Conveying emotions in video. THE BEGINNINGS.

Our reality is greatly influenced by our senses. Senses are intimately connected to our emotions. From the moment we wake up until we fall asleep, we use our vision to understand the world around us. It is only natural that a big part of our emotional response is created by what we see in front of us. Today, we spend most of our day looking at a digital reality. Indeed, according to the last CNN survey, American people spend an average of 10h per day on their screen. From the beginning of motion picture in the 19th century many people have tried to understand what is the effect of an image on our emotions. Let’s have a look at the beginnings of conveying emotions in video.

“Emotions create a fingerprint on our experience. They organize everything we experience and we only react emotionally to those thing that may be important for us. In this sense, they serve us like a compass.”

Maria Gablikova, CEO Emotion ID

The Power of Good Editing

Of course, there have been a lot of movements in cinema. But there is one that in our opinion revolutionized the way video conveys emotions: the Russian movement.

Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin movie is still considered as a masterpiece in cinema

• In the 1920s, Kuleshov, Eisenstein and Vertov, major Russian directors at the time brought a handful of new techniques in the modern cinema, especially in editing video! This experimental cinema is called the Russian movement or Russian montage. It really shifted the emphasis of video creation on the audience.

Eisenstein, a pioneer in editing videos

• Now you can not watch a music video without cuts every 3 seconds. 90 years ago, cutting a scene was inconceivable. At that time, movies consisted in whole scenes with a notion of continuity. Eisenstein is the guy who disrupted these conventions. As a pioneer of modern film-making, he invented for example the cutting on action, and POV shot or Eyeline match which are very usual in the modern cinema today.
• Eisenstein also aimed at impacting the viewer as much as possible by showing strong emotional shots and immerse him/her in the video. The purpose of editing was to make the movie as real as possible. A movie like Battleship Potemkin is still considered as one of the most revolutionary movies ever. It is one of the first movies depicting a real event, a massacre of the population by the Tsarist in 1905.
• Indeed, Russia was devastated by the civil war and the extreme famine in 1921, so Eisenstein decided to represent real happenings in his movies. The idea is that if you depict things people can identify with, it will impact deeply them. They will assimilate the image with their experience.

The Kuleshov experiment

• In 1922 Kuleshov developed a revolutionary technique called the Kuleshov experiment. Basically, according to Kuleshov, diverse emotions can be conveyed by combining different images. It means the same image in a different context can create two different emotions on the same person.
• Try it yourself — look at the images below. With the first sequence, you would assimilate the character’s face to the feeling of hunger. The 2nd sequence gives you the feeling that the character is very sad. The last one sequence makes you think the character is desiring the woman. You see, the same picture carries a different message in a different setting. Well, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Kuleshov proved that you can infer the mental state of others with what you make them see.

The Kuleshov effect

Let’s not forget to talk about Dziga Vertov and his movie The man with the movie camera. According to Vertov, camera should become the eye of the viewer. If you have the feeling that you are actually in front of that scene, that YOU are the film-maker, your involvement increases.

Russian montage had a great impact on modern cinema and most of the techniques are used even in online video. Cuts and other editing techniques have been improved of course. However, even if Russian editing helped the audience to get into the center of attention, the “4th wall” still exists between the screen and the viewer.

Deadpool and other movies partially succeeded to break the 4th wall by talking to the audience. But Deadpool has no idea how the viewers received his jokes and actions. What if a video-maker could actually know how his audience reacted to his video?

Youfirst: a link between the screen and the viewer

Let’s think about it for a few seconds… imagine you are sending a video to a friend, unless he told you it was very funny with 2 or 3 smileys, you can not know how he feels about it. Now, if you are watching a video together and you see your friend laughing, you know that he found your video funny. It means facial expression and people’s gesture are the reflection of emotions. But your friend does not have much of a statistical value — it is just one person.

• In 2009, the American serie Lie To Me was released. The basic plot is this: Dr. Cal Lightman helps police with resolving criminal affairs thanks to his ability to analyse people´s facial and body expressions. The interesting thing about this series is that it is actually based on the real work of Paul Ekman, a famous American psychologist.

Lie to me logo made by Andiezoe

• And if a computer was able to do it also? That is the concept Youfirst. It allows any video creator to use emotion AI and understand how the audience reacted while watching a video. Did they appreciate your jokes with happiness, or disgust? Did your voice make them angry? And what about the music that you have used?

Youfirst can actually establish this amazing trust link between the video-maker and his audience which paves the way for another revolution in video editing.