How to Evoke Emotion from Film

Introduction

To cap off an amazing year at Freestyle Academy, we were assigned an "Explorations" unit. In this unit, we could take any topic we wanted and simply dive into it and create a coherent project. I am centered around the ability to evoke emotion in literature, so I really wanted to explore how to evoke emotion through film. I truly enjoy film and I'm entering the film class next year at Freestyle, so I wanted to get a head start on learning the dynamic of film.

Shooting and editing my first work of film was a fantastic experience. The way the project just came together was truly a surprise to me, and I learned a lot from this project. I learned how to use Premiere, match up audio to video, operate a video camera, and export MP4 files. Welcome to my Explorations website!

The Anatomy

Humans are programmed to react to film. It is in our genetics to smile when an actor or actress smiles, and to duck our heads if something flies towards the camera. It is human instict to feel the emotion of what is being portrayed on the big screen. The ability to capture an audience and evoke emotion all depends on the anatomy of the human mind. Pawlowski, a contributer to the website "TODAY" has a theory on the anatomy of the human mind and cinema. Pawlowski refers to this relationship as the "Mirror Rule". She says: "One way that we perceive emotion in film is through I process I call the Mirror Rule, which says that it’s a good idea to mimic the visual input that you’re seeing. So if you walk up to somebody and they smile at you, it’s good to smile back." When we see joy on the screen, we unconsciously or consciously reflect what we see on a molecular level. All of the reactions we have from a film are ingrained through electrical pulses in our brains.

"According to Jeff Zacks, a psychology professor at the University of Washington, "it turns out there are complex processes happening in multiple areas of the brain that allow us to get swept up in a movie”. Zacks says that flinch response is actually the result of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution."

The Cinematography

Cinematography consists the power to evoke extreme emotions of happiness, sadness, or horror through the mastery of a cinematic syntax that has been fine tuned for over a century. First, exceptional camerawork is essential: shot sizes, angles, and movements are the heart of camerawork. On top of that, “Light is the chisel that sculpts the mood of any image on screen.” (Gennard). There are four attributes to light: intensity, angle, and texture. With each form of light comes a red to blue color temperature measured in Kelvin degrees. To evoke emotion fully, the manipulation of the red to blue color temperature scale is a very useful asset to have. I volunteer at an organization named "Challenger Baseball" frequently, and my time there actually inspired my Spoken Word Poem in english that we wrote in the first semester. The amazing experiences I have had at Challenger Baseball all revolve around emotion. I originally was going to make a short film about Challenger Baseball on my own time over the summer, so it was amazing that I got to work on this project as an actual assignment. My central question is: "How to Evoke Emotion from Film." I hope you enjoy my representation of how to evoke the emotion of joy from film!

Experimental Music

We were assigned to compose a song using the program "Reason" based on what we were instructed on for the previous couple weeks. I went through a couple different songs, and here's one with a bit of a mash up of some of them and also I wanted to explore putting dialogue into Reason.