See also: A chapter from Barry Salt's new book Moving Into Pictures
Statistical Style Analysis
The basic idea behind my methods of statistical style analysis is that the form of films noticeably differ from one to another, and that the variables used to study this should be based on the concepts that film-makers actually use.
Average Shot Length
The simplest to get is the Average Shot Length (ASL). This is the length of the film in seconds divided by the number of shots in it. I only quote one decimal place, except for films with an ASL under 2 seconds, for which I quote two decimal places. For older films I only take the length and count the shots from after the last title card in the front titles, which
For silent films, I measure the ASL at what seems to me to be the correct speed of projection, on the basis of the naturalness of the movement of the actors. That is, at the speed the film would have been shot at when it was made. This is admittedly a tricky point, and there is something to be said for quoting a value as though it was being projected at sound
I count the number of reverse angle cuts (RA), which are defined as changes of camera direction of more than 90 degrees, and I express it as a percentage of the total number of shots in the film.
Another variable I collect is the number of cuts to or from a Point of View (POV) shot in the two films. POV shots are those taken from the position of one of the participants in the scene, or at any rate from a position on their line of sight. these are expressed as a percentage of the total number of shot transitions in the film, which equals the number of shots
Insert shots (INS) are shots of things, and do not include an actor's face. I count a very distant shot of a street scene, in which no principal actors are included, as an insert. They are also expressed as a percentage of the total number of shots.
Shot Scale
Although there is a small amount of disagreement about precisely what shot scale corresponds to each descriptive term, it is sufficient for the purposes of analysis to define carefully what one means by each category, and then stick to it. I am using categories of Scale of Shot like those commonly used in the film industry from the nineteen‑forties, as follows: Big Close Up (BCU) shows head only, Close Up
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For comparative purposes, so as to give an obvious relative measure of the likelihood of a director choosing a particular scale of shot in a film, I have taken the actual number of shots of each scale in a film, and then normalized the number to correspond to the number that would have occurred if the film was made up of 500 shots. If you want percentages, you can divide the
Camera Movement
I handle the objective treatment of camera movement by tabulating the numbers of shots with the different kinds of camera movement in each film, and again normalizing to the number that would be expected if the film in question contained 500 shots. The categories I use are Panning, Tilting, Panning and Tilting simultaneously, Tracking both without and with panning movements, movement involving the use of a camera crane, and Zooming.
Analysing the complete film is obviously much preferable, but you will not be too far out in general with a forty minute sample. Contrary to received ideas, the overall cutting rate for the second half most films is either the same speed, or not much faster than that of their first halves, though there are exceptions.
Practical Details
Ideally, the analysis should be done by recording the complete characteristics of each shot (scale, movement, length, etc.) in succession down the length of the film. This permits the most complete analysis of all the possible interrelationships between the variables. But although I initially tried this thirty odd years ago, I found that it took about three times longer than the method I have since used, so I have only
Up until recent years, I have always worked with prints of the films I was analysing, and indeed almost exclusively with 35 mm. prints, and I worked with them on Steenbecks and other flat-bed editing machines, which is obviously ideal for complete accuracy. But now I have turned to working from DVDs and VHS tapes. I feed these into a non-linear editing system (NLE), in fact Adobe Premiere on an ordinary
There are important cautions to be made about the analytical process when working from tape recordings or DVDs of films. The first of these relates purely to the use of recordings made for the PAL television system. These are initially created from film prints that were shot at 24 frames per second when the original film were made, but are always transferred to the consumer medium at 25 frames per second.
Where possible, I used DVD copies when analysing the sample, and I also check with the VHS copy of the same film where possible. This check showed that in the case of Deep Blue Sea, which was shot in Super 35, the VHS copy had been taken from the full frame, and the DVD copy, like the cinema prints, was taken from the middle of the original frame in ‘Scope proportions.