So, I wanted to base my project on something that involved film and emotion. These were things that I was really interested in, and I wanted to combine the two. I struggle with mental health issues which hinder me from making connections with other people and understanding and emotion and human connection. When I reflect on why I might be feeling this way, I deduced that it’s most likely trauma that I went though in my childhood and teens that has meant that I shutdown and block out feeling certain emotions because it’s always been safer for me to do that as opposed to feeling pain all the time.
This has led me to feel a disconnect from human interaction and difficulty forming strong relationships with people. I do however feel emotions strongly myself and one of my conditions symptoms is that you feel pain and anger more strongly than neurotypical people. This shut down of emotion can be isolating but what I have found is that I take comfort in film. With film I feel able to grasp other people’s emotions and I feel a strong connection to the characters and their stories which I wouldn’t normally feel otherwise. I find this connection quite therapeutic, and it has always been a form of escapism for me, as well as music, design and other sensory things. I wanted my project to involve a reflection of these feelings I was experiencing and why I felt so connected to film. Prior to this project I had always wondered how film managed to capture human emotion so resonantly and it was always a bit of a wonder to me.
One of my conditions I suffer from is anhedonia, which is the inability to experience pleasure. I find this quite debilitating sometimes and it often a symptom of my medications. But I remember reading about Charlie Brooker a long time ago and that he also suffers from this condition but it’s so inspiring that he’s made a tv show that will go down as one of the most well- received shows of all time. What I like about Black mirror is the emotional resonance. Although the show is quite dark and gloomy, it shows human emotion in a compelling way. I think maybe the shock value is something that resonates with Brooker as with anhedonia it is difficult to experience the subtleties of emotion as a viewer. In addition to this, sometimes this condition can make your thoughts really dark so that might sometimes diffuse into your work.
For this project I wanted to delve into the technicalities behind film, how they are able to portray narratives in a specific way and most of all how these stories become so emotionally relevant to people. What was it that was creating these strong emotions in people. I started to think up what I wanted my research question to be about. When I thought about the subject matter, I realised I was going to have to fit a lot of subjects and aspects into one question and this was going to be difficult. I wanted to explore, film sets and how the design of film sets evoked emotion and engaged people. I also wanted to look into film scores , camera angles and other techniques used to engage an audience. In the end I came up with this research question.
How do the design, including title sequences, and cinematic elements in films encourage and impact emotional connections, particularly for individuals with neurological conditions who experience flattening or emotional blunting. How can these aspects be optimized to enhance emotional engagement and foster emotional connections?"
After my talk with Ben, I realised that my question was inclusive of too many factors and that it would be difficult to get a nuanced and deep exploration of the subject matter with too many elements to the project. Ben advised me to look at film spectatorship on the whole as well as cognitive motor spectatorship and embodied spectatorship. After this tutorial I will admit I felt a bit defeated. I wasn’t sure what direction to go with this project, I felt a bit overwhelmed, and it felt as though I was going down more of a psychology/scientific route.
After I started researching these topics, I realised that Ben was right to send me down this route and I was able to pick out the subjects that were most significant to my preferences and project. Eventually I narrowed down my question to
How might film experiences be enhanced to maximize emotional engagement and sensory resonance for individuals experiencing both anhedonia and hyperesthesia? An autoethnographic exploration.
I chose this question because it more accurately described what I was trying to do. In one of the tutorials Ben mentioned that we should steer away from questions such as “how can design/how can I raise awareness” and anything that claims to be truly representative of a subject. I decided I wanted to talk about my own personal experiences with film, how I have emotionally engaged with film and how I can relate my feelings and experiences to the broader community. I wanted to focus on anhedonia and hyperesthesia because I suffer from these conditions simultaneously. Although on reflection I think I may just focus on anhedonia as it might be too difficult to focus on the hyperesthesia when a lot of people experience emotional and sensory overload. I thought maybe I should just consider how film experiences can be enhanced to be more engaging and emotionally resonant for people with emotional blunting. I also decided that I wanted to make my project autoethnographic.
After researching into autoethnography, I found some papers that were based on their own reflective experiences and some that were based on other’s experiences which had me feeling a bit confused about which direction to take it in. I did however feel more strongly about writing and reflecting on my own personal experiences and relating those experiences to the wider picture and literature. I decided I was going to do some kind of literature review and relate my own experiences back to the research to come up with new findings.
For our project proposal we had to include how we were going to ethically and carefully approach the research. I think because my project is mostly autoethnographic this won’t be too much of a problem but I did include how I would go about doing this if I were to include interviews.
I haven’t thought too much about what my final outcome will be yet as I am still in the early stages of looking into previous research, but I am thinking about creating some kind of sensory experience that would be engaging for both neurotypicals and people with anhedonia. This would be like a previous project I did called cinema for social change where I made a subscription box that included items that provided tangibility but also raised awareness for social change. Similarly, I would make a box that included sensory items that would reflect the film’s themes and essence.
