“Time lapse” or the acceleration of time for processes involving objects and larger scenes such as the growing and blossoming of a flower, cloud fluctuations in the sky or the traffic circulation in a city offers the viewer an impression of processes that otherwise extend beyond the capacity for temporal integration in human memory systems. Since the early days of film-making, producers, directors and projectionists experimented with stretching or accelerating time by varying shooting and playback speed-cameras and projectors were operated by turning a handle. Music typically plays a key role in these experiences, so we contrasted slow-motion and real-time motion scenes in an experiment using multimodal conditions with and without music. Drawing on psychological theories of time distortion in heightened situations, we assumed that stretched time in screen-based media would have an impact on perceived emotion, physiological responses and visual perception. The aim of the current study was to investigate the emotional effects of slow-motion footage on viewers. Slow-motion scenes such as the one described above are very common across a range of media genres, yet there is only sparse empirical research examining why they are used and how they may possibly relate to daily-life experiences. The highly emotive film music emphasises the situation in the scene, and the running in slow motion may seem to be even faster in internally assumed time. The slowness may also allow for contemplation of the emotional transition from threat to overcoming and success. This film scene is produced in slow motion, allowing the film viewer to perceive facial expressions and the surroundings in a greater amount of detail. This is a significant turning point in his life, as Forrest becomes a very fast runner and eventually a top athlete. He starts running, shaking off his leg braces to escape the bullies.
Slomo video movie#
The award-winning movie “Forrest Gump” contains a remarkable scene in which Forrest, a boy with impaired motion, is chased by bullying children on their bikes. Music influences these experiences profoundly, thus strengthening the impact of stretched time in audiovisual media.
These findings suggest that perceiving slow motion is not related to states of high arousal, but rather affects cognitive dimensions of perceived time and valence. Video genre affected responses in addition. The presence of music compared to visual-only presentations strongly affected results in terms of higher accuracy in duration estimates, higher perceived arousal and valence, higher physiological activation and larger pupillary diameters, indicating higher arousal.
Results reveal that slow-motion scenes, compared to adapted real-time scenes, led to systematic underestimations of duration, lower perceived arousal but higher valence, lower respiration rates and smaller pupillary diameters. Participants were presented with slow-motion scenes taken from commercial films, ballet and sports footage, as well as the same scenes converted to real-time. The current study investigated time perception and emotional response to media clips containing decelerated human motion, with or without music using psychometric and psychophysiological testing methods. These states are simulated in films and video clips, and seem to resemble such experiences in daily life. The strong effects of slow motion on observers are hypothetically related to heightened emotional states in which time seems to pass more slowly. Slow motion scenes are ubiquitous in screen-based audiovisual media and are typically accompanied by emotional music.
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