Ich habe ein kleines Experiment durchgeführt, nachdem ich vermutet hatte, dass moderne Filme mit Blick auf Instagram Reels komponiert werden. Aus einer Handvoll Filmen wurde ein Bild pro Sekunde extrahiert, eine YOLO-Segmentierung durchgeführt, um herauszufinden, wo Personen in jedem Bild erscheinen, und alles in interaktiven Heatmaps gestapelt.
Von PuciekTM
41 Kommentare
2017 seems a bit early to be influenced heavily by reels/tik toks.
that’s a SERIOUSLY cool visualization with the frame sliders.
Cool data but no way was Dennis Villeneuve optimizing Bladerunner 2047 for TikTok in 2017
Source of data: Own BluRay rips
Tool: Python, React, ffmpeg
Hard to say when you only look at 6 movies.
> are modern movies being composed for vertical video?
Cool visualisation, but obviously no. And your data barely even supports that claim
If anything, it’s probably the decline of cinematography in the digital green screen age
Really cool plots.
Should be interesting to see if the trend extends over a larger sample size.
Isn’t it a screen ratio thing
Your sample is 6 movies.
You should really control for things like genres or release aspect ratios and get a larger sample size before drawing any conclusions. It wouldn’t hurt to get a professional opinion either.
Interesting considering the older films would have been clipped to fit the 4:3 screen of TVs
Great visualization. Love the idea. To put it bluntly…now do all the movies
I remember watching the original Blade Runner years ago in a film class and being amazed at how it used the entire frame.
For Fury Road George Miller deliberately put the action at the center of the screen as a response to CGI action and superhero movies that had become a mess with too much fast action all over the screen.
An interesting one to study would be the 70mm cut of The Hateful Eight which has a lot of interesting peripheral action. (Maybe Tarantino was inspired by Leone?)
Too small a sample size. Wonderful idea to investigate however
I’m certain it has nothing do to with Instagram reels, though it is a trend do have more central shot on actors.
Before the „ensemble shot“ was much more popular, with each actor filling it’s part of the screen talkin in turn, doing their own thing.
But as cinema progressed, this became less and less common due to several factors.
One, those kinds of wide shots require more from the actors performing, as you have multiple failure points vs piecing together the movie from 4-5-10 reshoots, using different takes from different actors.
The latter being much much faster to shoot.
Also a factor was how cheap cameras got, they have a lot more cameras on the sets, giving multiple angles. While before it was one main camera, and maybe a secondary angle shot, due to cost.
And also lately the „netflix“ trend. People are too „stupid“ to pay attention to 4 actors in one scene at the same time doing different stuff, so you have to piecemeal it, giving it with a teaspoon to the viewer or else they will miss something.
I can believe it honestly, but I think it’s ridiculous to use Blade Runner 2049 as an example!
Do the same experiment with some of the slop films that Netflix pushes out each year!
Very interesting, but obviously we need a waaaay bigger sample size.
I think this is a horrible example because I don’t believe that’s true for 2049.
We’d need you to map a lot more movies to be sure, but I would think that, if anything, this might be just to accomodate multi-platform viewing. TVs, laptops, phones.. idk, airplane screens..
(From a cinematography perspective, I think centering helps with continuity, eye tracking for viewers, and it makes it easier to cut between shots.)
Really interesting in a lot of ways.
Given the two „before“ examples are 60s/80s, I wonder if some of it is a change that happened as a result of people watching a lot of movies on narrower CRT TVs at home. I know the „after“ examples are way after wide-screen TVs came out, but the style changes may have persisted.
It’s also interesting how with blade runner you see two areas of activity, suggesting two people in a frame interacting. Could just be a directing style for that movie, or maybe movies started using more frequent cuts to avoid having to include two people in a shot, or for some other reason.
Really would need a lot more data to make these kinds of generalizations though
I don’t think there’s enough here for a firm conclusion, but for reference – THIS is what I’m always hoping to see on this sub, not another ugly bar chart about current events.
It’s likely a 2017 movie was framing with 16:9 cropping in mind. Very unlikely they were framing with vertical in mind.
I think a look at multiple consecutive entries from the same franchise would be more meaningful – all of Disney’s Star Wars movies, a sampling of Marvel movies, even all 3 Knives Out movies since you already looked at glass onion.
Or if you really had a farm of computers running the analysis, it would be interesting to compare the top ~20 movies per year from 2015-2025 for instance – that would really show what you are looking for across a broader mix of genre, directors, studios, etc.
Idk this doesn’t take into account artistic intent. For example mad max fury road specifically kept characters centered in the frame due to the rapid cutting and fast paced action. George Miller didn’t want the audience to get lost looking all around the frame for the subject every shot during action scenes. With the hypothesis above this would appear to appeal to vertical video but was done intentionally without any consideration for vertical video.
Awesome, now let’s see Wes Anderson’s movies
I want more of these comparisons
I like the theory and want to see more, but as others have said, I don’t see Blade Runner being optimized for vertical video in 2017.
I am more interested in data from just before vertical videos took off around 2020 and after.
Instead of comparing Knives Out from 2022 to a film from the 1960s, it would be more useful to compare all three Knives Out films. The same series and director released at different stages of the vertical video boom. For example, the pre-vertical Knives Out, Glass Onion early in the boom, and Wake Up Dead Man at the height of vertical video popularity.
Even better would be a broader trend analysis showing the shift across the industry. A heat map of 50 random movies from 2016, 2017, and beyond could show how vertical video usage evolves over time instead of focusing on just a few examples.
I am also curious if these changes are specifically related to optimizing for vertical video or if they reflect broader shifts in production. For example, with films relying more on VFX and green screens, we have seen lighting becoming more unmotivated and bland in Hollywood, and I wonder if framing is being affected as well.
I don’t think vertical video is the culprit here, but rather the increased pacing of editing. there are more cuts per minute in a modern film than films from the 70’s and 80’s, and a film is less exhausting to watch when our eyes aren’t constantly darting around the screen looking for our next point of interest. One of the more extreme examples of this is Mad Max: Fury Road, which is one of the most visually chaotic movies ever created, and yet the action is easy to follow because George Miller always placed the most important visual information in the center of the frame in every shot.
Or as he put it: „Put the fucking crosshairs on her nose“
Cool experiment!
I’d like to see this data for Wicked.
Does anyone actually watch movies vertically? Most people I see put their phone in landscape and set it on a table.
Even watching short clipped content vertically just feels bad.
I would like to see this data expanded upon, but like the other comments say: there’s such little data here that you can’t perform any serious analysis.
Y’know, it’s funny you mention this: Conan’s hosting of the Oscar’s the other night made a joke about this exact thing, and the punchline was that you couldn’t see anything on the films.
Question: how are you determining the position of the character? I’m not familiar with how YOLO Segmentation works.
Something to note: if you continue down this path, you should see about comparing movies by genre and see if any patterns emerge from there. Start isolating variables to see if there’s anything else at play here.
Really neat visualisation!!
This is a really cool idea, but as others have said, this is severely lacking a significant dataset. It also needs to account for camera and editing techniques, genere, budget, director, age of intended demographic, etc.
There was an amazing similar comprehension between new and old movies. In the old one people were everywhere on the screen where after the „avengers“ era everyone was in the middle of the screen. Gosh I hate what avengers done to the cinema.
Doubt it, but your sample is also really small. As well, I think it’s more that we often don’t see two people on screen at the same time any more facing each other. The meta seems to be right now the over-the-shoulder conversations that cut back and forth so they can do multiple takes quickly and put conversations together in the editing room.
I think genre and cinematography has a lot to do with this too. It’s too broad to just say when a movie was made.
There were also many years where symmetrical shots were seen as kind of uncool. When Wes Anderson started doing it, it was so striking because he was one of the few people in the mainstream doing it. In the maps that are farther out, I have a suspicion that it’s not that the action of any individual scene is spread farther out, but rather that it’s more off-center.
Cool idea – not sure how far it could be pushed but I’m so damn curious if anyone has done something like this for lighting on characters.
I’ve found in the last 2 years or so lighting has gone a really weird direction in film. I’ve started calling it the 2 face effect where almost every character or shot has to have half of the persons face in shadow.
It’s just trying to enhance the dramatic feeling of the shot but fuck if I don’t hate it.
I started watching walking dead again and the scene that stood out to me was when they were in the basement of a fucking abandoned prison and everyone’s faces were relatively evenly lit. The sat down with my partner to watch some Netflix show and in a busy office somehow half of everyone’s face was darkened by a very strong shadow.
They just center people because that’s how you keep attention. This is not ticket science
I think if anything is moving actors closer to the middlenof the screen would be the use of green screen as opposed to location shooting.
I’d like to see the output for Parasite