Conveying physical and emotional experiences

A film is in essence a conveyed set of experiences, visual, acoustic, emotional ones. Apart of all aspects of scenography and set architecture, where a good deal of credibility actually relies, also physical and emotional experiences can profit from scientific information: describing very well a hospital with all its interiors and machineries is important, but also rendering perceivable, actually liveable, the story involving a condition, symptoms, behaviours, feelings, perceptions, different combinations of altered senses, can be as important if not more. The same for sceneries underwater, or in the rarefied atmosphere of the highest peaks… How do we avoid that for some imperceptible reason, the audience “feels” that we’ve been shooting at a much lower elevation? How do we make the audience feel what the senses of a climber or of a diver feel? What makes that experience sensorially shareable?

There is quite a lot that Science and even ongoing studies are able to provide, that could help answering these questions. Many solutions have a scientific basis, yet they have been applied without any specific scientific knowledge, but rather have come out of simple experience and good powers of observations put into creativity. There is a language that our body and soul have and knowing that language is the aim of large efforts of scientific research. What Science makes available from those studies can be used with profit from the industry of creativity and of dreams made real.

While most audio visual effects are every better and better mastered by the state of the art in film industry (naturally often depending by the budget available), not all of our senses are taken into the audiovisual ride: perfumes, smells and tactile sensations are eminently left out, that would include easily also pain and pleasure. But how often did we have some “conscience”of pain, pleasure, even of smell and perfumes, just because we had been taken into a scene and a situation, including the skills of actors involved, that “feels” so true and real?

Empathy.

This is largely due to some of the most interesting characteristics of our nervous system. Two of its main factors are the mirror neuronal circuits (so called as they “mirror” what we see happening to someone else, somehow making us “aware” of the feelings and perceptions of who and what are we looking at) at the base of our empathic experience and synaesthesia (or synesthesia) a phenomenon by which a perception of a certain nature leads to a coscience or a perception of another nature, by crossing its neural pathway: so you perceive a number or a word or a letter as almost directly associated (almost as “being”) a color, or a smell, or even a mood. A synesthete is someone who experiences this constantly and in an extremely concrete way, but in some way with different intensities and by different associations, we all have some kind of synesthetic experience going on in our life. Evoking a sensation, often quite physical, by images, is something the film industry has been good at since its early days. Maybe since its very first one, with a train running right through the floor of the audience in a shaky footage by the Lumière Brothers… Another example where empathy plays a strong role?

A nice one: erotic films, you might include any form of more or less pornographic depiction in it. All of them do provoke by design a physical sensation while we just watch. Actually the less explicit scenes do have a higher evocative power due to their capacity of taking our perception into the ride: the most explicit scene might do far less if inserted in a context and a story that simply hasn’t “taken” us, while our mind, longing for the pleasure of a situation, fills the gaps of what does not hit the eye and gives us fullness of experience, in a story that we almost completely entered in with our feelings.

Another strong example: music and soundtrack. No need to explain here, we know their importance in making us feel. But it is good to remind us of one simple universal type of synesthesia we all have: a minor chord? sadness, fear, melancholy, absence, loss… A major chord? happiness, positivity, elation.

Synaesthesia.

Synestethic aspects are probably the most interesting ones when it comes to make someone feel what a film depicts. Not all that is part of a scene can be delivered directly to the audience: smell, tactile sensations, pleasure and pain, cold and warm… Yet they may turn important for a story or a scene. Many of these sensations not conveyable to the audience directly can in fact be delivered by the roundabout ways of synesthesia. Sound, noise, colours, music, all of it can be filtered and edited to at least partially convey a physical sensation of pain, pleasure, cold or warmth…

Many situational contexts might really need this sort of physical authenticity. If you have a story involving or based upon some sleep disorder or some kind of mental condition, you might consider that part of your audience has a personal experience, that you have to somehow meet, in order to have sensorial and emotional credibility by them. While another large part of the audience might have not the slightest inkling of that type of experiences. You need then to be credible by the first part of audience and at the same time able to evoke a real experience in the second part, especially if your story has among its aims to show and share what such a given condition means to those who have it.

There is no specific recipe for it though, and this is also good: it leaves it all open to our artistic and creative imagination. But two main aspects might help us with a solid basis to build upon: one is knowing what scientific data or even anecdotes say about a given situation, the other one is to know what audiovisual stimuli can evoke in the viewers in order to set them in the context we want to design.

Understanding some scientific literature is unavoidable for a thorough preparation of the first aspect, while the second aspect can be also helped by understanding the mechanisms of synesthetic perception, at least in its general terms, in order to exploit them.

Good reads:

Ward et al. Synesthesia, creativity and art: What’s the link?  British Journal of Psychology (2008), 99, 127–141 © 2008 The British Psychological Society.