I studied the dialogue in 64,332 movies released between 1940 and 2022. Each movie’s writing was scored using four metrics, which will allow us to see the change over time. Vocabulary variety ...

Hollywood cinema is not known to be a bastion of truth. It’s a place where entertainment and expediency are prioritised over accuracy and authenticity. It's frequently claimed that NASA uses the 1998 ...

A new video from me, under The Film Data Scientist banner, examining the claim that "Go woke, go broke" applies to movies.

A larger market for independent films worldwide is emerging, and I don’t think the industry has fully taken on board the consequences yet. To be clear, I think the individual forces behind this are ...

This is part one of a two-part deep dive into how the film industry is changing. This one focuses on the adverse effects, with the follow-up next week focusing on the positives. So strap in, this is ...

Films evolve in many small ways that are easy to miss if you are not looking for them. One area I had not studied before is shot composition. It is such a basic building block of visual storytelling ...

Last week in an article about how long your film needs to be to be accepted into film festivals, I mentioned in passing that a 90-second short film was eligible at nine out of ten film festivals I ...

There’s a lot of advice out there about ideal running times for festivals, and most of it boils down to one thing: keep it short. A while back I interviewed over 500 film festival directors. When I ...

Colour is one of the quickest ways a poster can tell you what kind of film it’s selling. Before you’ve read the title or registered the actors, your brain has already clocked the palette and filed it ...

This is final part of my collaboration with Screendollars in which we spoke to 246 cinema owners and exhibition-affiliated film professionals. We quizzed them on a range of topics, and their answers ...

Last Friday I was in Munich to speak at the Creators Conference of the German Producer Alliance as part of the Munich Film Festival. It was a really fun project as the event’s curator, Erwin M.