The Science of Perception and Film Continuity
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NPR
Carefully examine this x-ray. See the gorilla? In a test, most trained radiologists missed it. |
One of the most important jobs in movie and television production is Continuity,
making sure that the actors and sets appear exactly the same from scene to
scene. This job requires someone who is
detail oriented in the extreme, very meticulous in approach, with a good visual
memory.
And yet some amazingly distracting
continuity flubs slip through. Harry
Potter's T-shirt abruptly changing from a crew neck to a Henley shirt in 'The
Order of the Phoenix,' or how in 'Pretty Woman,' Julia Roberts' croissant
morphs into a pancake. Did you catch
these continuity errors? Probably not –
until they were pointed out to you.
An example that nearly ruined a classic movie for me occurs
in the classic flick Casablanca. I must
have watched the movie twenty times before I caught it, and once I did, I haven’t
been able to watch the movie without thinking, “it’s coming up. Wait for it.
It’s almost here. There. There’s the blunder. How could anyone miss that?”
Did anyone on the Warner Brothers production team catch
it? Apparently not, or if they did, they
didn’t feel it was worth re-shooting the scene to correct it. Or maybe they understood that people simply
don’t see things they’re not looking for.
You could call it the Gorilla in the Room effect. You may be aware of effect, especially if you
work in production continuity, and there is research to back this up. The effect is this: Study participants, all radiologists very
skilled at reading x-ray images, were assigned a task on a computer, and while
focused on the task, participants failed to notice the image of a gorilla
embedded in the x-ray. How could they
miss it? They weren’t looking for it so they didn’t see it.
What researchers did is ask 24 radiologists to perform a standard
lung nodule detection task. They examined five scans; each scan contained an
average of 10 nodules. A gorilla, 48 times larger than the average nodule, was
inserted in the last scan. The researchers found that 83 percent of
radiologists did not report seeing the gorilla.
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"The radiologists missed the gorillas not because they
could not see them, but because the way their brains had framed what they were
doing. They were looking for cancer nodules, not gorillas," explained Jeremy
Wolfe, senior psychologist and director of the Visual Attention Laboratory at
BWH.
This phenomena is basic to the way our brains function, and
is why people are hired to pay attention to the small, and even the large continuity
issues. Maybe only 17% of the audience
will catch the flub, but they will tell their friends and soon most people are
aware of it and will start noticing it.
Why we miss subtle
visual changes, and why it keeps us sane
Don't worry if you missed those continuity bloopers. Vision
scientists have discovered an upside to the brain mechanism that can blind us
to subtle changes in movies and in the real world, a "continuity
field" in which we visually merge together similar objects seen within a
15-second time frame.
"The continuity field smooths what would otherwise be a
jittery perception of object features over time," said David Whitney,
associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. "Essentially, it pulls together
physically but not radically different objects to appear more similar to each
other," Whitney added. "This is surprising because it means the
visual system sacrifices accuracy for the sake of the continuous, stable
perception of objects.[ii]"
“Conversely, without a continuity field, we may be
hypersensitive to every visual fluctuation triggered by shadows, movement and
myriad other factors. For example, faces and objects would appear to morph from
moment to moment in an effect similar to being on hallucinogenic drugs.”
Using the Gorilla in the
Room Effect
Since publication of Poe’s The Purloined Letter in 1844,
authors and later screenwriters have used the Gorilla in the Room Effect as a
plot devise. The entire Peter Faulk
series, Columbo, was based on the missing clue in plain sight that no one else
noticed. It might have been an object
out of place, or an unobserved step in a logical progression that Columbo
picked up that eventually catches the killer.
We knew from the first scene who the killer was. The show almost teased us with the unobserved
yet obvious object or event. “Did you
see it? Did you catch it?”
Look at it as a game between the writer and the reader or
viewer. Can you come up with something
obvious but unnoticed that is the lynch pin of your plot and story? Something that will make your audience think
along with your protagonist, involving them more deeply in your story?
You can test the Gorilla in the Room. Wear a button on your shirt or jacket that
you surreptitiously change for another button of a radically different color
and message in the same position and watch if anyone notices. You could do the same thing with a scarf, or
change your hair style right in the middle of a party. Think of how much fun you can have taking
advantage of the fact we’re all programmed to not notice these subtle changes.
For those who love Casablanca, I apologize for dooming you
to look for the continuity flaw. Rather
than watching for enjoyment, you will now watch the film looking for the very
minor but disconcerting mistake. “It’s
coming up. Wait for it. It’s almost here. There.
There’s the blunder.
How could
anyone miss that?”
Related stories:
- The emerging science of human screams
- Empathy represses analytic thought, and vice versa
- If You're Not Looking for It, You Probably Won't See It
- Inability to Identify Odors Likely Predicts Death Within Five Years
- Men perceive women in red as more sexually receptive. Do women as well?
- Musical tastes offer a window into how you think
- People Remember Unattractive Faces More Than Attractive Ones
- Self-deceived people are good at deceiving others
- What Musical Taste Tells Us About Social Class
- Why some people hear color, taste sounds
Sources:
[i]
T. Drew, M. L.- H. Vo, J. M. Wolfe. The
Invisible Gorilla Strikes Again: Sustained Inattentional Blindness in Expert
Observers. Psychological Science, 2013
[ii]
University of California - Berkeley.
"Why we miss subtle visual changes, and why it keeps us sane."
ScienceDaily, 30 March 2014.
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