Credit: Warner Bros
Most movies try for some semblance of storytelling, but trailers are all about hooking your eyeballs for a minute or two and leaving some sort of impression in your brain. Scott Brown of Wired wrote recently about how neuromarketing firms have been helping Hollywood create teasers and trailers that activate what he dubs the “neural g-spot.”
Companies such as MindSign Neuromarketing, a San Diego startup, use fMRI technology to track mental activity via blood flow in the brain. They then test out various movie or TV clips on human subjects, and watch what happens.
Such research supposedly yields mind-bending trailers that continually tickle the neural g-spot, and get viewers amped up for Hollywood’s next big blockbuster. The process sounds very similar to what I previously heard from Bob Knight, a neurologist at the University of California-Berkeley and scientific advisor to a different company called Neurofocus.
“If we’re analyzing a two-hour movie, we can extract the most salient parts for a trailer automatically,” Knight explained to me during a LiveScience interview.
But unlike MindSign Neuromarketing, Knight described fMRI brain scan technology as “not a viable technology for neuromarketing.” Knight and Neurofocus rely instead upon a method known Electroencephalography (EEG), which involves placing electrodes on people’s heads to read brain electrical activity.
Neurofocus also monitors the eye gaze of test subjects, along with skin response and heart rate. A proprietary computer algorithm then weighs each accordingly, and comes up with a best guess as to how a person is cognitively and emotionally responding to a certain movie or TV clip.
Perhaps one of the best examples of a trailer that might come from this approach is the one-minute teaser for the upcoming remake of “Clash of the Titans.” The updated version of the original sword-and-sandal 1981 film has replaced clunky stop-motion with a CGI-driven visual smorgasbord. (Hint: choose a higher resolution and expand to full screen for a better look).
I don’t have any expectations for storytelling greatness from the remake, given that the original was more about the technical achievements for its time. Yet the remake’s trailer is weirdly mesmerizing with all its frenetic pacing. There’s Sam Worthington’s character Perseus leaping! Fighting! Falling! Flying monsters attack!
YouTube viewers even rhapsodize over how a giant scorpion’s tail strike is timed with strident electric guitar notes that propel the visual frenzy forward. Some compare the remake to the video game “God of War” — a particularly bloody rendition of Greek-Roman mythology.
That’s all well and good for a trailer that wants to immediately grab the attention of would-be viewers. But Brown proposes a rather tongue-in-cheek thought experiment — what if the trailer trend extended into full film features?
Movies would become little more than a continuous series of images designed to furiously stimulate our brains’ pleasure centers. As Brown puts it:
“‘Formula’ is for suckers. It implies narrative — peaks and valleys. What MindSign seems to be offering is a new model — not formulaic, but fractal. Forget ups and downs, suspense and release. What if every moment were a spike, every scene ‘trailer-able’?”
Watching such hypothetical films might make for a constant thrill-ride, but I wonder what moviegoers would take away from the experience after walking out of the theater. Remove the peaks and valleys of narrative along with the compelling characters, and you’re left with a hazy memory of constant brain-titillation.
Assuming that you knew nothing about the original “Clash of the Titans,” could you piece together a coherent story from that trailer? How about the same experience extended over two hours? Could any film of that ilk even attempt to explore the complex, though-provoking issues raised by storytelling.?
That’s not to say that Hollywood directors won’t continue tinkering with neuromarketing for their trailers. They might even tweak segments of future films based upon neuromarketing research, so that they can enhance the climactic moments during the normal course of storytelling.
Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist at New York University, previously showed me how well-crafted films by the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and Sergio Leone exert a strong level of control over the cognitive and emotional response of viewers. The response pattern in the brain, as seen by fMRI, looked surprisingly similar across a group of test subjects.
“You can think about it as control by the director,” Hasson said. “Hitchcock managed to take each main area and cause it to respond in a similar way, so he basically controlled what’s going on in the brain.”
Hasson also warned that the rush to apply neuromarketing to Hollywood can sometimes lead to sloppy science and dubious marketing conclusions about audiences. But both Hasson and Knight agree that neuroscience will play a more prominent role for Hollywood in the near future.
That means even the lowliest directors might someday be able to achieve what Hitchcock and Leone accomplished — except that the masters used a storyteller’s eye rather than peeking inside our brains.
