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Showing posts from January, 2013

HFR and The Hobbit: There and Back Again

This entry appears on the Oxford University Press blog site:  http://blog.oup.com       Is it the sense of experiencing reality that makes movies so compelling? Technological advances in film, such as sound, color, widescreen, 3-D, and now high frame rate (HFR), have offered ever increasing semblances of realism on the screen. In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey , we are introduced to the world of 48 frames per second (fps), which presents much sharper moving images than what we've seen in movies produced at the standard 24 fps. Yet many viewers, including myself, have come away with a less-than-satisfying experience as the sharp rendering of the characters portrayed is reminiscent of either old videotaped TV programs (soap operas, BBC productions) or recent CGI video games. What features of HFR create this new sensory experience and why does it appear so unsettlingly similar to the experience of watching a low budget TV program?           One factor that c

Psychocinematics: With Movies in Mind

This entry marks the opening of Art Shimamura's  Psychocinematics blogs, which are devoted to the psychological (and biological) underpinnings of our movie experience. What follows is a brief introduction to the blogs partially excerpted from my chapter in Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies :  In the opening scene of The Graduate , Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) exits a plane and enters the terminal at the LA International Airport. When he steps onto a moving walkway, the camera begins to track alongside at the same pace, which keeps Benjamin's position fixed and isolated to the far right of an otherwise empty screen. The opening credits begin to fill the space as we listen to The Sounds of Silence , Simon and Garfunkel's anthem to social alienation. This beginning anticipates the entire movie which tells a story of a newly minted college graduate entering adulthood without any sense of purpose or direction. Benjamin is moving though he doesn’t