Using depth of field to guide attention and convey narrative structure

Ever since the 1910s, when Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov experimented with the effect film editing has on the audience's emotional reactions to different sequence of images, film editing has attracted scholarly attention in Film Studies as well as in Psychology. In his seminal book In the Blink of an Eye (1995), American film editor and sound designer Walter Murch proposes the most important criteria for an 'ideal cut' are 'emotion', 'story' and finally 'rhythm'. As Valerie Orpen argues in Film Editing: The Art of the Expressive (2003), 'this insistence on emotion challenges the impression that editing is a pragmatic and rational craft', whereas in fact montage 'favours emotion to attain a specific end: to make the audience react'.
This interdisciplinary PhD project draws on the fields of sensory neuroscience, in particular, the experimental study of eye movements, and Film Studies, notably cognitive film theory (Bordwell 1989; Carroll 2008; Persson 2003), and here in particular the study of visual perception, narrative comprehension and affective response in relation to film editing. The novelty of the proposed interdisciplinary approach promises to yield original insights that will expand the knowledge and understanding in both disciplines. It expands the new discipline of psychocinematics by looking at how audiences perceive (and thus how filmmakers can use) a new element of film grammar- the ability to vary depth of field within in a shot which has been developed by our industrial partner Cinefade.
Cinefade is a novel camera accessory that allows filmmakers to vary depth of field in one shot in film at constant exposure. Gradual transition between a deep and a shallow depth of field can be used to accentuate a moment of extreme drama or make a client's product stand out in a commercial.
Depth of field in film is a powerful device of cinematic storytelling. In the past, filmmakers were limited to choosing either a shallow or deep depth of field that stays consistent throughout the shot unless lighting or aperture changed. A variable depth of field has creative potential to express a shift in the subject's emotional state and also to guide a viewer's eyes. The technology adds a new possibility to the grammar of cinema.
In Watching you watch movies: Using eye tracking to inform film theory, Tim Smith points out "Filmmakers have hypothesized about viewer behaviour for decades and several aspects of film craft such as mise en scène, cinematography, staging, and editing are directly motivated by where viewers are expected to look. However, up until very recently there has been virtually no empirical investigation of viewer gaze behaviour." He and others have begun to use eye tracking to analyse how viewers watch films. The heuristics developed by filmmakers in practice were not empirically testable until the development of eye tracking technology made it possible to capture eye movements at a high temporal and spatial precision synchronized to the film events.
The proposed project builds on these insights in order to establish how applying the technique of depth of field manipulation enabled by Cinefade's technology influences the spectator's interpretation of the film's narrative. In particular, we aim to establish how exactly the rhythm and timing of cuts and the changes in depth of field can be utilised to achieve particular narrative effects. This project sets out to test:
1. How Cinefade's new camera technology, which facilitates filming with variable depth of field, can be deployed to control the spectator's gaze.
2. How a variable depth impacts upon the spectator's emotional response to the film's narrative.
3. How variations in the depth of field can be deployed to achieve specific narrative effects in films.