Using depth of field to guide attention and convey narrative structure

自20世纪10年代苏联电影制作人列夫·库拉舍夫试验电影剪辑对观众对不同图像序列的情感反应以来，电影剪辑一直吸引着电影研究和心理学的学术关注。在他的开创性著作《眨眼间》(1995)中，美国电影编辑兼音效设计师沃尔特·默奇提出了理想剪辑的最重要标准：情感、故事，最后是节奏。正如瓦莱丽·奥本在《电影剪辑：表现力的艺术》(2003)一书中所说的那样，这种对情感的坚持挑战了剪辑是一种务实和理性的工艺的印象，而事实上，蒙太奇更倾向于情感，以达到一个特定的目的：让观众做出反应。这个跨学科的博士项目借鉴了感觉神经科学领域，特别是眼球运动的实验研究，以及电影研究，特别是认知电影理论(Bordwell 1989；Carroll 2008；Persson 2003)，特别是与电影剪辑有关的视觉感知、叙事理解和情感反应的研究。拟议的跨学科方法的新颖性有望产生原创性的见解，从而扩大这两个学科的知识和理解。它扩展了心理运动学的新学科，通过观察观众如何感知(以及电影制作人如何使用)电影语法的一个新元素--由我们的工业合作伙伴Cinefade开发的在镜头中改变景深的能力。Cinefade是一种新颖的相机配件，允许电影制作人在不断曝光的情况下在胶片中的一个镜头中改变景深。深浅景深之间的渐变可以用来突出极端戏剧性的时刻，或者让客户的产品在广告中脱颖而出。电影景深是一种强有力的电影叙事手段。在过去，电影制作人只能选择在整个镜头中保持一致的浅景深或深景深，除非光线或光圈发生变化。可变景深具有创造性的潜力，可以表达主体情绪状态的变化，也可以引导观众的眼睛。这项技术为电影的语法增加了一种新的可能性。蒂姆·史密斯在《看电影：使用眼球跟踪为电影理论提供依据》一书中指出，几十年来，电影制作人一直在假设观众的行为，电影制作工艺的几个方面，如科学迷信、摄影、舞台和剪辑，都直接受到观众观看地点的影响。然而，直到最近，几乎还没有关于观众凝视行为的实证研究。他和其他人已经开始使用眼球跟踪来分析观众是如何观看电影的。电影制作人在实践中开发的启发式方法无法得到经验验证，直到眼球跟踪技术的发展使捕捉与电影事件同步的高时空精度的眼球运动成为可能。拟议中的项目建立在这些洞察力的基础上，以确定应用Cinefade技术实现的景深操纵技术如何影响观众对电影叙事的解读。特别是，我们的目标是确定如何准确地利用剪裁的节奏和时机以及景深的变化来实现特定的叙事效果。这个项目旨在测试：1.Cinefade的新相机技术，它可以方便地进行可变景深的拍摄，如何利用它来控制观众的凝视。2.变化的深度如何影响观众对电影叙事的情感反应。3.如何利用景深的变化在电影中实现特定的叙事效果。

Ever since the 1910s, when Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov experimented with the effect film editing has on the audience's emotional reactions to different sequence of images, film editing has attracted scholarly attention in Film Studies as well as in Psychology. In his seminal book In the Blink of an Eye (1995), American film editor and sound designer Walter Murch proposes the most important criteria for an 'ideal cut' are 'emotion', 'story' and finally 'rhythm'. As Valerie Orpen argues in Film Editing: The Art of the Expressive (2003), 'this insistence on emotion challenges the impression that editing is a pragmatic and rational craft', whereas in fact montage 'favours emotion to attain a specific end: to make the audience react'. This interdisciplinary PhD project draws on the fields of sensory neuroscience, in particular, the experimental study of eye movements, and Film Studies, notably cognitive film theory (Bordwell 1989; Carroll 2008; Persson 2003), and here in particular the study of visual perception, narrative comprehension and affective response in relation to film editing. The novelty of the proposed interdisciplinary approach promises to yield original insights that will expand the knowledge and understanding in both disciplines. It expands the new discipline of psychocinematics by looking at how audiences perceive (and thus how filmmakers can use) a new element of film grammar- the ability to vary depth of field within in a shot which has been developed by our industrial partner Cinefade.Cinefade is a novel camera accessory that allows filmmakers to vary depth of field in one shot in film at constant exposure. Gradual transition between a deep and a shallow depth of field can be used to accentuate a moment of extreme drama or make a client's product stand out in a commercial. Depth of field in film is a powerful device of cinematic storytelling. In the past, filmmakers were limited to choosing either a shallow or deep depth of field that stays consistent throughout the shot unless lighting or aperture changed. A variable depth of field has creative potential to express a shift in the subject's emotional state and also to guide a viewer's eyes. The technology adds a new possibility to the grammar of cinema. In Watching you watch movies: Using eye tracking to inform film theory, Tim Smith points out "Filmmakers have hypothesized about viewer behaviour for decades and several aspects of film craft such as mise en scène, cinematography, staging, and editing are directly motivated by where viewers are expected to look. However, up until very recently there has been virtually no empirical investigation of viewer gaze behaviour." He and others have begun to use eye tracking to analyse how viewers watch films. The heuristics developed by filmmakers in practice were not empirically testable until the development of eye tracking technology made it possible to capture eye movements at a high temporal and spatial precision synchronized to the film events.The proposed project builds on these insights in order to establish how applying the technique of depth of field manipulation enabled by Cinefade's technology influences the spectator's interpretation of the film's narrative. In particular, we aim to establish how exactly the rhythm and timing of cuts and the changes in depth of field can be utilised to achieve particular narrative effects. This project sets out to test:1. How Cinefade's new camera technology, which facilitates filming with variable depth of field, can be deployed to control the spectator's gaze. 2. How a variable depth impacts upon the spectator's emotional response to the film's narrative. 3. How variations in the depth of field can be deployed to achieve specific narrative effects in films.