Cinemetrics database of Average Shot Length

March 15, 2010 8:29 AM

Curious about the Average Shot Length of a movie? Wondering how the ASL has changed over time? The Cinemetrics database comes to the rescue with statistical data on shot length!
posted by burnfirewalls (19 comments total)

This is a neat idea, but without the ability to graph you can't really do much. And it's weird that that feature doesn't exist, since it does at the level of individual movies.
posted by DU at 8:54 AM on March 15, 2010

Thanks!
posted by sciurus at 9:30 AM on March 15, 2010

Have to agree with DU, I'd love to be able to compare movies or eras; I've always wondered how much the advent of non-linear digital editing has changed this kind of thing. (We see a lot of sub-24 frame shots in modern vfx.)



Also, curse my feeble ex-AOL user brain for continuing to parse ASL as 'Age, Sex, Location.'
posted by The Mysterious Mr. F at 9:40 AM on March 15, 2010

Cool idea but poor use of the data collected. I hope that they do more interesting things with it in the future like letting you graph over time or compare two directors averages.
posted by octothorpe at 9:56 AM on March 15, 2010

I too was disappointed with the lack of useful things to do with the data.
posted by jeffamaphone at 10:23 AM on March 15, 2010

I agree that a lot more could be done with all this data. And the graph drawing process feels unreasonably slow for what you get (although maybe that's just the MeFi effect?)

Nice use of sparklines in the news section though!

...and the linguistics nerd in me still reads ASL as "American Sign Language".
posted by otherthings_ at 11:00 AM on March 15, 2010

It would be pretty awesome if one of the less-employed MeFites could grab all this data and put it in a GoogleDocs spreadsheet, because then we could do all sorts of awesome graphs at home.
posted by shakespeherian at 11:09 AM on March 15, 2010

30/M/NYC
posted by Eideteker at 11:26 AM on March 15, 2010

I'm disappointed that they didn't compile any data on Michael Bay's films. Mainly, I'd like to track the progression of his ADD in the 15 years between the first Bad Boys and Japanese Seizure Robots 2: Revenge of the Fallen.
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:54 AM on March 15, 2010

There seems to be some graphing going on here.
posted by skyscraper at 12:12 PM on March 15, 2010

oops, otherthings_ beat me to it.
posted by skyscraper at 12:15 PM on March 15, 2010

A site about shot length, someone needs to put in Russian Ark.
posted by BrotherCaine at 1:13 PM on March 15, 2010

Here's a ASL database that's graphed.
posted by signalnine at 2:03 PM on March 15, 2010

Hmm.. I first read about the decreasing average shot length in Jerry Mander's book "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television." I only vaguely recall what he said, something about how if reality had a cut every 10 seconds, you'd pay a lot closer attention to it, you couldn't help yourself. But on TV we get jaded so quickly, they have to keep speeding up the action so people will keep paying attention. ISTR him citing a 60 second (!) McDonalds TV commercial that had over 60 cuts, ASL less than one second. I always remembered that figure, and I have noticed commercials lately that have ASLs like a half-second. Ow my eyes.
I'll have to dig up Mander's book and reread it, I know I have it around here somewhere.
posted by charlie don't surf at 4:03 PM on March 15, 2010

I wonder how they'd classify Russian Ark (an experimental 2002 film, 99 minutes long, done in one continuous Steadicam shot).
posted by zardoz at 6:58 PM on March 15, 2010

I watch a lot of movies from the 30s and 40s, and shot lengths are definitely much longer overall. Often we'll be watching some scene of a dance, or a fight, or other similarly complicated sequence, and near the end turn to each other and mouth the words "One take!"
posted by Miko at 7:43 PM on March 15, 2010

Barry Salt has been at this for years.
posted by Wolof at 7:53 PM on March 15, 2010

Hah, I wrote a paper on this effect at uni. I wish I had known about this data then, I counted the cut frequency myself at the time (I think I did so for about 30 films... it took a while!). There was a definite trend towards higher requency of cuts in more recent films. I looked at the most popular three films of a decade (by box office take), versus the three most 'critically acclaimed' movies of each decade. One of my exemplars of a modern indie movie was Requiem for a Dream:

      While an average 100-minute film has 600 to 700 cuts, Requiem features more than 2,000 Wikipedia

The finger I was using on the counter had nearly fallen off by the end of the film :)
posted by jzed at 6:17 AM on March 16, 2010

Hitchcock's Rope is an 80 minute movie shot in 10 takes. It's great and you should see it if you haven't. Jimmy Stewart.
posted by neuron at 9:29 PM on March 16, 2010