Description

Abstract: Comprehending a film is an amazing feat of neural and cognitive processing. A series of still pictures are projected quickly on a screen, accompanied by a stream of sound—and a viewer has an experience that can be as engaging, emotionally affecting, and memorable as many experiences in real life. Comprehending film is all the more amazing when one considers how films are constructed. Films typically are comprised of hundreds and into the thousands of individual camera shot, which are continuous runs of the camera. Shot are edited together in such a way to create scenes, which are sequences of goal-directed actions or unintentional events that take place in a particular location (or one or two locations when events are depicted as occurring concurrently). Shots on average last only a few seconds and are edited together in such a way that the vast majority of them go unnoticed by the viewer.