“When you make the darks dark, you remove the possibility that people will look at them."Ĭutting is also investigating the use of color in films, using a Matlab script to analyze the palette of colors in movies frame by frame. It’s one way film makers control where the audience looks and what they see, Cutting said. The frame is almost entirely black, except for a glow at the tip of his wand that lights up his face and hands. The move into digital has given us better control over the dynamic range.”Īs an example, he showed a still from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 in which a menacing Lord Voldemort looks like he's just about to unleash some wickedness. "The quality of the film stock has gotten better. “What’s happening is that the brights are staying just as bright, but the darks are getting darker,” he said. Modern movies are also darker than their predecessors, Cutting has found. The point is that when film makers use lots of motion, they usually only keep it up for short periods of time. The white and gray dots to the left represent sequences, and fragments of sequences from within movies. The black dots in the lower right corner represent the average shot length and motion index for entire films. The graph below shows what Cutting calls the "triangle of tolerability,” a sweet spot (shown in grey) where the shot duration and amount of motion are well suited to keep viewers’ attention. Tying the motion to shot changes is an especially effective way to engage the attention of viewers, he says.īut filmmakers risk irritating audiences if they bombard them with frenetic motion for too long.
When people watch action sequences their heart rate increases, and so does their galvanic skin response, an indicator of physiological arousal. “Our response to motion is physiological,” he said. This change also helps maintain viewers’ attention, Cutting says. Cutting has quantified this trend by calculating how many pixels change from one frame to the next across the entire movie.
*Note on lengths: Some of the lengths are derived directly from text of the books or similar written canon (interviews, games, etc.) but others are taken from the measurement of the props in the films. There are 42 wands for which the length is mentioned at some point in the series. While I have sold extremely short wands (eight inches and under) and very long wands (over fifteen inches), these are exceptionally rare. Most wands will be in the range of between nine and fourteen inches.
This matches up nicely to Ollivanders own comments on the matter: The most common range of wands is 10" or greater but less than 12" (10.00" to 11.75"), accounting for ~38% (16/42). However, when taking into account the distribution, you are probably going to get wand greater than 9".Ī wizard is most likely to receive a wand between 9.00" and 11.50" which account for ~62% (26/42) of all wands. So with the mode length, which is most commonly occurring number, the answer to your question would be 9".