Suspension of Disbelief

When we watch (& listen) to a film one of the most basic functions of an audience is the psychological behaviour known as ‘suspension of disbelief’ i.e. willingly choosing to ignore that the events we are watching are not real. A negative comment you sometimes hear about a film expresses the opposite of this effect: ‘it pulled me out of the movie’ i.e. an element of the story, character development or performance, visual effects or soundtrack forced the audience member to give up their disbelief and become conscious. We’ve all experienced this and sometimes more often that we’d like, but explaining exactly why it has occurred can range from the obvious (eg ‘that just looks SO wrong!’) through to the cumulative disengagement due to the story lacking clear direction. Hopefully such problems are identified and resolved while the film is being made, and that is one of the primary reasons for preview screenings (& temp mixes!) but it is also why ADR is such dangerous territory: for an informed audience such as people working in sound post, it is more easy to identify bad ADR i.e. obvious problems as when sync is slightly off or the acoustic/audio quality of ADR does not quite match the surrounding dialogue, and more subtlely when the performance or energy level does not quite match the expressions and physical/visual performance. But for an audience that cannot identify the source of the problem, the end result is that it works to undermine their suspension of disbelief and that is dangerous territory.

Relatedly I just came across the DIEM Project which is a fascinating investigation of how people look and see, check out the following video: “This is an excerpt from There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007). 11 adult viewers were shown the video and their eye movements recorded using an Eyelink 1000 (SR Research) infra-red camera-based eyetracker. Each dot represents the center of one viewer’s gaze. The size of each dot represents the length of time they have held fixation.”

Here is a similar analysis of the trailer for Ice Age 3:

They have a lot more videos available here – I never knew such research was being done, but in hindsight of course it makes sense, although it makes me wish there was a way to receive real time feedback as to what the audience are paying attention to in the soundtrack, a far more complex task…

Another form of audience research that is available to anyone who has ever uploaded a video to youtube is insight and its ‘Hotspots’ function is interesting, as it plays a graph in sync with your video showing audience interest… including punching squelchy vegetables it seems!