Motion Picture Editing as a Hawkes Process

Redfern, Nick

doi:10.6339/22-JDS1055

Journal of Data Science

Motion Picture Editing as a Hawkes Process

Volume 21, Issue 1 (2023), pp. 43–56

Nick Redfern

https://doi.org/10.6339/22-JDS1055

Pub. online: 7 July 2022 Type: Data Science In Action

Open Access

Received
1 April 2022

Accepted
20 June 2022

Published
7 July 2022

Abstract

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.

Supplementary material

Supplementary Material

The complete set of results and plots for all 134 films in the sample along with the R code used in this project are available for the reader to explore as a shiny app at https://tinyurl.com/2p8c86u3. The data, code, and results for this article are also available on the supporting GitHub repository at DrNickRedfern/hollywood-hawkes.

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2023 The Author(s). Published by the School of Statistics and the Center for Applied Statistics, Renmin University of China.

Open access article under the CC BY license.

Keywords

computational film analysis film editing Hollywood cinema point process time series analysis

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