Today, I was browsing a video website, and I suddenly got curious about the average length of shots in movies. So, I decided to find out how to calculate this average shot length, also known as ASL. You know, the idea is pretty simple. Just take the total running time of a film and divide it by the number of shots. But the thing is, where do I get the shot data from?
I did a quick search online and stumbled upon this website called Cinemetrics. It seemed like a goldmine of information on movie shot data. The website had a bunch of tools and a huge database, so I thought, “Why not give it a try?”
Starting the Exploration
First, I downloaded their visualization tool, which seemed to be the core tool. It came in a zip file, so I unzipped it. Inside, there was an executable file. I clicked it, and it took me to a webpage with the tool.
The interface was a bit overwhelming at first. There were so many buttons and options. I fooled around for a while and figured out I needed to load a text file with shot data. So I went back to the Cinemetrics website, to the database section, and found a bunch of movies with their data.
Diving into Data
I picked a movie I liked, “The Shawshank Redemption,” and downloaded its data file. It was a simple text file, with each line representing a shot and its start time in seconds. I then went back to the visualization tool and loaded this file. Boom! The tool generated a graph showing the shot lengths over time. It was pretty cool to see!
But I wanted the ASL, the average shot length, right? The tool had an option to export data, so I clicked around and found a way to get some basic stats, including the average shot length. And there it was, the ASL for “The Shawshank Redemption” was around 4.8 seconds.
Getting My Hands Dirty with Code
This was fun, but I wanted to do this for a bunch of movies, not just one. So, I thought, “Why not write a little script to automate this?” I’m no coding expert, but I know a bit of Python. I opened up my code editor and started hacking away.
First, I needed to read the text files. That was easy enough. Each line was a shot, and the number was the start time. Then, I needed to find the end time. Since the file only listed start times, I figured the end time of a shot is the start time of the next shot. The last shot’s end time would be the film’s total duration. Luckily, the Cinemetrics data files usually had the duration at the top.
- Read the file.
- Get the start times.
- Calculate the end times.
- Calculate the duration of each shot.
- Sum up all durations.
- Divide by the number of shots.
After some trial and error, I got a working script! I downloaded data for a few more movies, ran my script, and voila! I had the ASL for each of them. It was super satisfying to see my little program churn out the numbers.
What I Learned
This whole experiment was quite a ride. I started with a simple question and ended up writing a script to calculate something I was curious about. I learned a lot about the structure of movies, at least in terms of shot lengths. Plus, I got to dust off my rusty coding skills.
It’s amazing how much you can do with a little curiosity and some readily available tools. If you’re ever curious about something, don’t be afraid to dive in and explore. You might be surprised at what you can discover and achieve!
