INDUSTRY SMART CINEMA
WHAT IF FILMMAKERS AND STUDIOS COULD SEE HOW an audience is reacting in real time? ”
an Unreal Engine-powered stage and motion-tracked cinema cameras. “There are a number of different R&D streams,” explains Iain Gilchrist, professor of neuropsychology at the University of Bristol. “How can we stream content like Glastonbury to VR headsets at scale? How might we compress digital images? But what I do is very focused on understanding audiences because creative content succeeds or fails on the basis of response to the audience.” “What we’re asking is: can we assemble a toolkit of methods to measure audiences and responses to content – and then use those to inform creative decisions?” The team do this in three ways: firstly, classic focus groups, surveys and interviews. Secondly – and much more cutting edge – is through wearable tech like heart rate monitors and wireless brain activity recorders. Then thirdly, they use remote cameras that film people as they’re consuming content, monitoring things like micro movements, fidgeting, blinking and when they stop concentrating and dig into their popcorn. “If you sit in a 90-minute film, you might have highs and lows of how much you’re enjoying it and what your response to it is,” posits Gilchrist. “A questionnaire or focus group at the end isn’t really going to show whether scene 27 landed well, or how much a particular demographic appreciated a specific character. We can do moment-by-moment measurement.” A project with Bristol Old Vic proved revealing. Keen to expand livestreamed productions in the wake of Covid, the theatre partnered with the MyWorld team to explore how the remote viewing experience could be made as immersive and engaging as possible. Audience responses were monitored both inside the theatre and during streamed versions of the same performance, allowing the
researchers to compare how viewers reacted to different approaches to direction and cinematography. “The engagement and immersion of the livestream audience got better each time,” Gilchrist explains. “We really did inform, on a scene-by-scene, shot-by- shot basis, how that content should be shot to get as close as we could to the experience of the live audience.” The big question at the heart of it all is: what makes content immersive? What makes something so captivating
that you’re completely undistracted and tunnelled into what you’re watching? “That’s what we’re trying to measure because it’s that which determines whether you’ll carry on watching or not; whether or not you’ll watch the next series. We can measure that by looking at this synchrony between different participants. When different participants are synchronised in their physiological response to the content, that’s a very strong indicator of whether they are immersed or not.”
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