How Filmmakers Manipulate You by Tracking Your Gaze

Talking about film theory can be a lot of fun--we like to conjecture that how a director arranges a scene, how the actors gesture and when they speak, and how the camera moves all have a major impact on the way we view movies. In a rare example of art criticism and science working together, film theorist David Bordwell got a psychological researcher to compare the results of an empirical survey with his own observations as a critic. Bordwell wrote about film staging in There Will Be Blood, then had psychologist Tim Smith perform an eye-tracking study on viewers to see if the theory lined up with the facts.

As Smith’s eye-tracking video and research prove, filmmakers are damn good at focusing our attention exactly where they want it--and we probably won’t even know they’re doing it.

Smith’s study introduces his tracking project with a detailed explanation of how gaze works. Surprise! Our eyes are way complex: we rarely focus on a single point for more than a third of a second, and those brief moments of fixation are separated by 15-30 millisecond saccadic eye movements. He also details an effect called Attentional  Synchrony--when we’re looking at a static image, our eyes tend to rove and find different elements to focus on. But when an image is in motion, nearly everyone will focus on the same screen element. There are certain things we’ve simply learned to pay attention to--hands, faces, moving objects--and that obviously extends beyond films.

Smith also described the fascinating way our eyes and brain retain detail. Our attention spreads outwards from a focal point like an actor’s face, and objects further away from that point are memorized in a very vague way. That’s why we have trouble noticing continuity errors even if we’re looking for them--the brain doesn’t record peripheral objects in enough detail for us to recall what they should look like.

Then came the eyetracking study. Smith posted the study in two forms, one showing the responses of 11 viewers mapped onto the screen in circles depicting their attention, and one using a heatmap of sorts. 
      
    
 Unsurprisingly, the elements that draw our attention--faces when they’re speaking, hands when they’re moving--prove Bordwell’s theories nicely, demonstrating that directors really are masters of their craft. By setting up a static camera and having the actors play out the scene in a limited space, Paul Thomas Anderson made us look exactly where he wanted us to. Eyetracking studies: way cool. Filmmaking: even cooler.