Film by numbers

Interesting article in the current New Scientist suggesting that successful Hollywood blockbusters follow a pattern of editing duration which matches human attention spans. The same issue also mentions a system of automatic filming for shooting sports action without camera operators or directors. Sooner or later somebody is going to work out how to create a Hollywood blockbuster without human intervention.

An article in November suggested that still photographers will no longer have to anticipate Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment": instead, software will allow them to combine information from video and high-definition stills to create high quality images from video footage. Personally, I quite like what you can do by just rezzing up ordinary video framegrabs in Photoshop, like this one:

Final science fact, this time not from NS but from a neuroscientist friend: humans learn and remember stuff from moving images better than they do from still images.