Examination of the Hollywood Movie Trailers Editing Pattern Evolution Over Time by Using the Quantitative Approach of Statistical Stylistic Analysis
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EXAMINATION OF THE HOLLYWOOD MOVIE TRAILERS EDITING PATTERN EVOLUTION OVER TIME BY USING THE QUANTITATIVE APPROACH OF STATISTICAL STYLISTIC ANALYSIS A Thesis Submitted to The Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS by Ping Feng Graduate Diploma Date (July 2016) Thesis Approvals: Matthew Lombard, Thesis Advisor, School of Media and Communication, Temple University Barry Vacker, School of Media and Communication, Temple University Tony Liao, School of Media and Communication, Temple University ABSTRACT In this study, I took the quantitative research approach of film statistical stylistic analysis to examine the editing pattern evolution of 130 Hollywood movie trailers over the past 60 years from 1951 to 2015; the prior studies on the overall evolution of the Hollywood movies’ editing pattern are compared and discussed. The results suggest that although the movie trailers are much shorter than the whole movies, the average shot lengths of the trailers still display a declining trend over the past 60 years, and the variations in the shot lengths are also decreasing. Second, the motions within each frame do not change significantly over the years, while the correlation coefficients between the shot lengths and the motions within the shots are moving toward a more negative correlation relationship over time, suggesting that the trailers are subject to an editing evolution trend that the shorter the shot is, the more motions there are within it, and this also aligns with the overall movies’ editing pattern evolution trend. Last, the luminance of the trailers remains almost the same over time, which does not align with the overall movies’ editing pattern evolution of becoming darker and darker over decades. Together these findings suggest that the movie trailers’ editing rhythm evolution in general aligns with that of overall movies over time while the visual editing pattern evolution of color luminance does not. The study results will improve our understanding on how the Hollywood movie trailers’ editing pattern and style have evolved over time and pave the way for future advertising studies and cognitive psychology studies on the audience’s attention, immersion and emotional response to various editing patterns of movie trailers. Keywords: movie trailers, Statistical Style Analysis, editing pattern, video analysis, data visualization ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................. v LIST OF TABLES .......................................................................................................... vii LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................... viii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1 2. STATISTICAL STYLE ANALYSIS .......................................................................... 6 Statistical Style Analysis on Movies as a Concept and Methodology ....................... 6 The History of Statistical Style Analysis and the Concepts of Style, Norm and Pattern ......................................................................................................................... 6 Statistical Style Analysis Moving into the Contemporary Age—Cinemetrics Database .................................................................................................................... 11 Statistical Filmic Data ................................................................................................. 16 Filmic Data Segmentation from a Macro-perspective .............................................. 16 Filmic Data Segmentation from a Micro-perspective ............................................... 22 The Meaning of Information Visualization .............................................................. 26 Video Statistical Metadata Visualization .................................................................. 28 Video Textural Data Visualization ........................................................................... 31 3. MOVIE TRAILERS – THE SPECTACLE AND THE HISTORY ....................... 39 Movie Trailers as the Unique Promotional Narratives ........................................... 39 Movie Trailers as the Spectacle of the Movies ......................................................... 42 Movie Trailers as the Spectacle of the Audience ...................................................... 45 History of Movie Trailer Development-Moving Toward the Formulaic ............... 47 4. RATIONALE, RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND HYPOTHESES ........................ 51 5. METHODS .................................................................................................................. 54 Measurement Variables .............................................................................................. 54 Shot Length ............................................................................................................... 54 Motion and Movement .............................................................................................. 55 Color ......................................................................................................................... 56 Sampling Methods ...................................................................................................... 57 Data Collection Methods ............................................................................................ 59 Media File Data Collection ....................................................................................... 59 Editing the Metadata Collection ............................................................................... 60 iii 6. DATA ANALYSIS ...................................................................................................... 62 Data Analysis, Visualization and Results ................................................................. 62 7. DISCUSSION, LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH .............................. 73 Discussion .................................................................................................................... 73 Limitations ................................................................................................................... 76 Future Research .......................................................................................................... 77 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................ 79 APPENDICES ................................................................................................................. 85 A. MOVIE TRAILERS SAMPLING LIST ................................................................. 85 B. CORRELATION COEFFICIENT BETWEEN SHOT LENGTHS AND MOTIONS WITHIN SHOTS OVER GENRES .......................................................... 91 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my thesis advisor Professor Lombard for his encouragement to initiate the research project and his continuous support throughout the thesis writing process. His immense knowledge and experience have guided me through many difficult moments in my studies and helped me find the best solutions to various hard questions. Next, I would like to thank the rest of my thesis committee members: Professor Vacker, who inspired me about the theoretical guideline and constantly provided me the invaluable advice to help strengthen the theoretical foundation of this paper, and Professor Liao, who provided timely and insightful feedback about this paper, and whose Emerging Media class at Ph.D. level has inspired in me many important ideas and introduced several useful literatures that have been discussed and referred to in this study. Besides the people above, my sincere thanks also goes to the Digital Scholarship Center at Temple University Paley Library, where I was provided with the great research environment, resources, as well as the necessary equipment and funding to conduct digital humanity related research which inspired me to conduct a pilot study that led to the further research toward this thesis. Meanwhile, I want to send special thanks to the technical staff — Jordan Hample, who provided tremendous help in decoding many complicated computer scripts and made my data collection and analysis process become possible and time efficient. I also want to thank my friend Nairong Fan, a Statistics major student at Temple University, who spent many sleepless nights with me in tackling R codes to make my statistical analysis and visualization valid and presentable. v Other than that, I thank Laura Zaylea as a faculty member who never hesitated to share the editing related knowledge and recourses at the beginning of my research, and also Professor Karpinski in the Psychology Department at Temple University, whose solid statistics class has taught me the necessary skills and knowledge that enabled me to conduct the quantitative research in this study. Last but not the least, I would like to thank my family: without their financial help and spiritual supports, I would not be able to enjoy and complete my master program! vi LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Genre distribution of the sampled films………………………………………..58