Perceiving event dynamics and parsing Hollywood films.

We selected 24 Hollywood movies released from 1940 through 2010 to serve as a film corpus. Eight viewers, three per film, parsed them into events, which are best termed subscenes. While watching a film a second time, viewers scrolled through frames and recorded the frame number where each event began. Viewers agreed about 90% of the time. We then analyzed the data as a function of a number of visual variables: shot transitions, shot duration, shot scale, motion, luminance, and color across shots within and across events, and a code that noted changes in place or time. We modeled viewer parsings across all shots of each film and found that, as an ensemble, the visual variables accounted for about 30% of the variance in the data, even without considering the soundtrack. Adding a code recording place and/or time change increases this variance to about 50%. We conclude that there is ample perceptual information for viewers to parse films into events without necessarily considering the intentions and goals of the actors, although these are certainly needed to understand the story of the film.