Editorial intentions and viewer perceptions : An audiovisual methodology for studying film editing and eye movements

Abstract

This article presents an audio-visual methodology, VOSMET, designed to address activities of the craft of film editing, with a focus on the use of perception, and its implications. The methodology employs 13 different visual aspects and five different audio aspects, starting with video-recording observations of an editor, and ending with the analysis of eye-tracking data from film viewers. Craft research needs methodologies that address craft activities and cognitive approaches. Design practices share a similar need for reaching deeper understanding. It is neither established how film editors achieve perceptual precision in continuity editing in practice. The VOSMET methodology simultaneously captures bodily actions, utterances, software events, and keystrokes, along with the audiovisual material under processing, and uses graphics to distinguish between what takes place. The methodology also contributes by grasping what a film editor attends to, how this attention functions, as well as how perceptual factors are handled by the film editor. Finally, the methodology can evaluate editorial intentions against film viewer perceptions.