The director with the shortest average short length is Paul W.S. The chart below compares the average shot length for selected directors from the dataset. One of the ways we can measure the vast differences between the styles of different directors is to look at how they edit their movies (or, more correctly in most cases, how they instruct their editor to cut their movies). Both the Iron Man and Bourne series saw a significant reduction in the length of the average shot over the course of their first three movies. However, we can look at particular film series and see how they have evolved over time. I’d love to be able to see how this changes over time, but sadly there isn’t data on enough movies to draw conclusions. With this metric, we see the same cohort at the ‘fast-paced’ end – action films have an average shot length of 4 seconds, followed by adventure (5.1 seconds) and sci-fi (6.2 seconds).Īt the slow-paced end, we now see that horror films have the fewest cuts, with an average shot length of 15.7 seconds (almost four times longer than action movies!) (If you want to read more about the running time of movies then you may enjoy my article from last year entitled Are movies getting longer?). So let’s change our metric and look at the length of the average shot in seconds. Documentaries are often shorter than action films and this would affect the total number of shots. At the other end of the spectrum, action films have the highest number of shots (1,913), followed by sci-fi (1,701) and adventure (1,681).īy now, you may have started to wonder what the correlation is with running time. If we break the results down by genre, we can see that documentaries have the lowest number of shots (an average of 491 shots), followed by music-based movies (814) and romantic films (869). Russian Ark somewhat skews the average, seeing as it’s a 99-minute movie told in one continuous shot, whereas Doomsday held the record for the most shots in the dataset, at 4,052. Unsurprisingly, there are huge variations between movies. But I’m sure regular readers know that I’m not going to end the article purely because I’ve answered the original question! Across all the movies I could find data for (released 1997 to 2016), the average number of shots in a movie is 1,045. Let’s start by directly answering the question which started this research. Sadly, I lost count during the screening but afterwards, I resolved to look into the broader question: How many shots are in the average movie? How many shots are in the average movie? The constant fast-paced action and frenetic editing got me thinking just how many shots were in that movie. Last week, I experienced the latest Transformers movie.
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