![]() For example, is this really a recent tendency? If yes, then when did it begin? And, most importantly, why? These questions deserve some research, and I may actually do it in the future. They need to hold viewers’ attention for longer periods of time (up to 60 minutes), and thus can’t exhaust them with the sprinting shots.Įven if this explanation is correct (which we don’t know yet), many questions remain. Traditional television shows, however, can’t. #BORDERS VOX YOUTUBE TV#This hypothesis could explain why we observe “sprinting” shots in other brief genres: TV commercials or music videos. Sprinting-like YouTube versus jogging-like TV - this may be our distinction. I wouldn’t be surprised if attention worked similarly: we can be very focused for only a short time ( Vox Borders), but we can be less focused for much longer ( Departures). It resembles running: you can sprint for only several minutes, but you can jog for hours. Being highly focused for a short time may be as exhausting as being somewhat less focused for a long time. To get the most of this rapidly edited sequences, I have to put some effort in focusing attention: to actually keep noticing what is happening on all these half-a-second shots. (The shortest one is only 1 min 39 secs long, the longest is 15 mins 52 secs.) My experience as a viewer tells me that, while watching short Vox videos is highly entertaining, it is also demanding. In other words: because these episodes are short. Vox Borders episodes have rapid editing because they can afford it. Instead, let’s ask: How could we explain this quickness? And, like these fish, Vox certainly don’t want to drown in the ocean called YouTube.Īnyway, I will stop my - very preliminary - analysis here. The presenter is always walking, camera makes sharp (and sudden) turns… Some fish need to be in constant movement in order not to drown. 2011 measured with their “visual activity index.” In fact, you might have noticed that there is a lot of motion in Vox Borders. We can probably find something similar in the amount of onscreen motion, that is “optical change created by moving objects, people, and shadows,” which Cutting et al. I haven’t looked into it, but I expect that ASL is not the only parameter of Vox Borders that is exceptionally quick. And yet, this is the place occupied by the Vox Borders episode: the frontier of video editing, testing the speed limits of our perception. Just a few dots in the bottom right corner. Interestingly, we see very few films with the ASL of ~2 seconds or less. Shot length decreased from ~16 seconds to ~4. Look, the Vox Borders episode includes sequences of 5–7 shots with the ASL of less than a second! “Many more things,” then, may mean “many more shots.” #BORDERS VOX YOUTUBE FULL#We can get a slightly better idea of the difference between the two videos if we look at full distributions of their ASL. Not unexpectedly, ASL in Vox Borders turned out to be much shorter: 2.1 seconds, versus 3.6 seconds in Departures. I used a simple tool for counting shots: to compare average shot length (ASL) in Vox Borders and Departures. Shots - the chunks of film divided by cuts - play pretty much the same role for a cinemetrics scholar as words for a linguist: they are the central units of analysis. One of the key aspects measured (actually, the key aspect) is average shot length. Scholars of cinemetrics measure various aspects of movies and then use this data for explaining film production, aesthetics, or history. Luckily, there exists cinemetrics: a relatively new research project of a scientific study of cinema. Can we somehow measure this “many more things” - quantitatively? There is many more things happening per minute of screen time. But even more importantly, Vox Borders seem much more dynamic. Instead of two random guys poking at unusual things in a foreign country, we have a narrative structured around an intriguing question: Why does Japan have so many vending machines? Such question-oriented narration is a proven technique of arousing viewers’ curiosity. My personal taste whispers me that ten years that separate Departures and Vox Borders were not wasted: there’s been a clear progress on pretty much all the levels of video storytelling. ![]()
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