Brain Puppeteering

• Film makers, neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists have teamed up to figure out just how movies effect their audiences. Their studies show that the human eye often follows most closely to the action occurring during a scene in a movie. As a result, movie makers have to be cautious about how much CGI they are adding and where. Too much CGI in obvious places looks unreal and takes attention away from what needs to be focused on. The audience's brain is the best visual effects tool for the movie makers to use since it stitches the scenes together so they make sense. Also, faces and physics should be given special attention. Faces are hard to accurately replicate even with motion capture technology and the human brain is hard wired to recognize the human face. The more believable the face, the better the brain can recognize the face and relate to the character. Secondly, the audience can tell when a fall doesn't look or feel right, so the movie maker has to be extra careful to make sure that if a car is going to be tumbling and rolling, it can't look like a light weight tumble weed blowing in the wind. It has to look like a real car with real weight to create a sense of reality in the mind of the viewer. Further research is going into exactly how the brain stitches scenes together, but so far they know that our eyes take a bit of information from different sources and puts them together in a seamless stream of stimuli., even though that is not the case in reality.

• I thought this was a very useful article. These are things that all film makers, animators, or even novices should know. I learned that the brain draws little bits of information from all over the scene and it puts them together as though it was a single continuous stream. I definitely agree with what was said in the article. All of this is scientifically backed and makes a lot of sense if you really thing about it. How was a heat map generated for this experiment? If an aspiring film maker or someone else of a similar field can keep this in mind and uses it skillfully whenever they are working on a project, their films will always keep the viewers' eyes on track and never loose their attention from the main focus. This is definitely a useful skill to have and remember.