| In his project for the autumn, 2000, fractal geometry course, Olaf Schneider used driven IFS to study patterns in the film Pulp Fiction. | ||
| Schneider selected this film because of its merits, established through the many awards it won, and the way it polarized audiences. People seemed to either love or hate the film, leading to Roger Ebert's remark that "it is possibly the most unpopular movie ever to gross $100 million at the American box office." | ||
| Schneider gives a good explanation for his choice of this film. | ||
| "Pulp Fiction delights some audience members and disturbs others, I think, for the same reason: because it toys with their expectations. The movie is more subtle and complex than at first it seems. The screenplay turns out to contain the answers to mysteries that baffle viewers in a first viewing, and it makes connections that only occur to you after watching the movie several times. The film tells interlocking stories, which unfold out of chronological order, so that the movie's ending hooks up with the beginning, most of its middle happens after the ending , and a major character is onscreen after he has been shot dead. This seemingly circular plot first led me to suspect that I might find a fractal pattern in this movie." | ||
| He continues, | ||
| "many things in nature produce fractal patterns, perhaps we as humans identify them on an unconscious level and this unconscious awareness allows us to reproduce these patterns in our attempt to recreate life through films. The rhythm of a movie then, might consist of a correlation of several visual features that form a pattern that corresponds to fractals in nature." | ||
| Schneider performed two driven IFS experiments, both based on the sequence of shots in the film. | ||
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| Gathering this data is laborious, even with a good stop-action video player. | ||
| Schneider speculates on the presence of some combinations that may distinguish Tarantino's style from that of others, but more films by more directors need to be analyzed in this way before we can feel confident about the validity of driven IFS for studying films. |