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February 08, 2004
Cinema Redux







Brendan Dawes, an insanely brilliant programmer, has created Cinema Redux -- an application that produces a massive poster composed of tiny snapshots of each scene in a film. In essence, he produces a huge image that lets you "see" the entire film in one eyeful. He wrote a really nice description of the aesthetic purpose of his project, so here it is in his own words:

The end result is a kind of unique fingerprint for that film. A sort of movie DNA showing the colour hues as well as the rhythm of the editing process. Compare Serpico to The Conversation. You can see there's far more edits in Lumet's classic compared to the more gentle slower pace of Coppola's Conversation. This is also down to the editing style of Walter Murch who prefers to only make cuts when absolutely necessary.

That picture above is a small chunk of the poster of Alfred Hithcock's Vertigo. You can see more examples of the images here, and even buy a poster of one of them.


(Thanks to the J-Walk blog for finding this one!)

Posted by Clive Thompson at February 08, 2004 11:14 PM

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Comments

hmmm those are really cool-looking, look like some type of sequencing chart ... darker than i would expect. for the life of me i don't see how much "information" one can derive (now channeling edward tufte) looking at it i can't tell the difference in average shot length between Lumet and Coppola. perhaps if each discrete "snapshot" was done not at regular intervals, but instead each time there was an editing cut, that would give more information about stylistic tactics- a film's editing "density". interesting though, wonder if you can see it more diverse examples - in the 30's few of your films had an average shot length (ASL) of less than 9 seconds or so ... today lots are down in the 2-second range! they take advantage of human physiological response to movement- the so called "orienting response". annie lang at indiana u. showed triggering the response dilates blood vessels to the brain, slows the heart, blocks alpha waves, and increases attention and memory retention. modern videos and action films push the limit a little bit ... but mtv addiction is partly a result a triumph of technique over content.

Posted by: chris at February 9, 2004 11:48 PM

It's definitely true that this technique would only produce a mush when used on a super-fast jump-cut action movie du jour. That's probably why he's mostly running the software on older flicks with less frequent cuts.

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