Viewers fail to notice a large share of film cuts, especially those made according to continuity conventions or during sudden movement.
Smith and Henderson asked viewers to press a button at every cut while watching feature film clips. About a quarter of cuts between two views of the same scene went unnoticed, rising to about a third when the cut coincided with a sudden onset of motion, and cuts that followed continuity rules were missed more often than cuts that broke them.
In practice
- Asked afterwards, most of an audience guesses that a dialogue scene was one or two shots; it was twenty-six.
- An editor hides a jump in a speaker's answer by cutting on the moment she turns her head.
- Possible explanations
- The authors attributed some misses to cuts falling during blinks and eye movements, which suppress visual change, but most to attention: viewers following the story do not attend to the join. It is a cinematic case of Inattentional Blindness and Change Blindness.
- In its favour
- It is consistent with eye-tracking studies showing that viewers' gaze converges on the same points in a well-edited film, and with editors' long-standing practice of cutting on action and on the blink.
- Against it
- The detection task itself changes viewing, so rates measured when people are hunting for cuts may not match ordinary watching, and the effect has been studied mainly with mainstream Hollywood material rather than other editing traditions.
- Standing
- Explains why the 180-Degree Rule and Creative Geography work. Murch's Rule of Six recommends cutting on the blink for the same reason.
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- A century and a half of measuring the mind