Visual Disturbances: what eye-tracking and 187 unlicensed clips reveal about change blindness and our perception of films

My most recent essay film, Visual Disturbances, premiered in the open access journal [in]Transition yesterday. This open access journal features peer reviewed academic video essays and showcases a wide variety of film and media analysis. Visual Disturbances uses some cutting-edge eye tracking visualizations to explore how film audiences both perceive and mis-perceive movies.

A few readers may remember my 2007 Disney mashup, A Fair(y) Use Tale. That film, in its own small way, helped open up the video essay genre by sampling commercial films for educational purposes.

Visual Disturbances is a very different kind of film but relies on the precedent set by A Fair(y) Use Tale and the diligent work of scholars, attorneys, archivists, and activists to bring Fair Use into the 21st century. For Visual Disturbances, I should give a very special shout out to attorney and UC Irvine Professor Jack Lerner. His students at UC Irvines Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic reviewed the film and wrote a valuable opinion letter regarding its Fair Use status. That letter ultimately helped procure an Errors and Omission insurance policy that helps protect the film from frivolous copyright shake downs.Visual Disturbances uses 187 unlicensed clips (down from the 385 clips used in A Fair(y) Use Tale!) from commercial films to explore how audiences watch a movie. Cinema suffers from a basic problem telling a story: the medium captures too much visual information from reality. Thus, early on, Hollywood filmmakers developed a series of tactics for subtly focusing audience attention on key narrative details. Read the rest