Hollywood, without doubt, dominates the global film market. It makes the most expensive, most profitable and most seen films. So it’s easy to forget that a lot of Hollywood productions use technical expertise from the UK.
This ranges from the regular cast and crew; the actors and cinematographers and script writers and editors and sound recordists, etc through to the effects departments.
When you think of movie visual effects you may assume they’re all done in the US. You may have heard of companies like Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), started by George Lucas, creator of Star Wars, or Digital Domain, started by James Cameron, director of Terminator and Avatar.
What you probably don’t realise is that a lot of effects work is done in the UK too, because we’re a big player in the effects market (and the video games market).
He found that the more recent the films were, the more likely they were to obey the 1/f fluctuation, and this did not just apply to fast action movies. Cutting said the significant thing is that shots of similar lengths recur in a regular pattern through the film.
Cutting believes obeying the 1/f law makes films “resonate with the rhythm of human attention spans,” and this makes them more gripping. Films edited in this way would then tend to be more successful and the style of shooting and editing more likely to be copied. Films of Cutting’s own favorite genre, the Film Noir, do not generally follow the 1/f law, with shot lengths tending to be more random. By contrast The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and the 2005 blockbuster movie Star Wars Episode III (which Cutting considers to be “just dreadful”) both follow 1/f rigidly.
It’s fairly unusual, it looks fairly good quality and the contributors seem to have been globally spread and was directed by a woman (most fan films are the work of guys). It goes to show that dedicated people can make movies for relatively little money.
So I guess they have been placated. It has sparked an airing of some of the points around the release window though with the Beeb having a good summation of the main arguments. I can understand the arguments from both sides and obviously Disney has decided to try some experimenting to see what results.
Another interesting article discusses how Blockbuster have secured an exclusive window for new releases that could damage independent rental store. I still rent from Blockbuster occasionally, they’re the closest store to me, there was an independent chain but they went out of business years ago. You have to think their days are numbered (certainly Blockbuster, who keep reporting loses) and we’ll just get machines dispensing disposable media or downloadable rentals in the future.
