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Nick Redfern

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Read my new interactive book Computational Film Analysis with R at https://cfa-with-r.netlify.app/.

I have taught film at Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Central Lancashire, and Leeds Trinity University, where I was programme leader for film from 2016 to 2020.

I graduated from the University of Kent in 1998 with a degree in Film Studies and History, and was awarded an MA by the same institution in 2002. I received my PhD from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2006 for a thesis titled ‘Regionalism and the Cinema in the United Kingdom, 1992 to 2002.’

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University of Portsmouth

Southwestern College, Chula Vista, Calif.

John Adrianfer Atienza

University of the Philippines Diliman

Holger Pötzsch

University of Tromsø

Defiance College

University of Kent

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Books by Nick Redfern

Computational Film Analysis with R

Computational Film Analysis with R is a first course in the application of computational methods ... more Computational Film Analysis with R is a first course in the application of computational methods to questions of form and style in the cinema using the R programming language. It aimed at those who have no previous experience of computational film analysis and no prior knowledge of statistics, data science or programming with R is required or assumed. Each chapter discusses the underlying methodological concepts in depth and demonstrates the implementation with R of a range of approaches for analysing sound, colour, editing, cinematography, and scripts of motion pictures, so that after reading this book you will be able to design and execute your own computational film analysis research projects.

Papers by Nick Redfern

The average shot length and the ecological fallacy in Film Studies

Humanities Bulletin, 2023

The ecological fallacy is an error in the interpretation of statistical data when one ascribes to... more The ecological fallacy is an error in the interpretation of statistical data when one ascribes to an individual the qualities of the group to which that individual belongs. In this article I show that using the average shot length (ASL) leads film researchers to commit the ecological fallacy due to the skewed nature of shot length distributions. The ecological fallacy can be avoided when analysing motion picture shot length data using methods that assess the stochastic equality of films’ shot lengths.

Acoustic startle events in trailers for US horror films

Art & Perception, 2023

This article analyses the function and form of acoustic startle events (ASEs) in trailers for fif... more This article analyses the function and form of acoustic startle events (ASEs) in trailers for fifty US horror films released between 2011 and 2015. There are 173 ASEs in the sample, ranging from one startle up to a maximum of ten, with a median of three events per trailer. ASEs exhibit different types of relationships between figure and ground, with some events preceded by silence and anticipated by the viewer while others are unanticipated and intrude on scenes relying on a prior emotional state of apprehension. The functions of ASEs within the hybrid form of a trailer are emotional, narrational, aesthetic and attentional. Sound designers deploy ASEs to exploit the defensive mechanism of the startle response by using ASEs as a form of attentional redirect in order to engage the viewer with on-screen information and presenting marketing information to be remembered by the viewer during a hypervigilance phase. Startle events in the sample are typically the product of the interrelationship between sound design, editing, and movement, but there are also numerous instances when a startle event is not associated with a cut and a moment of horror is the product of the combination of an acoustic startle and movement only.

Computational Analysis of a Horror Film Trailer Soundtrack

Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities, Dec 30, 2022

Computational film analysis combines statistics, data science, information visualization, and com... more Computational film analysis combines statistics, data science, information visualization, and computer science with the analytical approaches and domain knowledge of the study of film to frame and answer questions about form and style in the cinema. In this article, I illustrate the visualisation and analysis of the soundtrack of the trailer for the Korean horror film Into the Mirror (2003). Using the spectrogram and normalized aggregated power envelope to show how the sound design of the trailer evolves over time and functions at different scales. I address a range of practical considerations relevant to the methods demonstrated here relating to the use of mono versus stereo audio files, the use of different sampling rates, and audio normalization. A supporting website with the code for the statistical programming language R used in this analysis is available at https://rpubs.com/nr62_rp33/CFA-into-the-mirror.

Genre, Narrative, and (Mis)remembering the Vietnam War in Jacob's Ladder (1990

New Horizons in English Studies, 2022

In this article I examine the role of memory in Jacob's Ladder (1990), and I argue that Jacob's L... more In this article I examine the role of memory in Jacob's Ladder (1990), and I argue that Jacob's Ladder takes as its subject cultural memories of the war and dramatizes the problematic status of cinematic representations of the past as public memory. This is evident in the way in which the film draws on the viewer's generic memory through the remediation of the iconography of contemporary Vietnam War films such as Platoon (1986), Hamburger Hill (1987), Casualties of War (1989), and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) but refuses the narrativization of the soldiers' experience through the use of a modular narrative form. I argue that Jacob's Ladder inhibits the formation of cultural memories about the war through a critique of the 'veteranness' of the 'grunts' war' films of the late-1980s that sought to extend the experience of the Vietnam War to the viewer cinematically as a form of recovered memory. I also examine the ways in which Jacob's Ladder represents the scenes of reminiscence as being both therapeutic and traumatic and discuss how the film presents an alternative path to coming to terms with the past through conscious acts of remembering and forgetting.

Distributional Thinking About Film Style: Quantile Comparisons of Motion Picture Shot Length Data

Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal , 2022

This article illustrates the use of quantiles as a means of describing and comparing motion pictu... more This article illustrates the use of quantiles as a means of describing and comparing motion picture shot length distributions. This approach is conceptually and computationally simple and leads us to think distributionally about shot lengths rather than focusing on individual values. The result is a better understanding of how this element of film style of two (or more) films differs.

Analysing motion picture cutting rates

Wide Screen, 2022

This article refocuses attention onto cutting rates in motion pictures, which have largely been i... more This article refocuses attention onto cutting rates in motion pictures, which have largely been ignored in quantitative studies of film style in favour of shot lengths. I clarify the concept of a rate in statistics and define two equivalent versions of cutting rate in motion pictures. I show that the introduction of the average shot length as a statistical film style was based on a flawed understanding of statistical theory and that it is not a measure of cutting rate, with the result that the tendency of researchers to quote the average shot length as a measure of rate leads to flawed analyses of film style. I demonstrate some simple methods for visualising and analysing cutting rates illustrated by concrete examples for data collected from slasher films.

Motion Picture Editing as a Hawkes Process

Journal of Data Science, 2023

In this article I analyse motion picture editing as a point process to explore the temporal struc... more In this article I analyse motion picture editing as a point process to explore the temporal structure in the timings of cuts in motion pictures, modelling the editing in 134 Hollywood films released between 1935 and 2005 as a Hawkes process with an exponential kernel. The results show that the editing in Hollywood films can be modelled as a Hawkes process and that the conditional intensity function provides a direct description of the instantaneous cutting rate of a film, revealing the structure of a film's editing at a range of scales. The parameters of the exponential kernel show a clear trend over time to a more rapid editing style with an increase in the rate of exogenous events and small increase in the rate of endogenous events. This is consistent with the shift from a classical to an intensified continuity editing style. There are, however, few differences between genres indicating the consistency of editing practices in Hollywood cinema over time and different types of films.

A Data Set for US Horror Film Trailers

Research Data Journal for the Humanities and the Social Sciences

This article presents a new data set comprising audio, colour, motion, and shot length data of tr... more This article presents a new data set comprising audio, colour, motion, and shot length data of trailers for the fifty highest grossing horror films at the US box office from 2011 to 2015. This data set is one of the few available for computational film analysis that includes data on multiple elements of film style and is the only existing data set for motion picture trailers suitable for formal analyses. Data is stored in csv files available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license on Zenodo: www.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4479068.

Negotiating Franchise Identity in Trailers for Neoslasher Remakes and Reboots

Horror Homeroom, 2021

The neo-slasher cycle (2000-2013) includes many films that remake, reboot, and retcon films from ... more The neo-slasher cycle (2000-2013) includes many films that remake, reboot, and retcon films from classical slasher movie franchises, including Halloween (2007), Friday the 13th (2009), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010). These films must negotiate their relationship to the original films by recontextualising viewers’ prior knowledge of a franchise. In this article I focus on the trailers for neo-slasher movies to examine how the strategies of negotiating franchise identity operate as part of the creation and circulation of a film’s narrative image prior to its release. I argue that trailers for franchise neo-slasher movies adopt a range of strategies to recontextualise viewers’ relationships to a franchise. These strategies include disavowing prior narrative continuities to erase franchise canon established in earlier films and re-mystify the monster; adopting aesthetic strategies from trailers for the original films to present themselves as remakes of the original trailers; and presenting their reference films as being identical to that of the original film to avoid disclosing changes made to the narrative.

Colour palettes in US film trailers: a comparative analysis of movie barcodes

Umanistica Digitale, 2021

*** Explore the trailers colour data and create your own visualisations using the interactive Shi... more *** Explore the trailers colour data and create your own visualisations using the interactive Shiny app for this paper at https://nickredfern.shinyapps.io/colour_palletes_US_trailers/ ***

This article analyses the smoothed movie barcodes of 173 trailers nominated for a Golden Trailer award between 2016 and 2019 across nine genres: action, animation/family, comedy, documentary, drama, fantasy/adventure, horror, romance, and thriller. The results show that colours in the nine genres are similar, dominated by dark, unsaturated colours in the orange (hue = 30° ± 30°) and azure (hue = 210° ± 30°) regions of the HSL colour wheel. Colour palettes for each genre have similar colours but show some differences in the diversity and evenness of the distributions of these colours.

Modelling inference in the comprehension of cinematic narratives

Journal of Methods and Measurement in the Social Sciences , 2020

The viewer's processes of inference making in the cinema involve the framing of hypotheses about ... more The viewer's processes of inference making in the cinema involve the framing of hypotheses about the world of the narrative that may be overturned by subsequent information and are, therefore, nonmonotonic. The goal of narrative researchers is to understand the nature of those processes and how texts organise the deployment of those processes in order to present a narrative successfully. To do this we need methods capable of describing processes of hypothesis framing and belief revision. In this paper, I describe the application of the Transferable Belief Model to a hypothetical example of narrative comprehension based on an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation as one such method.

Modelling shot lengths of Hollywood motion pictures with the Dagum distribution

Statistica, 2020

This paper demonstrates the three-parameter Dagum distribution provides a good fit for shot lengt... more This paper demonstrates the three-parameter Dagum distribution provides a good fit for shot lengths in Hollywood films due to its ability to model a wide range of skewness and kurtosis values and a variety of tail behaviours by virtue of its two shape parameters. The fit of this distribution is better across films in the sample than the two-parameter lognormal distribution, though animated films are an important exception to this. These results can be applied to more closely replicate the editing practice of film editors when generating film sequences using automated editing software.

The soundtrack of the Sinister trailer

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae Film and Media Studies , Nov 1, 2021

In this article, I analyse the soundtrack of the green band trailer for Sinister (Scott Derrickso... more In this article, I analyse the soundtrack of the green band trailer for Sinister (Scott Derrickson, 2012), combining quantitative methods to analyse the soundtrack with formal analysis. I show that, even though Sinister is a narrative about a demon who lives in images, the horror in the soundtrack of this trailer is articulated through the sound design. I describe the structure of the soundtrack and analyse the distribution and organisation of dialogue, the use of different types of sound effects to create a connection between the viewer and the characters onscreen, as well as the use of specific localised sound events to organise attention and to frighten the viewer. I identify two features not previously discussed in relation to quantitative analysis of film soundtracks: an affective event based on reactions to a stimulus and the presence of nonlinear features in the sound envelopes of localised affective events. The sound design of this trailer is consistent with the principles of contemporary sound design in horror cinema, but also demonstrates some variation in its use of sound as a paratext to its parent film.

Sound in horror film trailers

Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 2020

In this paper I analyse the soundtracks of fifty horror film trailers, combining formal analysis ... more In this paper I analyse the soundtracks of fifty horror film trailers, combining formal analysis of the soundtracks with quantitative methods to describe and analyse how sound creates a dominant emotional tone for the viewer through the use of different types of sounds (dialogue, music, and sound effects) and the different sound envelopes of affective events. The results show that horror trailers have a three-part structure that involves establishing the narrative, emotionally engaging the viewer, and communicating marketing information. The soundtrack is organised in such a way that different functions are handled by different components in different segments of the soundtrack: dialogue bears responsibility for what we know and the sound for what we feel. Music is employed in a limited number of ways that are ironic, clichéd, and rarely contribute to the dominant emotional tone. Different types of sonic affective events fulfil different roles within horror trailers in relation to narrative, emotion, and marketing. I identify two features not previously discussed in relation to quantitative analysis of film soundtracks: an affective event based on the reactions of characters in horror trailers and the presence of nonlinear features in the sound design of affective events.

Exploratory data analysis and the editing structure of Friday the Thirteenth (1980)

I analyse the dynamic editing structure of Friday the Thirteenth (1980) using the time series of ... more I analyse the dynamic editing structure of Friday the Thirteenth (1980) using the time series of the ranks of the shot lengths as an exploratory data analytical method for revealing the editing structure of motion pictures without requiring a priori assumptions about the functions of film style. I find that Friday the Thirteenth comprises multiple editing regimes with change points between editing patterns occurring with large changes in mood and localised clusters of shorter and longer takes are associated with specific narrative events. The multiple editing regimes create different types of frightening experiences for the viewer with slower edited passages creating a pervading sense of foreboding and rapid editing linked to the frenzied violence of body horror.

Quantitative analysis of sound in a short horror film

Humanities Bulletin, 2020

In this paper I analyse the structure of sound in a short horror film Behold the Noose (Jamie Bro... more In this paper I analyse the structure of sound in a short horror film Behold the Noose (Jamie Brooks, 2014), applying quantitative methods using open source statistical software in order to determine the structure of the film’s soundtrack and to understand how sounds at different frequencies are used to create an affective experience for the viewer. Examination of the time contour plot the normalised aggregated power envelope shows the soundtrack is organised at different scales, from local transient events, medium scale sections easily distinguishable from those that precede and follow it, and a step change between large scale segments. In this film, sections of increasing emotional attention are associated with on-linear increases in sound energy. Using the short-time Fourier transform I show that sounds at different frequencies are used to create different emotional effects in the viewer; that the range of frequencies used increases as the emotional effect of the soundtrack intensifies; and, that infrasonic frequencies are deliberately and purposefully used as a part of the soundtrack.

Age, gender, and television in the United Kingdom

I apply correspondence analysis (CA) to data produced for the British Film Institute’s (BFI) ‘Ope... more I apply correspondence analysis (CA) to data produced for the British Film Institute’s (BFI) ‘Opening our eyes’ report published in 2011 to discover how age and gender shape the experience of television for audiences in the United Kingdom. Age is an important factor in shaping how audience perceive television, with older viewers describing the medium as ‘informative’, ‘thought provoking’, ‘artistic’, ‘good for people’s self-development’ and ‘escapist’, while younger viewers are more likely to describe television as ‘exciting’, ‘fashionable, and ‘sociable’. Younger respondents are also more likely to describe the effect of television on people/society as negative. Variation in programme choice is highly structured in terms of age and gender, though the extent to which of these factors determine audience choice varies greatly. Gender is the dominant factor in explaining preferences for some programme types with age a secondary factor in several cases, while age is the explanatory factor for other genres for which gender seemingly has little influence. Male audiences prefer sports, factual entertainment, and culture programmes and female audiences reality TV/talent shows, game/quiz/panel shows, chat shows and soap operas. Older audiences prefer news, documentaries, and wildlife/nature programmes, while music shows/concerts and comedy/sitcoms are more popular with younger viewers.

Robust estimation of the mAR index of high grossing films at the US box office, 1935 to 2005

The modified autoregressive (mAR) index has been proposed as a description of the clustering of s... more The modified autoregressive (mAR) index has been proposed as a description of the clustering of shots of similar duration in a motion picture. In this paper we derive robust estimates of the mAR index for high grossing films at the US box office using a rank-based autocorrelation function resistant to the influence of outliers and compare this to estimates obtained using the classical, moment-based autocorrelation function. The results show that (1) The classical mAR index underestimates both the level of shot clustering in a film and the variation in style among the films in the sample; (2) there is a decline in shot clustering from 1935 to the 1950s followed by an increase from the 1960s to the 1980s and a levelling off thereafter rather than the monotonic trend indicated by the classical index, and this is mirrored in the trend of the median shot lengths and interquartile range; and (3) the rank mAR index identifies differences between genres overlooked when using the classical index.

Comparing the Shot Length Distributions of Motion Pictures Using Dominance Statistics

Comparing the shot length distributions of motion pictures we are interested in answering three m... more Comparing the shot length distributions of motion pictures we are interested in answering three main questions: do two (or more) films have similar shot length distributions? If there is a difference between shot length distributions, how large is that difference? Where do the shot length distributions of two films overlap and where are they most different? This article demonstrates the use of dominance statistics—Cliff's d, the Hodges-Lehmann median difference, and the empirical cumulative distribution function—for comparing the shot length distributions of motion pictures that make better use of the available shot length data and provide an unambiguous description of the difference in style between films that corresponds more closely to questions we wish to ask of film style than using average shot lengths compared to the most commonly used method of testing μX = μY, where μ is some measure of central tendency. R functions for calculating these statistics are easily available and details of relevant packages are included.

Computational Film Analysis with R

Computational Film Analysis with R is a first course in the application of computational methods ... more Computational Film Analysis with R is a first course in the application of computational methods to questions of form and style in the cinema using the R programming language. It aimed at those who have no previous experience of computational film analysis and no prior knowledge of statistics, data science or programming with R is required or assumed. Each chapter discusses the underlying methodological concepts in depth and demonstrates the implementation with R of a range of approaches for analysing sound, colour, editing, cinematography, and scripts of motion pictures, so that after reading this book you will be able to design and execute your own computational film analysis research projects.

The average shot length and the ecological fallacy in Film Studies

Humanities Bulletin, 2023

The ecological fallacy is an error in the interpretation of statistical data when one ascribes to... more The ecological fallacy is an error in the interpretation of statistical data when one ascribes to an individual the qualities of the group to which that individual belongs. In this article I show that using the average shot length (ASL) leads film researchers to commit the ecological fallacy due to the skewed nature of shot length distributions. The ecological fallacy can be avoided when analysing motion picture shot length data using methods that assess the stochastic equality of films’ shot lengths.

Acoustic startle events in trailers for US horror films

Art & Perception, 2023

This article analyses the function and form of acoustic startle events (ASEs) in trailers for fif... more This article analyses the function and form of acoustic startle events (ASEs) in trailers for fifty US horror films released between 2011 and 2015. There are 173 ASEs in the sample, ranging from one startle up to a maximum of ten, with a median of three events per trailer. ASEs exhibit different types of relationships between figure and ground, with some events preceded by silence and anticipated by the viewer while others are unanticipated and intrude on scenes relying on a prior emotional state of apprehension. The functions of ASEs within the hybrid form of a trailer are emotional, narrational, aesthetic and attentional. Sound designers deploy ASEs to exploit the defensive mechanism of the startle response by using ASEs as a form of attentional redirect in order to engage the viewer with on-screen information and presenting marketing information to be remembered by the viewer during a hypervigilance phase. Startle events in the sample are typically the product of the interrelationship between sound design, editing, and movement, but there are also numerous instances when a startle event is not associated with a cut and a moment of horror is the product of the combination of an acoustic startle and movement only.

Computational Analysis of a Horror Film Trailer Soundtrack

Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities, Dec 30, 2022

Computational film analysis combines statistics, data science, information visualization, and com... more Computational film analysis combines statistics, data science, information visualization, and computer science with the analytical approaches and domain knowledge of the study of film to frame and answer questions about form and style in the cinema. In this article, I illustrate the visualisation and analysis of the soundtrack of the trailer for the Korean horror film Into the Mirror (2003). Using the spectrogram and normalized aggregated power envelope to show how the sound design of the trailer evolves over time and functions at different scales. I address a range of practical considerations relevant to the methods demonstrated here relating to the use of mono versus stereo audio files, the use of different sampling rates, and audio normalization. A supporting website with the code for the statistical programming language R used in this analysis is available at https://rpubs.com/nr62_rp33/CFA-into-the-mirror.

Genre, Narrative, and (Mis)remembering the Vietnam War in Jacob's Ladder (1990

New Horizons in English Studies, 2022

In this article I examine the role of memory in Jacob's Ladder (1990), and I argue that Jacob's L... more In this article I examine the role of memory in Jacob's Ladder (1990), and I argue that Jacob's Ladder takes as its subject cultural memories of the war and dramatizes the problematic status of cinematic representations of the past as public memory. This is evident in the way in which the film draws on the viewer's generic memory through the remediation of the iconography of contemporary Vietnam War films such as Platoon (1986), Hamburger Hill (1987), Casualties of War (1989), and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) but refuses the narrativization of the soldiers' experience through the use of a modular narrative form. I argue that Jacob's Ladder inhibits the formation of cultural memories about the war through a critique of the 'veteranness' of the 'grunts' war' films of the late-1980s that sought to extend the experience of the Vietnam War to the viewer cinematically as a form of recovered memory. I also examine the ways in which Jacob's Ladder represents the scenes of reminiscence as being both therapeutic and traumatic and discuss how the film presents an alternative path to coming to terms with the past through conscious acts of remembering and forgetting.

Distributional Thinking About Film Style: Quantile Comparisons of Motion Picture Shot Length Data

Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal , 2022

This article illustrates the use of quantiles as a means of describing and comparing motion pictu... more This article illustrates the use of quantiles as a means of describing and comparing motion picture shot length distributions. This approach is conceptually and computationally simple and leads us to think distributionally about shot lengths rather than focusing on individual values. The result is a better understanding of how this element of film style of two (or more) films differs.

Analysing motion picture cutting rates

Wide Screen, 2022

This article refocuses attention onto cutting rates in motion pictures, which have largely been i... more This article refocuses attention onto cutting rates in motion pictures, which have largely been ignored in quantitative studies of film style in favour of shot lengths. I clarify the concept of a rate in statistics and define two equivalent versions of cutting rate in motion pictures. I show that the introduction of the average shot length as a statistical film style was based on a flawed understanding of statistical theory and that it is not a measure of cutting rate, with the result that the tendency of researchers to quote the average shot length as a measure of rate leads to flawed analyses of film style. I demonstrate some simple methods for visualising and analysing cutting rates illustrated by concrete examples for data collected from slasher films.

Motion Picture Editing as a Hawkes Process

Journal of Data Science, 2023

In this article I analyse motion picture editing as a point process to explore the temporal struc... more In this article I analyse motion picture editing as a point process to explore the temporal structure in the timings of cuts in motion pictures, modelling the editing in 134 Hollywood films released between 1935 and 2005 as a Hawkes process with an exponential kernel. The results show that the editing in Hollywood films can be modelled as a Hawkes process and that the conditional intensity function provides a direct description of the instantaneous cutting rate of a film, revealing the structure of a film's editing at a range of scales. The parameters of the exponential kernel show a clear trend over time to a more rapid editing style with an increase in the rate of exogenous events and small increase in the rate of endogenous events. This is consistent with the shift from a classical to an intensified continuity editing style. There are, however, few differences between genres indicating the consistency of editing practices in Hollywood cinema over time and different types of films.

A Data Set for US Horror Film Trailers

Research Data Journal for the Humanities and the Social Sciences

This article presents a new data set comprising audio, colour, motion, and shot length data of tr... more This article presents a new data set comprising audio, colour, motion, and shot length data of trailers for the fifty highest grossing horror films at the US box office from 2011 to 2015. This data set is one of the few available for computational film analysis that includes data on multiple elements of film style and is the only existing data set for motion picture trailers suitable for formal analyses. Data is stored in csv files available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license on Zenodo: www.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4479068.

Negotiating Franchise Identity in Trailers for Neoslasher Remakes and Reboots

Horror Homeroom, 2021

The neo-slasher cycle (2000-2013) includes many films that remake, reboot, and retcon films from ... more The neo-slasher cycle (2000-2013) includes many films that remake, reboot, and retcon films from classical slasher movie franchises, including Halloween (2007), Friday the 13th (2009), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010). These films must negotiate their relationship to the original films by recontextualising viewers’ prior knowledge of a franchise. In this article I focus on the trailers for neo-slasher movies to examine how the strategies of negotiating franchise identity operate as part of the creation and circulation of a film’s narrative image prior to its release. I argue that trailers for franchise neo-slasher movies adopt a range of strategies to recontextualise viewers’ relationships to a franchise. These strategies include disavowing prior narrative continuities to erase franchise canon established in earlier films and re-mystify the monster; adopting aesthetic strategies from trailers for the original films to present themselves as remakes of the original trailers; and presenting their reference films as being identical to that of the original film to avoid disclosing changes made to the narrative.

Colour palettes in US film trailers: a comparative analysis of movie barcodes

Umanistica Digitale, 2021

*** Explore the trailers colour data and create your own visualisations using the interactive Shi... more *** Explore the trailers colour data and create your own visualisations using the interactive Shiny app for this paper at https://nickredfern.shinyapps.io/colour_palletes_US_trailers/ ***

This article analyses the smoothed movie barcodes of 173 trailers nominated for a Golden Trailer award between 2016 and 2019 across nine genres: action, animation/family, comedy, documentary, drama, fantasy/adventure, horror, romance, and thriller. The results show that colours in the nine genres are similar, dominated by dark, unsaturated colours in the orange (hue = 30° ± 30°) and azure (hue = 210° ± 30°) regions of the HSL colour wheel. Colour palettes for each genre have similar colours but show some differences in the diversity and evenness of the distributions of these colours.

Modelling inference in the comprehension of cinematic narratives

Journal of Methods and Measurement in the Social Sciences , 2020

The viewer's processes of inference making in the cinema involve the framing of hypotheses about ... more The viewer's processes of inference making in the cinema involve the framing of hypotheses about the world of the narrative that may be overturned by subsequent information and are, therefore, nonmonotonic. The goal of narrative researchers is to understand the nature of those processes and how texts organise the deployment of those processes in order to present a narrative successfully. To do this we need methods capable of describing processes of hypothesis framing and belief revision. In this paper, I describe the application of the Transferable Belief Model to a hypothetical example of narrative comprehension based on an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation as one such method.

Modelling shot lengths of Hollywood motion pictures with the Dagum distribution

Statistica, 2020

This paper demonstrates the three-parameter Dagum distribution provides a good fit for shot lengt... more This paper demonstrates the three-parameter Dagum distribution provides a good fit for shot lengths in Hollywood films due to its ability to model a wide range of skewness and kurtosis values and a variety of tail behaviours by virtue of its two shape parameters. The fit of this distribution is better across films in the sample than the two-parameter lognormal distribution, though animated films are an important exception to this. These results can be applied to more closely replicate the editing practice of film editors when generating film sequences using automated editing software.

The soundtrack of the Sinister trailer

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae Film and Media Studies , Nov 1, 2021

In this article, I analyse the soundtrack of the green band trailer for Sinister (Scott Derrickso... more In this article, I analyse the soundtrack of the green band trailer for Sinister (Scott Derrickson, 2012), combining quantitative methods to analyse the soundtrack with formal analysis. I show that, even though Sinister is a narrative about a demon who lives in images, the horror in the soundtrack of this trailer is articulated through the sound design. I describe the structure of the soundtrack and analyse the distribution and organisation of dialogue, the use of different types of sound effects to create a connection between the viewer and the characters onscreen, as well as the use of specific localised sound events to organise attention and to frighten the viewer. I identify two features not previously discussed in relation to quantitative analysis of film soundtracks: an affective event based on reactions to a stimulus and the presence of nonlinear features in the sound envelopes of localised affective events. The sound design of this trailer is consistent with the principles of contemporary sound design in horror cinema, but also demonstrates some variation in its use of sound as a paratext to its parent film.

Sound in horror film trailers

Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 2020

In this paper I analyse the soundtracks of fifty horror film trailers, combining formal analysis ... more In this paper I analyse the soundtracks of fifty horror film trailers, combining formal analysis of the soundtracks with quantitative methods to describe and analyse how sound creates a dominant emotional tone for the viewer through the use of different types of sounds (dialogue, music, and sound effects) and the different sound envelopes of affective events. The results show that horror trailers have a three-part structure that involves establishing the narrative, emotionally engaging the viewer, and communicating marketing information. The soundtrack is organised in such a way that different functions are handled by different components in different segments of the soundtrack: dialogue bears responsibility for what we know and the sound for what we feel. Music is employed in a limited number of ways that are ironic, clichéd, and rarely contribute to the dominant emotional tone. Different types of sonic affective events fulfil different roles within horror trailers in relation to narrative, emotion, and marketing. I identify two features not previously discussed in relation to quantitative analysis of film soundtracks: an affective event based on the reactions of characters in horror trailers and the presence of nonlinear features in the sound design of affective events.

Exploratory data analysis and the editing structure of Friday the Thirteenth (1980)

I analyse the dynamic editing structure of Friday the Thirteenth (1980) using the time series of ... more I analyse the dynamic editing structure of Friday the Thirteenth (1980) using the time series of the ranks of the shot lengths as an exploratory data analytical method for revealing the editing structure of motion pictures without requiring a priori assumptions about the functions of film style. I find that Friday the Thirteenth comprises multiple editing regimes with change points between editing patterns occurring with large changes in mood and localised clusters of shorter and longer takes are associated with specific narrative events. The multiple editing regimes create different types of frightening experiences for the viewer with slower edited passages creating a pervading sense of foreboding and rapid editing linked to the frenzied violence of body horror.

Quantitative analysis of sound in a short horror film

Humanities Bulletin, 2020

In this paper I analyse the structure of sound in a short horror film Behold the Noose (Jamie Bro... more In this paper I analyse the structure of sound in a short horror film Behold the Noose (Jamie Brooks, 2014), applying quantitative methods using open source statistical software in order to determine the structure of the film’s soundtrack and to understand how sounds at different frequencies are used to create an affective experience for the viewer. Examination of the time contour plot the normalised aggregated power envelope shows the soundtrack is organised at different scales, from local transient events, medium scale sections easily distinguishable from those that precede and follow it, and a step change between large scale segments. In this film, sections of increasing emotional attention are associated with on-linear increases in sound energy. Using the short-time Fourier transform I show that sounds at different frequencies are used to create different emotional effects in the viewer; that the range of frequencies used increases as the emotional effect of the soundtrack intensifies; and, that infrasonic frequencies are deliberately and purposefully used as a part of the soundtrack.

Age, gender, and television in the United Kingdom

I apply correspondence analysis (CA) to data produced for the British Film Institute’s (BFI) ‘Ope... more I apply correspondence analysis (CA) to data produced for the British Film Institute’s (BFI) ‘Opening our eyes’ report published in 2011 to discover how age and gender shape the experience of television for audiences in the United Kingdom. Age is an important factor in shaping how audience perceive television, with older viewers describing the medium as ‘informative’, ‘thought provoking’, ‘artistic’, ‘good for people’s self-development’ and ‘escapist’, while younger viewers are more likely to describe television as ‘exciting’, ‘fashionable, and ‘sociable’. Younger respondents are also more likely to describe the effect of television on people/society as negative. Variation in programme choice is highly structured in terms of age and gender, though the extent to which of these factors determine audience choice varies greatly. Gender is the dominant factor in explaining preferences for some programme types with age a secondary factor in several cases, while age is the explanatory factor for other genres for which gender seemingly has little influence. Male audiences prefer sports, factual entertainment, and culture programmes and female audiences reality TV/talent shows, game/quiz/panel shows, chat shows and soap operas. Older audiences prefer news, documentaries, and wildlife/nature programmes, while music shows/concerts and comedy/sitcoms are more popular with younger viewers.

Robust estimation of the mAR index of high grossing films at the US box office, 1935 to 2005

The modified autoregressive (mAR) index has been proposed as a description of the clustering of s... more The modified autoregressive (mAR) index has been proposed as a description of the clustering of shots of similar duration in a motion picture. In this paper we derive robust estimates of the mAR index for high grossing films at the US box office using a rank-based autocorrelation function resistant to the influence of outliers and compare this to estimates obtained using the classical, moment-based autocorrelation function. The results show that (1) The classical mAR index underestimates both the level of shot clustering in a film and the variation in style among the films in the sample; (2) there is a decline in shot clustering from 1935 to the 1950s followed by an increase from the 1960s to the 1980s and a levelling off thereafter rather than the monotonic trend indicated by the classical index, and this is mirrored in the trend of the median shot lengths and interquartile range; and (3) the rank mAR index identifies differences between genres overlooked when using the classical index.

Comparing the Shot Length Distributions of Motion Pictures Using Dominance Statistics

Comparing the shot length distributions of motion pictures we are interested in answering three m... more Comparing the shot length distributions of motion pictures we are interested in answering three main questions: do two (or more) films have similar shot length distributions? If there is a difference between shot length distributions, how large is that difference? Where do the shot length distributions of two films overlap and where are they most different? This article demonstrates the use of dominance statistics—Cliff's d, the Hodges-Lehmann median difference, and the empirical cumulative distribution function—for comparing the shot length distributions of motion pictures that make better use of the available shot length data and provide an unambiguous description of the difference in style between films that corresponds more closely to questions we wish to ask of film style than using average shot lengths compared to the most commonly used method of testing μX = μY, where μ is some measure of central tendency. R functions for calculating these statistics are easily available and details of relevant packages are included.

The Structure of ITV News Bulletins

This article explores the relationship between the discourse structure and the formal structure o... more This article explores the relationship between the discourse structure and the formal structure of television news by analyzing the editing patterns of a sample of bulletins broadcast on ITV 1 in August 2011. The discourse structure of the bulletins in this sample is fixed and remains constant irrespective of the subject of news items, suggesting that content is adapted to meet the needs of this structure and that the presence and order of discourse elements in a bulletin shape its formal structure.

The time contour plot: graphical analysis of a film soundtrack

**NB: This paper is taken from the draft of my article 'Quantitative analysis of sound in a short... more **NB: This paper is taken from the draft of my article 'Quantitative analysis of sound in a short horror film' above.

Audio segmentation comprises a set of techniques for analysing the features of audio signals, including motion picture soundtracks. Parsing the structure of film audio allows us to identify scenes and change points, features in the audio envelope (attack, decay, sustain, release), the distribution of sound energy, and the presence of affective events in a soundtrack. Despite the availability of a wide range of software capable of audio analysis (e.g. Python, R, Sonic Visualiser, Audacity, Speech Filing System, Raven Lite, etc.) statistical analyses of cinematic style have yet to apply these methods to the formal analysis of film soundtracks systematically. In this paper I demonstrate the analysis of film sound using the time contour plot of generated by the R package seewave. The time contour plot is a graphical method for visualising the temporal structure of sound energy based on the short-time Fourier transform of a signal and allows analysts to identify interesting features in a film’s soundtrack that warrant further examination and to communicate is a straightforward manner that is easy to comprehend. Applying this method to the soundtrack of Behold the Noose (Jamie Brooks, 2014), a short horror film, I show that the sound energy in the film increases non-linearly in creating of a state of heightened anxiety in the viewer.

The transformation of the Western in the early Cold War

Faced with the need to produce anti-Soviet films during the early Cold War but eager to avoid any... more Faced with the need to produce anti-Soviet films during the early Cold War but eager to avoid any overt political message, Hollywood used of genre as a means of assuaging external political pressure from the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) without compromising its profitable status as an entertainment industry. Westerns, science fiction films, and gangster pictures allowed the tensions between American and non-American to be presented in a manner that was unequivocal and easily comprehensible to film audiences seeking entertainment. However, the politicization of genre led to important revisions in the narrative patterns and common characters of these types of films. This is especially the case for Westerns, which saw (1) the frontier transformed from the Fredrick Jackson Turner’s ‘line of most rapid and effective Americanization’ upon which depended ‘the growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions’ into a defensible national boundary; (2) the ‘military metaphor’ of government by national institution supplant the figure of ‘the Westerner’ as the guarantor of American liberty and justice; and (3) the ‘code of the west’ that prized honesty and integrity in the absence of formal laws is replaced by the need for – and justification of – undercover investigators and secret agents. The early Cold War Western thus provides an interesting case study of how external pressures on the US film industry creates a demand for certain types of narratives based on pre-existing generic formulas while at the same time altering those formulas.

The Romance Film at the Box Office in Five European Countries, 2006 to 2010

We analyze the box office performance of romance films in five European countries – France, Germa... more We analyze the box office performance of romance films in five European countries – France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom – from 2006 to 2010, inclusive, based on the top 50 grossing films in each country in each year. The results show that romance films account for only a small proportion of the films to reach the top 50 highest grossing films, and that there is no statistically significant variation in the proportion of romance films among the highest grossing films in each country. However, few romance films achieve a high box office ranking in more than one of these countries, indicating a lack of commonality across different markets with different audiences watching different romance films. Romance films achieving top 50 rankings in Germany, Spain, and the UK originate almost exclusively from outside these countries, whereas domestically produced films account for a larger proportion of romance films in France and Italy. Romance films perform consistently at the box office in three of the five countries, albeit lacking the very high grosses achieved by action/adventure, family, and fantasy/science fictions films; while this genre performs particularly poorly in Italy and Spain. Romance films emerge as a fixed part of the exhibition market in all five countries, but the variation in the films viewed, source of productions, and box office grosses indicates some important national differences.

An Empirical Approach to Film Audiences

The appeal of specific genres to particular audiences has been a crucial factor in the marketing ... more The appeal of specific genres to particular audiences has been a crucial factor in the marketing and exhibiting of motion pictures, and films are often categorised by their intended audience – ‘woman’s film,’ ‘teenpic,’ ‘chickflick,’ etc. While there are a number of historical and economic studies of film audiences there has to date been no analysis of the relationship between genre, audiences, and the box-office performance of a film. This session will focus on empirical approaches to researching audiences and the British film industry, and will introduce relevant sources of publicly available data and discuss appropriate methods of analysis. Some recent results on the relationship between genre, gender, and the UK box-office will be presented, along with new research comparing the performance of films at the UK and US box-office.

‘It’s chaos out there …:’ Northern Ireland and the Problem of Identity in Divorcing Jack (1998) and Wild About Harry (2000)

Emotion, Genre, and the Hollywood Paranoid Film

The mental flow model of the viewer’s experience of the cinema takes film genres to be forms cons... more The mental flow model of the viewer’s experience of the cinema takes film genres to be forms constructed in order to evoke characteristic emotions that are intimately connected to generic themes and narrative structures. In this model, the horror film evokes the emotion ‘fear,’ producing autonomic responses of crying, shivering, and screaming in the viewer. Paranoia is frequently cited as a recurrent generic theme of the horror film, and, in some case, critics have identified a sub-genre of ‘paranoid horror’ films. However, the characteristic emotion of paranoia is not fear but ‘anxiety,’ and films that evoke such a state in the viewer demonstrate numerous differences from the horror genre. These differences are evident in the type of emotional responses experienced by the viewer and the level of their intensity, as well as in the generic themes and narrative structure of these films. Examples of these differences can be found in Hollywood-produced films such as The X-Files (1998) and Enemy of the State (1998). In light of these differences, the paranoid film can be regarded as a category distinct from the horror film.

Locational Non-substitutability and Regional Film Policy in the United Kingdom

“Land of Hope and Bloody Glory:” Region and Nation in Brassed Off

John Hill describes Brassed Off (Mark Herman, 1996) as a film that offers ‘a certain utopianism a... more John Hill describes Brassed Off (Mark Herman, 1996) as a film that offers ‘a certain utopianism about the possibility of collective action.’ In this paper I argue that in Brassed Off it is the cultural utopianism represented by the Grimley Colliery Brass Band that overcomes the alienation and economic decline of a Yorkshire mining community. Typically, Brassed Off is read as a film that dramatises the ‘crises of a working class community’ or the ‘crisis of masculinity’ but here I argue that the film represents the affirmation of a British national identity through the expression of a regional, Yorkshire identity that is capable of overcoming differences of class and gender.

London Spaces in Contemporary British Cinema: Notting Hill and South West 9

Quantitative Methods and the Study of Film

This talk addresses the analysis of film – its texts, its audiences, its political economy – in h... more This talk addresses the analysis of film – its texts, its audiences, its political economy – in higher education, arguing for the abandonment Film Studies as either a subject or a discipline and approaching the cinema as a complex object of inquiry that demands an ecumenical methodological perspective in order that its numerous and various dimensions are fully comprehended. Though used widely by those studying the cinema beyond the narrow methodological confines of Film Studies, quantitative methods are at present underused by film scholars. To fix their place in the study of film and place the study of film in the wider world – particularly the BFI's recent recognition of the importance of evidence-based policy making – I argue there is much to be gained from the application of quantitative methods in studying film and its audiences, and I illustrate this claim by drawing on a range of empirical studies.

Introduction to Hell is a City

Introduction to Brighton Rock

Adapted from Graham Greene's novel, Brighton Rock was brought to the cinema by John and Roy Boult... more Adapted from Graham Greene's novel, Brighton Rock was brought to the cinema by John and Roy Boulting in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Boulting brothers had established a reputation for producing films with a commitment to social comment, and actively sought out Greene's novel with its tale of Pinkie Brown, a brutal young killer in 1930s Brighton. For John Boulting the film was to be unlike the illusions of Hollywood, what he referred to as the 'opiates' of the day; and, armed with a commitment to realism the brothers declared that they would 'yet prove how dramatic real life could be.' 2

Low frequency sound in a short horror film

This poster looks at occurences of low frequency in a short horror film.

Cycles of conspiracy in Hollywood cinema, 1947-2006

This research applies time series analysis to production trends in 164 Hollywood conspiracy films... more

Comparing shot length distributions using dominance statistics

This poster applies dominance statistics to comparing the shot length distributions of motion pic... more

multiloess is a streamlit app for fitting multiple loess smoothers to motion picture shot length ... more

MFC6182 Science Fiction Module Handbook 2019/2020

This is the handbook for the module MFC6182 Science Fiction for 2019/2020

MFC5602 Theorising Film Module Handbook 2019/2020

This is the handbook for the module MFC5602 Theorising Film for 2019/2020

MFC4082 Analysing Film Module Handbook 2019/2020

This is the handbook for the module MFC4082 Analysing Film for 2019/2020

Modelling cutting rates in Alfred Hitchcock's late-silent and early sound films

I model cutting rates in the late-silent and early-sound films of Alfred Hitchcock as a selfexcit... more I model cutting rates in the late-silent and early-sound films of Alfred Hitchcock as a selfexciting Hawkes process, fitting exponential and power law kernels to the data. The results show that the exponential kernel is a good fit, though it may not be the best fit for every film; and that with the introduction of synchronised sound, the exogeneity of the cutting rate decreased and the endogeneity increased, resulting in slower cutting rates and an increased tendency of shots to cluster.

Sound practice in trailers from the Halloween franchise, 1978 to 2018

This paper analyses trailers for films in the Halloween franchise from 1978 to 2018, looking at t... more This paper analyses trailers for films in the Halloween franchise from 1978 to 2018, looking at the structure of the trailers based on segmentation of their soundtracks and the functions of speech, music, and sound effects. The results show that most trailers in the franchise have a similar structure, with approximately two-thirds of the running time devoted to narrative exposition followed by an emotionally intense montage sequence displaying the key attractions of the film's genre. Speech is used to present narrative information to the audience and is gendered, with male characters able to speak with authority; while music and effects serve the dual functions of creating an emotional experience for the audience and sustain a coherent identity for a franchise over time. There is also evidence that relationships exist between trailers within the franchise, either as sequels or remakes, that are relevant to understanding the organisation of a narrative across several films in a franchise.

Probabilistic models of motion picture shot length distributions

I present results showing how the editing style in the films of Alfred Hitchcock changed with the... more I present results showing how the editing style in the films of Alfred Hitchcock changed with the introduction of synchronised sound. I show that the distribution of shot lengths in is well fitted by the three-parameter Dagum distribution and that changes in editing style are captured by the parameters of the fitted distribution.

SLviz: a shiny app for visualising motion picture shot length data

In this article I introduce SLviz, an interactive application for visualising motion picture shot... more

MovieBarcodeAnalyzeR: an interactive app for visualising film colour

In this article I introduce MovieBarcodeAnalyzeR, an application for extracting and visualizing c... more

Computational analysis of a horror film trailer soundtrack with Python

In this article I demonstrate the computational analysis of the soundtrack of the trailer for The... more