How Movies Manipulate Your Brain to Keep You Entertained

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How do movies manipulate your brain to keep you entertained? Wizardry, magic, explosions and boobies. Not necessarily in that order. :D

The University of London, presented eye tracking data collected from 75 people as they watched the clip on a flatscreen. A camera tracked their eye movements, and software created a frame-by-frame heat map. When Smith played the clip with the eye-tracking heat map overlaid, the red hot spot tightly followed the action—people focused on the dueling superheroes, especially their weapons and faces, and on the car parts bouncing around.
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Neat, and Favreau is correct when he says you're legally blind outside of a thumbnail width. The angular diameter that you can actually see things very clearly is extremely small, while you can notice motion and what not throughout your whole vision, you can only focus on a tiny area. Luckily our eyes are moveable so we can change the focus with a slight glance but it is a trick that I tell my students in class, biology will not allow you to cheat during a test by glancing out of the corner of your eye, you have to stare at another piece of paper to actually read it and by then I already see you cheating :D
 
Funny thing is, that's actually not the most interesting part of the article. Someone from Hollywood admitting that you can't do fake CG faces and have them look convincing is a miracle. Of course sticking a greenscreened face on a CG cartoon character(looking at you Green Lantern movie) isn't much better, but at least it seems like they're aware of it. Same thing for the physics, especially the F1 car scene mentioned from Ironman 2. Someone with an understanding of when to still use some practical effects in conjunction with CG is capable of creating better looking scenes than just CG only(SW prequels...).

Basically, understanding what the audience is going to be focusing on, and then using the appropriate tools to create the intended scene, a mix of CG and practical effects, seems like a much better way to create scenes than a lot of other directors are capable of.
 
Merc1138 said:
Basically, understanding what the audience is going to be focusing on, and then using the appropriate tools to create the intended scene, a mix of CG and practical effects, seems like a much better way to create scenes than a lot of other directors are capable of.
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This is basically why I'm not a huge fan of 3d movies, Avatar? Pfffbt, like I gave a shit about the story line that was going on during it, I was trying to look at all the other stuff of the background, unfortunately because "I wasn't supposed to be focused there" the images were blurry or unfocused (causing my eyes to try and focus which is not fun)
 
Actually, I tend to go out of my way to look at things in a frame that aren't the focus of a shot because I like spotting errors, peculiarities, and CG fuck-ups.

And Iron Man 2 was a shit movie.
 
Megalith said:
Actually, I tend to go out of my way to look at things in a frame that aren't the focus of a shot because I like spotting errors, peculiarities, and CG fuck-ups.

And Iron Man 2 was a shit movie.
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Plot, yes. Acting... from a lot of the actors, yes.

From a visual perspective? It was actually pretty good.
 
I get a annoyed when there is nothing to focus on.... i.e. when the camera view keeps shifting to various blurry shots of intense action scenes. This is all while the view is zoomed in so you only see a random limb or part of a chunk of random debris flying through the air. It's cheap.
 
Parmenides said:
I get a annoyed when there is nothing to focus on.... i.e. when the camera view keeps shifting to various blurry shots of intense action scenes. This is all while the view is zoomed in so you only see a random limb or part of a chunk of random debris flying through the air. It's cheap.
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Duh.

If Michael Bay had directed Ironman 2, the image with the F1 car cut apart and in the air, would have had 10 other cars flying though the air at the same time, with explosions in the background, while the camera flies by at 80 miles an hour, upside down.
 
I haven't read the article:

I will say that this is a great example of one of the problems with 3D for me. I don't always look at "what I'm supposed to", however with the selective depth of field fixed on what they want you to will give me a headache looking at what I want to. There have been stretches of movies where I didn't want to follow the driver in the car chase, I wanted to look at that weird object on the lower part of the car or something else in the background. I can't so I just close my eyes and wait for the scene to change.
 
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