There will be research

November 21st, 2011 by Glendyn

When I first saw the clip below, my first thought was how useful this would be to see if how effective your visual storytelling is, to asses composition and to study how an audience views a sequence.

My second thought was how all the marketing folk will use it to asses if an audience is staring at their hamburger/cereal box/car long enough.

And my third thought was how incredible Paul Thomas Anderson’s  has ‘blocked’ this scene! The way the camera leads you to reveal the other characters and open up the dialgogue between those characters.

Either way this is pretty bloody fascinating!

‘This is an excerpt from There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007). 11 adult viewers were shown the video and their eye movements recorded using an Eyelink 1000 (SR Research) infra-red camera-based eyetracker. Each dot represents the center of one viewer’s gaze. The size of each dot represents the length of time they have held fixation.’

More info and research examples from TheDIEMProject here.

Thanks John Brawley!

6 Responses to “There will be research”

  1. Kriv Stenders Says:
    November 22nd, 2011 at 8:16 pm

    Yeah. Saw this a while back. Had the exact same reaction as you – which was, f..ck the science, this is just a really well thought out and beautifully shot scene.

  2. Glendyn Says:
    November 23rd, 2011 at 9:31 pm

    I hate it when you look at a Vimeo clip or similar and am blown away by it and then realise I’m like the 200 000th person to see it…!

    But yeah, that scene is killer!

  3. Rhys Graham Says:
    November 24th, 2011 at 8:56 am

    this is incredible… i love that there seems to be one or two viewers with the most intense gaze. while other eyes are flitting around, they are focused intently…

  4. Glendyn Says:
    November 24th, 2011 at 8:59 am

    Yeah… I like the point when ‘the lamp’ is quite prominent on the left hand side as the dolly pushes into the room. And there is a beat where some of the audience ‘check the cool lamp out’. The set dressers must be happy about that!

  5. John Brawley Says:
    November 27th, 2011 at 12:59 pm

    I think eyes will generally always scan and check out the brightest part of the frame. Obviously the face is important here too, but once the frame is parked, the eyes get to roam. They’re generally going to go to what’s bright. In this case…the lamp !

  6. Glendyn Says:
    November 27th, 2011 at 1:19 pm

    Or it could just be a nice lamp!

    ; )

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