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Comment by linuxftw | Hacker News Reader

> In the last 100 years average shot duration has dropped from 12 to 5 seconds. Try to watch 60s westerns, like the dollar trilogy, today. Very sluggish pace. Viewers today like fast edits.

Do we like fast edits, or is this just being forced upon us? I absolutely hate the pacing of new movies. Super Hero movies take this into overdrive, each shot might only be 1-3 seconds, it's nauseating.

Every once in a while, I catch a modern movie with slower pacing. The problem with these movies is the reason for the slow pacing has nothing to do with the story, and is seemingly done for style reasons. Like it's a 2 second scene and they press pause for 8 seconds. Screen writers seem to be completely unable to write a 10 second scene.

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> Super Hero movies take this into overdrive, each shot might only be 1-3 seconds, it's nauseating.

Especially in contrast to movies like John Wick where the fight scenes tend to be decently long takes.

Perhaps if the scenes were designed with interesting events with-in them, then cuts wouldn't be needed as much to make them feel like 'movement' is happening.

There's also how you frame the visuals: Mad Max: Fury Road moved at a frenetic pace for almost the entire movie, but all the important bits were framed well, so there was less 'visual exhaustion' by the time the credits rolled.

They were framed well, yes, but also more specifically framed with the subject at the center of the frame, so not much eye movement was needed.

Live music videos really kill me with all of the fast cutting. When it comes to the guitar solo, I want to see the guitar being played. Unless the non-musician lead singer is doing something interesting, I don't want to see them during the solo. Same with the drummer or any one with a solo. We don't all have ADD/ADHD and can look at something longer than 10 frames.

I have wondered if it is cheaper to film a bunch, edit together enough shots that are super short but not complete shit, and call it a day.

I can't stand most modern movies because of the dramatically decreased average shot length. I just can't even watch most of them.

In my experience it's usually more expensive and slower to do it that way.

I liked the first Jason Bourne movie because the fight scenes showed the whole room and you could see the entire fight. I did not like the sequels because they were the opposite. Very fast edits where you couldn't really tell what was happening.

Fight scenes definitely took the brunt of this. First it was shaky-cam, then it was 100 jump cuts. Older action movies didn't suffer from this. I suspect it's much more time consuming and difficult (aka, expensive) to film real fight scenes. Despite the gargantuan budgets of modern films, very little seems to be left for actual acting and set design.

The infamous "36 jump cuts to hop a fence" scene from Taken...3(?) is so wild as to be parody, but its real. Just wild to me that it would make the cut.

Movie studios have to be trolling us at this point.

Maybe its a new version of "Sneaking the Wilhelm scream into everything", or the rumored "Make the stupidest TV hacking scene possible" contest that is supposed to have lead to the NCIS 'double keyboard jockey' scene.

What's forced on one generation becomes the default preference of the next.

Watch the movie "1917" for long takes. Short takes would ruin the harrowing experience the main characters suffer.

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