You’re sitting in a theater. The action and sound on thescreen makes your heart thump, your pupils dilate. That action and sound can makeyou sweat, clench your hands, cringe, or cry. Why is this, and can we exploitthis to make better eLearning video? How does video engage the viewer like noother medium we use?
When film was film and there was no video, it was calledmoving pictures. The directors at the time (early 1900s) came up with the ideasabout how camera movement and film editing exploited human emotions. But they didn’tunderstand what they were doing. They just did it.
What the cinema directors came up with about 100 years agostill works today. A cut happens inside a scene and a dissolve shows the passageof time or changing from one scene to another. These two tenets of filmmakingare so basic in the human emotional psyche that there’s not really asubstitute. Sure, we’ve made some crazy transitions over the years, but theyare still cuts and dissolves.
Those same directors (Eisenstein and DeMille to name justtwo) also exploited, (mostly unknowingly) how movement across the screen cancreate emotions, along with lighting effects, sound effects (even beforetalking pictures, sound was important), and all the other subliminal thingsthat go into creating an experience in cinema. Why does it matter how pictures move?Why does it matter? The answer is pretty complex.
Homo sapiens’ proclivity for movement is apparent, known,highly researched, and documented. On the savannah, humans used our unique peripheralvision at first to determine if there was a flight-or-fight scenario. Putsimply: eat or be eaten. Our peripheral vision may be unique but so is the waywe track objects. This is true both in the reality presented in front of oureyes in a scene and on a somewhat smaller screen. It’s the reality a videocreator wants us to see and feel. The art of forcing the eye to look at variousthings on a screen is invaluable and we don’t exploit it in eLearning nearlyenough.
Nanner nanner … made you look!
Sometimes you can’t stop yourself from looking. There is abody of research that shows how video (and cinema) is immersive. A talking headis rarely riveting to our eyes unless the presenter is so animated and tellssuch a good story that we cannot take our eyes of him or her. So I generallydon’t count talking heads as video. Video sometimes forces you to look wherethe video is telling you to look.
Techniques and how (and why) they work
As a developer or designer of media to support learning,think of it this way. The most basic, most subtle technique is movement acrossthe screen. Left-to-right tells us one thing. Right-to-left tells us somethingcompletely different.
Left-to-right movement shows progression of time. We alwaysgo from left to right in our culture. Surprisingly, even cultures whoselanguage is read in a different direction (Arabic or Hebrew or some Asianlanguages), left to right motion signifies progress, progression of time,positive elements, etc. This is something that we can use reliably in our videoto denote good things.
Conversely, right-to-left in a shot is read as menacing orconfused, but not progress or moving the story forward.
In a study at Cleveland State University, investigators useda clip that had left-to-right movement, then reversed the direction in all theshots to explain some of the movement-related perceptions that humans had. Theytested a large group of people to see what their perceptions would be about themovement across the screen. Here’s a video clip from “Now You See It” that explainssome of the research on this so you don’t have to take my word for it. Or youcan read the paper the researchers submitted for presentation to the VisualCommunication Division of the International Communication Association at theannual conference in Phoenix AZ, May 2012.
But what about other kinds of movement? For example,response to movement toward the camera or away from the camera is obviously notpossibly derived from cultural differences. Lateral movement is essentially two-dimensional.Toward and away movement relative to the camera becomes three-dimensional. Accordingto the ideas of film critic Roger Ebert, and other claims as presented in thevideo “Now You See It,” something coming directly toward the camera notespower, strength, or dominance. Movement away from the camera can show weaknessor diminishing of a character or object (the presenter’s words, not mine). Youcan also look down on a character either by having the camera above thecharacter or having a character be the camera so someone comes into the scenefrom “above” as in looking down on a character.
Looking down is looking down, whether it’s metaphorical orreal (as far as a video or film can get real), it really doesn’t matter. Whatmatters is how your audience reacts to movement in the scene. Other important movementswere not discussed in the article or in the video: for example, trucking, wherethe camera is moved along a track or is mounted on a pedestal with wheels—thecamera itself moves in this case. Interestingly, zooming a lens in and outdoesn’t have quite the same effect as moving the camera because there is noparallax movement behind the camera. We’re just getting closer to or furtherfrom the subject. It’s not as powerful because the audience knows instinctivelythat it’s a zoom and not a real movement.
Putting it to use
How do you begin to incorporate these concepts that I have verybasically introduced here into your next eLearning video? Even if you don’tmake video, these concepts are locked in your brain because of all the mediaaround us that makes use of them. The way that a director blocks a scene(determines character movement) and how and where objects appear in a scenemakes use of these concepts in order to establish key story elements. Blockingis a whole art in itself, and understanding movement is one of the keys toeffective direction.
Mostpeople know how to take video, although given how much video is shot verticallywith a phone makes me wonder. Takin’ ain’t makin’, for sure. But you know howto make video, correct? Since movement is so deeply embedded in our collective humanpsyche, it’s not too far-fetched to believe it’s part of how we make video,even if we don’t consciously know it. Gaining this knowledge, and learning howto use it, pushes your video-making skills to a whole new level.
