Projections

When Sam Peckinpah turned over his raw footage for Ride the High Country

(1962) to the MGM studio editor, she declared that the material he had filmed

for the final gunfight was incompetent and that it could not be edited together

in a coherent way. Viewed today, the scene does not seem especially

transgressive in its treatment of continuity, but in that earlier period when

studio editing rules were more conservative, Peckinpah’s disregard for standardized

camera set-ups and conventional coverage perplexed and infuriated

MGM’s editor.

The intention of most film editing is to create the impression of continuity by editing together discontinuous viewpoints. The continuity editing rules are well established yet there exists an incomplete understanding of their cognitive foundations. This article presents the Attentional Theory of Cinematic Continuity (AToCC), which identifies the critical role visual attention plays in the perception of continuity across cuts and demonstrates how perceptual expectations can be matched across cuts without the need for a coherent representation of the depicted space. The theory explains several key elements of the continuity editing style including match-action, matchedexit/entrances, shot/reverse-shot, the 180° rule, and point-of-view editing. AToCC formalizes insights about viewer cognition that have been latent in the filmmaking community for nearly a century and demonstrates how much vision science in general can learn from film.

When and Where Is the Digital Revolution in Cinematography?

Although stereoscopic cinema was invented very early in the history of film, it did not become the standard for cinematic representations. With the latest digital wave of stereoscopic 3D cinema many shortcomings of earlier technologies have been eliminated, but debate remains about the aesthetic principles of stereoscopy. This article explores and evaluates basic approaches to aesthetic design in stereoscopic films.

Just as perceptual gestalten complete images and narrative gestalten complete storylines, both encouraging audiences to fill in missing information based on the information provided, the data pertaining to an imaginary world can collectively generate a world logic that helps audiences extrapolate and fill in gaps, resulting in the illusion of a complete and consistent imaginary world, through we what might call world gestalten. This article examines how these gestalten occur and function, how they contribute to the illusion of a complete world, and the importance of this process to transmedial entertainment franchises that are set in imaginary worlds.

This is an amendment to the article "How Act Structure Sculpts Shot Lengths and Shot Transitions in Hollywood Film" by the same authors published in Projections 5(1), summer 2011.