Fig. 1

The movie-length patterns of shot duration (in seconds, left panel), of the extent of motion (middle panel), and of relative luminance (right panel) across 180 popular English-language movies released from 1930 to 2015. The lengths of the movies were normalized so that each measure was assessed across 100 equal-duration bins, and those values were normalized within each movie before averaging across them. Shot duration (converted back to seconds), flicker motion (converted back to mean correlations of eight-bit pixel values across frames), and luminance (converted back to the mean pixel value per frame) are three roughly orthogonal measures of film style (Cutting, 2016). Polynomial fits are shown as darker lines surrounded by white areas that correspond to the 95% confidence interval of that polynomial. Lighter colored regions denote the 95% confidence intervals on the data, given that polynomial. The data of each panel are also separated by vertical lines that suggest four narrative divisions (see Thompson, 1999): the setup (roughly bins 1–25), the complication (bins 26–50), the development (bins 51–75), and the climax (bins 76–100). Also noted are a prologue (initial and variable number of bins of the setup) and an epilogue (a variable number of bins at the end of the climax), optional units that do not appear in every film. A take is another name for a shot. The term long shot is reserved for a wide-angle shot, not a long-duration shot