The
Rock: Lights, Camera, Perception, Action
By Edward W. Otten
One of my favorite action scenes of all time is the chase
between a Ferrari and a Humvee through the streets of San
Francisco in the 1996 movie, The Rock. John Mason (Sean
Connery) has just stolen a Humvee in an attempt to escape
from the FBI. One of the FBI agents, Stanley Goodspeed
(Nicholas Cage), commanderes a bright yellow Ferrari in an
attempt to catch Mason. The chase leads the audience up and
down the many hills of San Francisco, along the way
destroying a milk truck, countless police cars, and a
trolley. It is one of the most exciting and amazing chase
scenes ever created.
But why?
Why is it exciting? Why is it amazing? Why do you feel like
you could be standing there, watching this unfold, before
your very eyes? Why, at other times, do you feel like you
are in a place it would be impossible to exist in real life
without being killed? Why do you cringe at each crunch of a
vehicle? Why are you energized when the Goodspeed revs the
engine of the Ferrari and flies off at breakneck speeds?
Most people, in thinking about those questions, would
probably suggest that cognition and specifically emotions
provide the answer. I have no doubt that they play a role.
However, there is something much more important at work
here, something which without it would make it impossible
to even watch a movie, let alone be influenced by it. That
something is perception.
Perception is the process that allows us to be in contact
with the environment around us. It involves the pickup of
information contained within the environment and the
subsequent use of that information to specify that
environment and the possibilities for action (behavior)
within it. Perception is critical in everything we do, from
picking up your coffee mug to walking down the street to
watching movies.
In effect, in raising the questions above, I am really
raising one overarching question: Why do movies work?
Notice I did not say How do movies work?. I will be the
first to admit that I know very little about lenses,
lights, shutter speeds, and all the other mechanisms by
which movies are made. My interest here lies in the
perceptual mechanisms that allow people to watch movies.
These mechanisms must be utilized by moviemakers in order
to provide adequate information to the viewer about what is
going on. What makes a movie exciting, however, is the
manipulation of the mechanisms to create a specific effect.
These manipulations are what defines a movie’s style, and
consequently, a moviemaker’s style.
In the remainder of this essay, I am going to examine a
few, but certainly not all, of the perceptual mechanisms
that allow movies to work, and how specifically those
mechanisms were used in the movie The Rock. The Rock
presents many excellent examples of the use of these
perceptual mechansisms, and perhaps more interestingly,
many examples of the manipulation of those mechanisms for a
particular effect.
Saccadic movement
I am sure everyone has experienced the following
phenomenon; you are reading something when suddenly some
movement in your periphery distracts you. You shift your
gaze to see what is occuring in the same space. The
movement seems instananeous, and it almost is. About
one-fifth of second after your eyes see the distraction,
your eyes start moving. Your eyes, in the span of about 40
ms (milliseconds), reach speeds upwards of 500 degrees per
second and then come to a screaching halt on the new target
(Cutting, in press). This movement is called a saccade, and
we make them constantly. In reading the previous line on
this page, you made a saccade from each word to the next
one. What makes saccades interesting, and applicable to
movies, is what happens during a saccade. We are, in
effect, blind to all visual information during a saccade,
and a short time afterwards.
Movies consist of cuts, which separate one shot from
another. Shots and cuts are combined together to create a
scene. The right combination of shots and cuts is critical
for creating a comprehensible scene. But think about this a
little bit closer. The presence of cuts creates
discontinuities in the flow of information, even if the
cuts are short. Intuitively one might think that the
presence of these discontinuties would lead to confusion on
the part of the viewer because when we look around in the
real world, everything seems continuous. But we don’t
become confused. We are able to follow a scene without
difficulty. Why? Because of saccades. Everything seems
continuous in the real world, but it’s really not. We, just
like a scene in a movie, have “cuts”, and consequenently,
“shots”. Even with these discontinuities, we are able to
the extract information from the environment. We are able
to understand our environment. And that is why we are able
to understand movies.
A great example of this occurs in the climactic standoff
near the end of The Rock. General Hummel (Ed Harris) is
faced with the possible mutiny of his men after the bluff
of killing the population of San Francisco fails. In all,
six men stand in a roughly circular pattern pointing
firearms at one another, all which Goodspeed and Mason
watch from an adjoining room. Every actor in the scene has
at least one line, and therefore the camera is constantly
changing position and orientation to film the actor for
their line. One might suspect that this cutting would lead
to confusion as to who is talking to who, because you
generally can’t see who exactly one actor is talking to.
They are simply looking off camera. And yet, the scene is
completely comprehensible. This is because we are
accustomed to having cuts in the visual information in our
environment. They occur all the time. (Incidently, this
scene contains about 80 cuts over 3 minutes. During the
same period, you experience approximately 900 saccades).
Occlusion
As we all know, film is a two dimensional medium. However,
the appearance of depth can be achieved by various
techniques. One of the most common and straightforward of
these techniques is that of occlusion. Basically, occlusion
occurs when one object partly hides another from view.
Obviously, the partially hidden object appears farther
away. The use of occlusion can also help provide an
understanding of position and orientation of a scene. For
example, the introduction of Stanley Goodspeed involves a
scene in which he is diffusing a bomb inside a glass
containment unit. At various times during the scene, the
camera cuts from inside the unit to the outside looking in.
If the camera only filmed Goodspeed, it would be difficult
to get a sense of the environment he was in, not to mention
his relation to the rest of the actors in the scene. As
another example, consider when Goodspeed is chasing Mason
through the kitchen of the Fairmont hotel. In various shots
Goodspeed is being blocked by shelves in the kitchen.
Again, the occlusion of parts of his body adds depth to the
scene. Now, the use of occlusion may seem very trivial, but
it is in fact the most important and basic cue for creating
depth. There are numerous other examples of occlusion in
The Rock, including the standoff scene discussed above.
Motion perspective
The next time you are riding in a car, preferably a highway
with lots of space on either side of you, do the following.
Look out toward the horizon either to the right or left
side of the car. Look at the buildings, mountains, or trees
at the horizon. See how slow the seem to be moving past
you? Now slowly begin to focus your gaze on objects closer
and closer to the car, until the point you are looking
straight down at the objects directly next to the car. The
seem to fly by before you can even tell what they are. This
phenomenon is called motion perspective. It refers to the
relative motions of the objects attached to ground around a
moving observer (or camera) or moving objects around a
stationary observer. Objects closer to you move faster than
ones farther away, and their velocity is inversely
proportional to their distance from you, meaning that
objects twice as far move half as fast (Cutting, in press).
In the Humvee and Ferrari chase, many of the shots had
objects (especially repeating objects, like a fence)
between the cars and the camera. These objects are moving
by the camera faster than the car and the background. This
helps create the effect that the car is moving faster than
it actually is because the entire foreground appears to
moving faster than the entire background. Also, in scenes
where the car is very close to the camera it appears to be
moving faster than in probably was in real life (compared
to scenes where it the car was farther from the camera).
Combining Techniques
Talking about each of these particular techniques
individually is fine, but the great thing about The Rock is
that many scenes contain multiple techniques at the same
time. For example, many of the exterior shots of San
Francisco have both occlusion and motion perspective,
especially the shots where the camera moves past the Golden
Gate bridge with the city behind it. The bridge is
occluding the city, and the movement of camera causes the
bridge to move past faster than the rest of the background,
resulting in a visually stunning scene.
Of course, perhaps the most stunning scene is one about
which I am sure everyone is familiar. It has become a
trademark of Michael Bay; the low angle rising shot that
spins around (in this case) Goodspeed. In this case, the
occlusion is Goodspeed occluding the background, a very
simple occlusion to be sure. But the movement of the camera
creates an constantly changing background. Goodspeed’s body
is occluding one part of the background while
simultaneously revealing another part of it. The is called
the accretion and deletion of the background. Also, the
movement of the camera causes motion perspective, meaning
that Goodspeed is moving faster than the background. This,
combined with the fact the the scene is in slow motion,
creates one of the most incredible shots I’ve ever seen,
both perceptually and cinematically.
The are hundreds of other perceptual techniques that I
could talk about, including ones dealing with color,
contrast, sound, etc. I chose to focus of several that I
find the most interesting, especially when discussing a
Michael Bay movie. His use of camera movement is unique
among all of the directors I have seen. For a very long
time, it was difficult for me to understand why I thought
it was unique. It wasn’t until I started studying
perception that I realized that the human visual system is
actually critically dependent on movement. Without the
movement of our bodies, and specifically our head, we
probably would not be able to see, or at very least, we
would be very poor at it. By moving the camera, Michael Bay
in many ways is simulating our own movement and therefore
our own perception. Better still, he moves the camera in
ways that for us would be impossible. That is what makes
his movies visually stunning. He takes human perception and
pushes it to its limits. For other filmmakers, it’s
“lights, camera, action.” For Bay, it’s “lights, camera,
perception, action”.
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References:
Cutting, J.E. (in press). Perceving Scenes in Film and in
the World. In J. D. Anderson & B. F. Anderson (Eds.)
Moving Image Theory: Ecological Considerations.
Edward W. Otten is a third year graduate student in the
Department of Psychology at Miami University in Oxford, OH.
His research interests include motion perception, virtual
environments, and postural coordination, as well as other
aspects of applied cognitive psychology.
Email: ottenew@muohio.edu
Website: http://www.users.muohio.edu/ottenew/