SMART CINEMA INDUSTRY
a film, offering amazing insight into how audiences respond to specific scenes, editorial rhythms and visual choices. All very cool: but a faint alarm bell starts ringing at the prospect of a future where this rich well of information creates a risk of creativity being stifled in the pursuit of optimisation and adherence to data- driven formulas. MyWorld’s Katie Martin argues the exact opposite. “We’ve talked to a lot of people in industry, and we know how they make decisions. They know what format worked before, and a lot of recycling of content that worked at a moment in time goes on, and then they exhaust it. “We would argue that what we’re doing enables more innovation within storytelling; innovation that the sector doesn’t seem to want to let happen so much any more. When you’re relying on viewership data or data that comes after the fact, you get quite homogenised content over time – but we want to de- risk creative risk taking. We’re giving an opportunity to try something out, test it in detail in front of a real audience and see what works without spending much money, before committing to a full series or feature film – whatever it is.” Gilchrist is also careful to stress that the technology is intended to help inform creative decisions rather than dictate them. “We’re not going to tell you that you should have done a long shot there, or why didn’t you go for a close-up,” he says. “What we do find, though, is that the really important thing is the story. Good storytelling seems to dominate the level of immersion.” Right now, the focus is on gaining traction in TV and film, but Gilchrist sees potential in the tech being used within educational settings – say, monitoring students’ level of engagement in lectures – or in business training videos. “We’re spinning this out into a company called Hidden Signals. It’s a really exciting emerging space to be in,” says Martin. “In a world of AI chaos, and all these questions around human creativity, we feel really passionately that we’ll always have humans as part of the process. They’re the ones that watch your content, who buy tickets to cinemas.” “It’s always got to be human centred,” agrees Gilchrist. “You can’t replace an audience with AI.”
THINKING SMART Rob Hifle, director of the first film screened at Smart Cinema (above), and Iain Gilchrist, a professor of neuropsychology (left), are exploring new ways of test screening (top)
The reason, he explains, is that if two people are watching the same film – in a moment that’s particularly captivating – the thing that’s driving our physiology is the content. “You know exactly what happens on the screen is going to be reflected in my physiology,” he explains. “And if it’s a moment where it’s completely immersive and engaging, then the same is going to be true of you, and that means, as a byproduct, our physiology is correlated.” That level of synchrony can be mapped moment by moment across
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