Reblogging as a reminder that Paul Thomas Anderson is an amazing director because science experiments.

stayforthecredits:

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.

A fascinating post by Tim Smith, a psychological researcher interested in how viewers watch films can be read here. Here is an excerpt:

The most striking feature of the gaze behaviour when it is animated in this way is the very fast pace at which we shift our eyes around the screen. On average, each fixation is about 300 milliseconds in duration. (A millisecond is a thousandth of a second.) Amazingly, that means that each fixation of the fovea lasts only about 1/3 of a second. These fixations are separated by even briefer saccadic eye movements, taking between 15 and 30 milliseconds!

Looking at these patterns, our gaze may appear unusually busy and erratic, but we’re moving our eyes like this every moment of our waking lives. We are not aware of the frenetic pace of our attention because we are effectively blind every time we saccade between locations. This process is known as saccadic suppression. Our visual system automatically stitches together the information encoded during each fixation to effortlessly create the perception of a constant, stable scene.

In other experiments with static scenes, my colleagues and I have shown that even if the overall scene is hidden 150milliseconds into every fixation, we are still able to move our eyes around and find a desired object. Our visual system is built to deal with such disruptions and perceive a coherent world from fragments of information encoded during each fixation.

The second most striking observation you may have about the video is how coordinated the gaze of multiple viewers is. Most of the time, all viewers are looking in a similar place. This is a phenomenon I have termed Attentional Synchrony. If several viewers examine a static scene like the Repin painting discussed in David’s last post, they will look in similar places, but not at the same time. Yet as soon as the image moves, we get a high degree of attentional synchrony. Something about the dynamics of a moving scene leads to all viewers looking at the same place, at the same time.

Deathly by Aimee Mann.

In Magnolia, Claudia (played by Melora Walters with a true sense of Aimee Mann insanity) says, “Now that I’ve met you, would you object to never seeing me again?” I must come clean. I did not write that line. Aimee Mann wrote that line as the opening of her song “Deathly”, and I wrote it backwards from that line. It equals the story of Claudia. It equals the heart and soul of Magnolia. All stories for the movie were written branching off from Claudia, so one could do the math and realize that all the stories come from Aimee’s brain, not mine…Like any great writer, she has the ability to articulate. She is the great articulator of the biggest things we think about, “How can anyone love me?” “Why the hell would anyone love me?” and the old favorite, “Why would I love anyone when all it means is torture?” - Paul Thomas Anderson