Match-action: the role of motion and audio in creating global change blindness in film

An everyday example of change blindness is our difficulty to detect cuts in an edited moving-image. Edit Blindness (Smith & Henderson, 2008) is created by adhering to the continuity editing conventions of Hollywood, e.g. coinciding a cut with a sudden onset of motion (Match-Action). In this study we isolated the roles motion and audio play in limiting awareness of match-action cuts by removing motion before and/or after cuts in existing Hollywood film clips and presenting the clips with or without the original soundtrack whilst participants tried to detect cuts. Removing post-cut motion significantly decreased cut detection time and the probability of missing the cut. By comparison, removing pre-cut motion had no effect suggesting, contrary to the editing literature, that the onset of motion before a cut may not be as critical for creating edit blindness as the motion after a cut. Analysis of eye movements indicated that viewers reoriented less to new content across intact match-action cuts than shots with motion removed. Audio played a surprisingly large part in creating edit blindness with edit blindness mostly disappearing without audio. These results extend film editor intuitions and are discussed in the context of the Attentional Theory of Cinematic Continuity (Smith, 2012a)

Screenwriting as a mode of research, and the screenplay as a research artefact

Screenwriting practice is now a flourishing mode of research within universities internationally, whereby the act of writing a screenplay or developing screenplay works is not only understood, but also celebrated as a legitimate form of knowledge discovery and dissemination. The resulting work of this creative practice research, which we might call the 'academic screenplay', thus functions simultaneously as a method of research enquiry and a 'non traditional' research artefact. In this chapter we explore what it means to develop and write a screenplay in the academy, under the conditions of and for research. By positioning screenwriting alongside and in between the disciplines of creative writing and screen production, we reflect on how it can draw from both disciplines at different times and for different purposes, and can be influenced by their specific - and sometimes contradictory - discourses. By doing so, the chapter provides a comprehensive overview of screenwriting as a growing mode of research, and its practice as an important addition to the academy