Dundee (1/09/06). This is a great little workshop organised by Ben Tatler. Lots of interesting presentations about eye movement research from a diverse range of disciplines. The atmosphere was really relaxed which resulted in a lot of discussion and humour. This workshop was a great example of how many interesting eye movement researchers there are across the UK. I’m really looking forward to being more “active” in this community (Sorry, I couldn’t help it)

• Edinburgh International Film Festival (14/08-25/08/06). God I love living in Edinburgh! August is a month of cultural, artistic and pleasurable excess that always amazes me. The high point for me is always the film festival. I see an unhealthy number of films each year and 2006 was no difference. Highlights include Brothers of the Head, Black Sheep, Host (Gwoemul), Snow Cake, Clerks 2 (and attending a Q&A with Kevin Smith), and Looking for Cheyenne (Oublier Cheyenne). Thanks to Shane Danielsen the festival director who programmed a fantastic final festival. You shall be missed. Especially your bizarre digressional Q&A style and uncontrollable flirting. Fantastic.

Actually I think I just ended up writing those blog posts!

You can’t get rid of me that easily.....

I am very happy to announce that I shall be continuing my research for at least another year. I have been accepted for a post-doctoral research position in John M. Henderson’s Visual Cognition lab in the Edinburgh University Psychology department. Now I know what you’re all thinking: “I thought he was already in Edinburgh Uni”. You are correct. My current status is as a Research Associate for the Le Active Math project employed by Moray House School of Education at Edinburgh University. However, my move to Psychology will be a very fortuitous one as it will allow me to conduct my research without distraction and within a group of likeminded people.

This move to psychology has only been made possible by the uncannily well-timed move of John Henderson’s visual cognition lab from Michigan State University to Edinburgh. John and his partner Fernanda Ferreira were offered chairs in our psychology department and they were wise enough to accept. In the simple signing of a contract Edinburgh has suddenly become a hot-bed of eyetracking and visual cognition research. John, for those of you who don’t know, is one of the foremost researchers in the field of visual search, scene perception, and visual cognition in general. If you read my thesis you will find that he is one of my most cited people. His work is highly influential and I am sure that it will continue to be so from his base in Edinburgh.

John has been very encouraging of my research and interested in the theories I have been developing. As a post-doc under John I shall be continuing my research into the use of attentional cues in film to create the perception of continuity. I will also be expanding my theoretical, methodological, and writing skills to begin establishing myself as a visual cognition researcher.

Thank you, John for this opportunity.

So it looks as if you (reader) won’t be getting rid of me or this blog for a few years to come :)

Rock ‘n’ Roll Research

or “How to do an experiment in two days”.

I was contacted at the start of July by a Gustav Kuhn from Durham University. Gustav is doing some really interesting research looking at how magicians use misdirection and perceptual expectations to make you perceive something that actually isn’t there (Gustav is a highly talented magician himself. He’s available for children’s parties, corporate events, bar mitzvah’s …..). He’s done a series of eyetracking experiments to examine where people look whilst watching magic tricks. To satisfy a reviewer of one of his papers he needed to run an eyetracking study and he needed to do it fast. *Cue the Mission Impossible music*

Unfortunately, Gustav’s eyelink II system was not setup yet so he asked if he could run his study using the equipment we have here. I agreed with three small provisos:

1) the study had to take place after the 11^th July as I was at a project meeting in Germany before then;

2) I would have to run some of my own stimuli on the subjects whilst they were being eyetracked;

3) the study had to be finished by the 14^th July as I had to fly to Germany (again) to present at a conference (CCSMI, more later).

In the course of 3 days I managed to prepare two sets of stimuli for my part of the study, design and implement the experiment using the Experiment Builder software which I had never used before, test, pilot, and run 13 subjects through the experiment, and process the data so that Gustav could do his analysis. Phew! Gustav was up in Edinburgh for a day and a half and in that time we managed to get all the data we needed and, through subsequent analysis, Gustav got the result he needed to appease his reviewer. Now that’s how science should be :)

Unfortunately, the pace for my part of the experiment has slowed down somewhat. I tested two types of stimuli. The first were the videos I used in the editing memory experiment. I wanted to see which details of the videos viewers were using to detect the editing discontinuities. I also had some hypotheses about how the discontinuities would effect their eye movements (see d'Ydewalle, G., Desmet, G., & Van Rensbergen, J., 1998 for similar effects). To extract these effects I need to examine each video by hand and then perform some complex statistics on the eye movement data. Sadly this can not be done in a day L I’ll publish these results in the Editing Memory sometime soon.

The second stimuli I eyetracked were feature films. I have been desperate to get eyetracking data for films with different degrees of continuity for ages and Gustav’s urgency finally motivated me to do it. In my thesis I develop a series of hypotheses about how eye movements should be controlled by an editor in order to create the perception of continuity. This data should provide direct evidence of these techniques (if they exist) and motivate further, in depth studies. The films I eyetracked are also interesting to film theorists as they cover the most significant styles of films: Blade Runner (Continuity), Citizen Kane (Deep Focus), Koyaaniqsatsi (Non-narrative), Dancer in the dark (Dogme-esque), Eisenstein’s October (Dialectical Montage), Hulk (Digital Composition/Collage), Requiem for a Dream (Quick Cutting/MTV style), and a few more.

I’m really excited about the findings of this study and I’ll keep this blog updated as to what I find. Unfortunately, analysis of eyetracking data for long sequences of feature films is not easy and there exists no tools to assist. I’m currently developing my own methodologies, tools, and analyses to make this possible. Fingers crossed everything goes to plan and I have some interesting results to present asap.

So in conclusion, high speed experimentation is by far the most Rock ‘n’ Roll way to run experiments. Unfortunately, there is nothing Rock ‘n’ Roll about analysis. (Any suggestions on how I can make my analysis “rock” are highly appreciated)

Corrected version of my Ph.D. thesis submitted

I have just resubmitted my Ph.D. thesis in its final hard-bound version. When I had my viva (see Viva! Viva) back in February I was awarded a pass with minor corrections. The corrections amounted to the modification of a few graphs, fixing of typos, rephrasing of a few sentences to make things clear and general reformatting. Not much really. I finally got round to making the changes to my thesis and I formally resubmitted the thesis last Monday (9^th May). I have also registered my thesis on-line with Edinburgh University’s Research Archive. The archive is a wonderful, publically accessible repository of research documents produced at Edinburgh. You can find my thesis here.

I have also updated the version linked from my website. Now everybody can read what I have been up to for the last 4.5 years and be confident that reputable researchers have given it their seal of approval.

Now all I need to do is channel some of the ideas stemming from my thesis into research proposals for my future career. Too many ideas, too little research funding/job offers J

Science Festival Fun

This is just a quick note to say that I am currently running activities at the Edinburgh International Science festival (April 11^th – 15^th, 2006) at the National Museum of Scotland. There are two activities: Editing Memory and Directing Reality.

Editing Memory is a drop in activity in which you get to test your memory for films by reconstructing the film using editing. It is proving to be very VERY popular (my helpers can barely keep up!). Come and have a go (its free) if you want to test you memory or try editing a film. You can visit the website for more information and the eventual results: http://scifest.inf.ed.ac.uk/editing-memory/

Directing Reality is a 1-hour workshop in which kids (and big kids) can come and make Trick Films using really simple filming techniques. The films the kids are making are just like those produced by George Melies over a hundred years ago. The intention of the workshop is to get the kids thinking about the expectations and assumptions we make when perceiving the visual world and how these can be violated to create funny illusions using editing. The kids pick it up really quickly and the tricks they come up with are marvellous. If you want to come and have a go get down to the museum before Saturday although you might want to book on-line before hand (http://www.sciencefestival.co.uk/) as tickets are selling out fast (they cost £3).

Hope to see you there :)

An Attentional Theory of Continuity Editing

So here it is: my thesis. After successfully passing my viva a few weeks ago I have finally finished tweaking and polishing my thesis so that it is now in a format that I can distribute. Feel free to download the thesis and print it off although I will warn you it is 389 pages long. Selective printing might be better for the rainforests.

If you wish to reference my thesis please use the reference below.

Smith, T. J. (2006) An Attentional Theory of Continuity Editing. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis. University of Edinburgh.

I welcome all comments and questions about the thesis as well as peripheral issues. The thesis is a first stab at using cognitive science theories and methodologies to answer questions about how we watch film. The deeper I delved into the issues related to film perception, the more questions emerged. It is my hope that I will have the opportunity to investigate these questions in the future and that other researchers, from both cognitive science and film theory will also take an interest in answering these questions.

Whilst writing this thesis my love of film and adoration of filmmakers has grown inordinately. The insight into the human perceptual system exhibited by talented filmmakers is awe inspiring. The precision with which they appear to shape their audience’s experience of the film highlights how much further cognitive science has to go before we begin to get even close to understanding how perception works. By applying an analytical mind to the conventions and techniques used by filmmakers, it is my belief that cognitive scientists will learn a lot about the human perceptual system.

Film is a deviant reality that we, as members of its audience, have been successfully interacting with for over a century. By understanding how film differs from reality and why this difference has no negative effect on our ability to perceive film we will gain, not only a greater understanding of how we perceive film but also an insight into how we perceive reality.

Viva! Viva

Last Tuesday (21^st February) I had my viva. For those readers who are not academics this is an oral examination during which I am grilled by two experienced academics about my thesis, its content, all issues surrounding my thesis, my research goals, and, if they are really pedantic, my dubious sentence construction. Vivas in my department have been known to go on for 3-4 hours on average! Imagine a job interview in which your interviewers know you inside out and challenge you to defend why you are you. That’s the kind of experience a viva can be.

Luckily my viva turned out to be nowhere near as bad as I was dreading it might be. Due to some fortuitous scheduling I was able to have Professor John Henderson of Michigan State University as my external examiner. Usually your external has to come from the UK or Europe as the university have to pay to fly them over and accommodate them. I was able to have John as my external as he happened to be planning a visit to Edinburgh just at the time that I was due to have my viva. In terms of my research topic and the specific approach I took, John was probably one of the most qualified people in the world to examine me. He and his colleagues at Michigan State have produced a wealth of innovative research investigating visual scene perception and memory across eye movements. John is specifically interested in using ecologically valid stimuli to try and understand how real-world scene perception works. I hoped that this would make him receptive to my application of the theories and methodologies of visual cognition to film.

As it turned out in the viva, he appeared to appreciate my approach and my thesis in general. After only an hour of discussion, most of which at a high level of issues arising from and related to by thesis John and my internal examiner (Professor Keith Stenning) decided to recommend that I be awarded a Ph.D. with only minor corrections (giving me one month to do these). This is essentially the best result you can hope for from a viva. I was stunned, to say the least.

I want to say a huge thank you to John and Keith for agreeing to examine me on my thesis, to read the massive document, provide me with feedback on it, and take time out of their busy schedules (in John’s case, super busy) to examine me. I also want to thank John Lee, my primary supervisor for is help in getting to this point and organising the viva and Helen Pain, my second supervisor for reading my thesis multiple times, grilling me in a mock viva, and being there during my real viva. Thank you everyone.

The best part of my viva success for any interested readers out there is that this means I am able to make my thesis available to you. I will post a pdf copy of my thesis on this blog in the next few days. There are a few minor corrections I have to make first but once they are done I’ll post it here.

Thesis Complete

I did it! I handed in my Ph.D. thesis. I can't actually believe I finished my thesis. As you might deduce from the lack of blog posts since early December, the Christmas period was busy for me. I had so much of my thesis left to write as I approached Christmas and I had no idea how I would do it. However, I seemed to enter the thesis “zone” where all my ideas coexisted in my brain and I was finally able to see all the connection, relationships, and structures that had been lacking from my ideas for so long. This made the final writing possible and meant that I was able to produce sections at an alarming rate.

I returned on the 27^th December to Edinburgh from my parent’s house on the Wirral. Between that day and the 10^th January I had no more than 4 hours sleep a night, spoke to very few people other than my girlfriend on the phone (she was visiting her family in Germany), and saw even less people. I produced at least 30% (~33,000 words) of my thesis in this period. Having now submitted my thesis I feel I can now reflect on the experience and hand out this advice: WRITE YOUR THESIS AS YOU GO ALONG, NOT AT THE LAST MINUTE. Simple, some might say, obvious advice that I completely failed to adhere to when doing my thesis. Luckily my sanity, my fingers (from all the typing), and my Will to live where not completely crushed by the experience. Not completely anyway……

I can now officially record that the Ph.D. thesis entitled ‘An Attentional Theory of Continuity Editing’ was submitted for examination on the 11^th January 2006. My viva (oral examination) should take place around the 20^th February and based on the outcome of that (eek!) I will know if I have succeeded in gaining my doctorate. I have no idea how it will go but I’m doing all I can to be prepared for it. I’ll try to keep this blog updated so you know how things go.

For the time being I am fortunate to report that I am employed as a Research Assistant on a European project developing an intelligent tutoring system (http://www.leactivemath.org/). This project gives me the opportunity to develop my AI interests whilst continuing to perform experiments (I’ll be performing usability, evaluation of a tutoring system). However, I do not intend to end my research interest in film perception with my thesis as there are too many questions left unanswered. I’ll be developing research proposals and making grant applications during my time as an RA with the aim that by 2007 I’ll be able to pursue my research interests. To this end I will be presenting my research at conferences during 2006 (e.g. ETRA, in San Diego in March, www.e-t-r-a.org) and writing papers. Lets hope 2006 proves to be an enjoyable and productive year and sets the foundations of my future research career.

The same wishes are extended to all readers of this blog: may your 2006 bring all you desire.

A human filter

I feel like my head has become a filter for all the information that might possibly be relevant to my thesis. All the ideas I have had about continuity editing, the papers I have read, the studies I have performed are all filtering through my head and on to the page. If I achieve nothing with my thesis at least I can be proud or collating such a large reference list! This is the problem with performing cross-disciplinary research you have to be knowledgeable in multiple areas simultaneously. This requires a lot of reading and even more thinking. After I hand in my thesis (less than a month from now) I'm going to need to do something mind-numbing for a while. Maybe I'll get a job in data entry. I did this job for three summers during my undergraduate degree and it is incredible how little of your brain you need to use to do it well (no disrespect to the envelope stuffers out there).

My thesis is finally shaping up. I've got most of the sections written and the main theory is nearing its final form. For anybody who has witnessed/read any of the previous accounts of my research its final form might come as some what of a shock. By reading so many theories written in different areas I started to see the natural crossovers. I think my theory as it now stands can account for a lot of the techniques used in continuity editing. All that I hope is that my examiners also think so.

I'll wait until my thesis is finished before debuting my new theory. However, if you want to get a good insight into why continuity editing is acceptable to the human perceptual system take a look at these books. These editors know what's what:

Dmytryk, Edward (1986) On Filmmaking
Block, Bruce (2001) The Visual Story: Seeing structure of film, TV, and New Media
Murch, Walter (2001) In The Blink Of An Eye: a perspective on film editing
Pepperman, Richard (2004) The Eye is Quicker: film editing; making a good film better

Do you see a theme?

Quick Thesis Update:
Deadline = 9th January (Merry Christmas for me then)
Percentage written = 80% (and then I have to edit; Oh, the irony: the one part of writing I hate)

Remembrance or Mardi Gras?

I was in Germany a year ago today and I had a very odd experience. I was walking through Stralsund with my girlfriend’s family at 11am on the 11^th November feeling very odd due to the significance of the time and date. In the UK this is Remembrance Day, the day when we remember the people who died during the First World War and the day when the armistice was signed. It is a very solemn day that makes you dwell on the futility, brutality, and loss of war. So, being in Germany on this day made me feel a bit strange and a bit uncertain whether I should enquire of my girlfriend’s family whether they knew of the day’s significance. However, as 11am came round the streets were suddenly filled with kids wearing streamers and party hats and blowing on party blowers and horns. As we walked towards the town hall we saw that there was some kind of party going on inside. We walked into the Town Hall and found loud German Techno booming from one of the ornate meeting rooms, a table set full of Sekt (German sparkling wine), and people handing out Berliners (donuts). A party was in full swing in Germany whilst at home people would be mourning the death of thousands of soldiers.

The party, I was later informed by my girlfriend was to celebrate the start of Fasching, the Mardi Gras or Carnival. For some reason, traditional preparation for Fasching begins on the 11^th November and it is celebrated by storming the Town Hall. Fasching is a big deal in the Catholic south of Germany but the whole of Germany likes a good party so the idea seems to have spread north. The precise match of the beginning of Fasching with the signing of the WWI armistice was too startling a coincidence to be accidental. It must have been chosen to emphasise the importance of the occasion (11am 11^th day, 11^th month is very easy to remember) yet in Germany nobody remembered the significance of the day. Other than the fact that you get to drink wine and eat donuts at 11am. Another interesting example of how a shared history isn’t always the same history.

Errors/goofs/gaffes/slip-ups

No, I’m not talking about my current problems writing my thesis. These are all names given to continuity errors. Now I thought it was about time that I addressed one of the common confusions about my thesis: I am not researching continuity errors. What are generally referred to as continuity errors are mistakes made during production that in some way highlight the artificiality of the film. Classic examples are cigarettes/drinks/food suddenly changing level across shots, actors changing posture or position within the scene, and the all-too-frequent instantaneous changes of costume. A great source of continuity errors is Jon Sandys’ website www.moviemistakes.com and the books that accompany it http://tinyurl.com/8hjxt. He has a massive directory of errors some of which are hilarious and others are so bafflingly complex that it is incredible that anybody noticed them. However, hardly any of them actually have anything to do with editing. Which brings me to a strange contradiction: continuity errors are not usually caused by violating a continuity editing rule. I discuss this in some detail in my thesis (I have just finished writing a taxonomy and explanation of the psychology of continuity errors) but in general my thesis is about editing so continuity errors are not important.

After my thesis I might expand on my taxonomy of errors and work out a webpage devoted to the topic but for now I’d direct you to Jon Sandys', the expert on this subject, and you can amaze at how slack Hollywood can sometimes be.

Quick Thesis Update:
Deadline = 9th January (notice the change)
Percentage written = 50% (still yikes!)

DDD

Just finished presenting my Draft Dissertation Defence (DDD). This is curious part of the British Ph.D. process where by you defend the ideas in your thesis before you've finished making them up....Sorry, I mean "writing them up".

My presentation seemed to go well. As always, I was bizarrely calm whilst presenting. The audience seemed to appreciate and follow what I was presenting so I rewarded them with some entertaining visuals (well, I thought they were entertaining). Received some useful feedback from various people after the presentation which will, hopefully find its way into my thesis.

Quick Thesis Update:
Deadline = 16th December
Percentage written = 30% (yikes!)

For those who are interested I'll whet your appetite with the abstract for my DDD. If you have any questions about it or want to know more don't hesitate to contact me. My plan is to write some journal publications based on this data immediately after I submit my thesis so hold on in there for the official unveiling of this stuff.

Title: An Attention-based Theory of Continuity Editing: A Draft Dissertation Defence
Date: Wednesday 5th October 2005

Abstract:

All film and television productions are constructed according to a set of conventions developed during the first two decades of the 20^th century. These conventions are collectively referred to as the “rules of continuity editing”, and enable a filmmaker to construct a film in a manner that makes the artificial visual disruption occurring during an edit invisible to the viewer whilst maintaining the impression of continuous action. Achieving this “continuity” is the goal of all mainstream editing yet the concept is poorly understood and has never received an in depth scientific examination. The intention of this thesis is to rectify this neglect and in doing so advance our understanding of how we perceive edited visual media.

A cut (an instantaneous change from one camera shot to another) creates a sudden disruption of the entire visual scene which, under normal viewing conditions would involuntarily capture a viewer’s attention (Lang, 2000). This would make the viewer aware of the editing and has been shown to have negative effects on comprehension (Frith & Robson, 1975) and arousal (Lang, Zhou, Schwartz, Bolls, & Potter, 2000). For a cut to occur without attentional capture, the continuity editing rules must create viewing conditions under which attention is suppressed or occupied, or the attracting quality of the disruption minimised. During this talk I will present examples of editing rules that I have empirically shown to utilise these processes.

Three main phenomena will be presented that explain how natural modulations of attention during normal scene viewing can be used to explain how continuity editing rules function: event segmentation (Zacks et al., 2001), visual occlusion (Michotte, 1991), and saccadic eye movements (Yarrow, Haggard, Heal, Brown, & Rothwell, 2001). The close compatibility between these natural cognitive phenomena and the editing rules indicates that “continuity” is actually a combination of spatiotemporal continuity and existence constancy. These properties do not have to be created as they are assumed to continue unless we are made aware of their absence. Therefore, the editing rules function by ensuring continuity of attention which in turn guarantees perceptual continuity.

References

Frith, U., & Robson, J. E. (1975). Perceiving the language of films. Perception, 4(1), 97-103.

Lang, A., Zhou, S., Schwartz, N., Bolls, P. D., & Potter, R. F. (2000). The Effects of Edits on Arousal, Attention, and Memory for television Messages: When an Edit is an Edit Can An Edit Be Too Much? Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 44, 94-109.

Lang, A. (2000). The Limited Capacity model of Mediated Message Processing. Journal of Communication, 50, 46-70.

Michotte, A. (1991). On phenomenal permanence: facts and theories. G. Thines, A. Costall, & A. Butterworth (Editor), Michotte's experimental phenomenology of perception (pp. 122-139). Hillsdale, NJ, US: Erlbaum. Notes: (Original work published 1950)

Yarrow, K., Haggard, P., Heal, R., Brown, P., & Rothwell, J. C. (2001). Illusory perceptions of space and time preserve cross-saccadic perceptual continuity. Nature, 414.

Zacks, J., Braver, T. S., Sheridan, M. A., Donaldson, D. I., Snyder, A. Z., Ollinger, J. M., Buckner, R. L., & Raichle, M. E. (2001). Human brain activity time-locked to perceptual event boundaries. Nature Neuroscience, 4(6), 651-655.

A Coruna: Continued

[continued from previous post]

As for the conference it was hit and miss. There seemed to be a large emphasis on neuroscience and psychophysical methods. There is nothing wrong with these methods, in fact they are very powerful ways of investigating visual phenomenon in very precise ways, but they are not the only methods for investigating visual perception. Quite a few people commented to me after the first couple of days that they were a bit disappointed with the lack of higher-order perception studies and applied cognition. As it turned out these types of studies were reserved for the last couple of days and there were quite a number of interesting posters that made up for my general feeling of “intellectual drowning” during most of the seminars.

Before the start of the conference there was a pre-symposium entitled Art and the Visual System. This was really interesting and was exactly the approach I have been trying to take during my PhD: applying scientific theories and methods to the analysis of visual art. There were a number of really interesting presentations including explanations of the Watercolour illusion (Baingio Pinna), Picasso’s cubism via visual crowding (Denis Pelli), and Mona Lisa’s ambiguous smile via peripheral vision (Margaret Livingstone). Very clever stuff. The presentation I found most interesting was Semir Zeki’s (University College London) discussion of the chronoarchitecture of the brain and its relationship to sensory experience. As an example of his ideas he showed an animation of real-time brain activation whilst watching a clip from the James Bond movie Goldeneye. Brilliant stuff. Although I have to acknowledge Uri Hasson (NYU) who has previously presented similar results of neural synchrony between viewers when watching a feature film (his Science paper can be found here). Hasson presented further evidence of this synchrony at ECVP (abstract). He showed that neural activation was mostly the same if a silent film was viewed forwards or backwards with only a couple of regions showing different activation: the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) when the films depicted non-continuous shots of motion and Wernicke’s area when the shots were semantically related (i.e. the films had a plot).

There were a couple of other relevant presentations at ECVP (such as Kazuya Kito’s eye tracking study of Coca-Cola adverts….sweet industrial sponsorship) but the most relevant was Kiyoshige Suzuki’s presentation of ‘The perceptual organisation with serially presented motion picture shots’…..sound familiar? I couldn’t believe the similarity between his study and my own when I first saw it. He even used stimuli that depicted a ball moving laterally across the screen, exiting the screen, and then reappearing on the opposite edge after a cut! His mode of assessment was primarily introspective and he drew conclusions about viewer’s perception of continuity of object identity and motion across the cut where as I was using indirect methods to find evidence for the same effects (you can see my abstract here). Suzuki has presented work at ECVP twice before, one poster was an empirical reproduction of the Kuleshov experiment (2002) and the other was an earlier investigation into continuity across cuts (2004). The fact that we have both been investigating the same questions was a great shock to both of us. Suzuki seemed to get a lot out of my poster when I presented it on the Friday and we spent a lot of time together discussing our methodologies and research interests. I’m sure Suzuki will prove to be a great colleague and I hope we can stay in touch to exchange ideas and keep each other motivated about this area of research.

During Suzuki’s poster session I also had the good fortune to meet Rosanna Actis-Grosso. Rosanna, in conjunction with Luca Tommasi presented two studies investigating the perception of temporal continuity across cuts at ECVP in 1998 and 1999. Their 1998 poster (sorry, can’t find a link) showed that perception of temporal continuity across a magnification cut during a Michottean Launching event was effected by the degree of magnification. This experiment is the first empirical evidence I know of that shows how a temporally discontinuous edit can be made to appear continuous. My Watched Pot / Stopped Clock experiment owes a lot to this experiment. Their 1999 poster showed that this perception of temporal continuity is effected by the relocation and the resulting apparent motion of the main object on the screen across the cut. This conclusion supported my ideas about the effects of saccadic eye movements on continuity perception across edits. Rosanna made some very interesting comments about the poster I presented at ECVP and it is great to see that her interests still lie in this area even if she hasn’t followed up her two innovative studies.

In general ECVP was a very satisfying experience and I am very glad I went. The people I met, both socially and in an intellectual context really made the conference worthwhile and I look forward to staying in contact with as many of them as possible. Thanks again everyone and I hope to see you at future ECVPs or other visual perception conferences.

A Coruna!

So I returned from the ECVP conference last weekend (27/8) and thought it was about time I filled you in on how it was. The whole trip was lots of fun. A Coruna is a really interesting city, mixing the heat of southern Spain with the rolling green hills of somewhere like Ireland or the Scottish Highlands. The city is positioned on a hammer-head peninsula with a beautiful golden beach down one neck of the peninsula, a harbour on the other side of the neck and a Roman lighthouse on the rocky head of the peninsula. The cool air off the Atlantic makes the climate really comfortable (if a little wet at times) although the temperature of the water makes for a rather surreal beach-going experience: beautiful sand, hot sun, and F*****g freezing water!

I stayed in university accommodation on the outskirts of the city which turned out to be a rather “interesting” experience. I knew the accommodation was somewhat out of the way but I didn’t expect it to be positioned on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere! The accommodation looked like a mini holiday camp with swimming pool, cafeteria, bar, gym, ping-pong table, laundry, bingo, boules, and about 300 old Spanish women! My first afternoon at the accommodation was very surreal as it slowly dawned on me that the place was over-run by Spanish old people (the accommodation was a retreat for old people from Barcelona and Madrid for whom the summer heat was too much), nobody spoke English (even the receptionist), I couldn’t identify any other conference attendees and I was stuck without any way out of this place. It was like a bad comedy horror film! Luckily I met a couple of people during dinner and started to realise that the accommodation actually had its upside: cheap dinner served with all the wine you could drink and fabulously fun people to share it with. The people I met during the conference were what made the whole trip worthwhile (there were intellectual rewards, I’ll get on to them later). The first two people I met were James and Lucie (so sorry if this isn’t how it is spelt, Lucie) from Calgary, Canada. They proved to be the life and soul of the entire trip, especially Lucie who is a mini-whirlwind of unstoppable fun. James and I hit it off immediately, probably due to our mutual interest in applied visual cognition and eye tracking as well as the fact that we are both originally from the North West of England and seem to share the humour and personality traits associated with that. Lucie is his fiance who originally came from the Dominican Republic. Together they form this wonderfully complimentary couple that are both hilarious, endlessly enthusiastic, and adoring. Thanks guys for making my trip so enjoyable.

Staying at the accommodation bred a sense of community that I’m sure would have been lacking if I had stayed at a hotel in the city. By a couple of days into the conference there was a stable group of ECVP people who all hung around together, socialised, toured the city and attended conference sessions. Here are some of the wonderful people I met and hope to meet again:

Nicholas Pugeault – Stirling University

Zsara Hussain – Hamilton university, Ontario

Karol Myszkowski – Max-Planck Institute, Saarbrucken

Baingio Pinna - Università di Sassari, Italy

Kamal (?) – Tokyo

ECVP and Thesis Progress

So, it’s been a while. What have I been up to? Well, in short I have been writing my thesis. Actually there is nothing short about it. Not the time it is taking to write it, the length of the produced material, or the time I still foresee it taking to finish. However, I have a deadline (end of December) and a schedule that I am, mostly, sticking to so I guess that is all I can do. The act of writing the thesis is actually quite enjoyable. It is really satisfying to finally put in to words the ideas I have had throughout my PhD and take time to research the questions that have always been in the back of my mind. Some of the topics I have already written about are: before the second World War to initiate the drama. The cinematography and score of Nirgendwo are absolutely beautiful. Wah-Wah captured some of the beauty of the African landscape but Nirgendwo really caught its soul.

• Continuity editing rules and their evolution
• The Kuleshov Effect
• Pudovkin’s Constructive Editing
• Eisenstein’s Dialectical Montage
• Facial Expression perception
• Distribution of attention about a dynamic visual scene
• Matched Exit/Entrance cuts
• Cuing and Expecting a cut
• Attention and the cut
• Eye movements
• Saccadic Suppression
• How to empirically investigate film perception
• As well as describing my first experiment.

This may sound like a lot but some of the sections are only partially complete and there are still a lot of other topics to address. I am going to have to be super productive over the next few months. I’ll try my best to keep the blog updated with my progress as I get closer to completion.

However, this period of intense writing will have to be temporarily put on hold whilst I attend the European Conference of Visual Perception (ECVP). The conference is being held in A Coruna, Spain from Monday 22^nd August to the 26^th. I’m flying out there tomorrow morning for a pre-conference workshop on Art and the Visual system. Should be interesting. I’ll be presenting a poster at the main conference on the Friday morning. It should be really useful to get some feedback from people highly experienced in visual perception research. Precisely the kind of input I need at this point in my write-up. Well, as long as it is positive J. I’ve posted the poster on my website front page for anybody to read who isn’t at the conference. Feel free to send me any comments or questions.

So that’s where I’ll be for the next week and I’ll try and blog the conference on my return.

On an completely unconnected note, the Edinburgh International Film festival (http://www.edfilmfest.org.uk/) opened last night with Richard E. Grant’s autobiographical ‘Wah-Wah’. It was a wonderful film to open the film festival: very satisfying, finely crafted and acted, and very, very British in a way that British film rarely is. It concentrated on the disintegration of the British Empire and its parallels within a family in Swaziland. I found it fascinating to see the life of the colonials, their desperate grasp of a ‘Britishness’ that didn’t really exist anymore in Britain at that time and is long deceased now. I think the topic of ‘British colonial guilt’ should really be dealt with more often as it was such a significant part of our history. Wah-Wah was very brave for tackling it, however incidentally. Check it out when it gets a general release. If you enjoy it I could also highly recommend a German film called ‘Nirgendwo in Afrika’ (Nowhere in Africa) which won the Best Foreign language film in the 2003 Oscars. It tells a similar story about European immigrants in rural Africa but uses the flight of Jews from Germany