From a scientific paper: “Event segmentation and seven types of narrative discontinuity in popular movies” by James E. Cutting:

These results suggest that there are at least four different signatures of narrative shifts to be found in popular movies — general patterns across time, patterns of historical change, genre-specific patterns, and film-specific patterns.

[…]

…the structure of popular movies, and the changes in that structure over the last 80 years, are fit to perceptual and cognitive processes that allow movies to be faster paced but still easy to understand. Moreover, we know that in real life and in movies this segmentation process is an aid to memory and comprehension. Thus, understanding the reasons for why and how viewers segment movies into events brings us closer to understanding why we find them such a powerful component of contemporary visual culture.

Once a system is analysed, others will attempt to encode this analysis into algorithms.

And I thought editors would never be disintermediated…

Judith Allen found this.