The average person throughout their lifetime spends five years waiting in lines and queues where roughly six months of that is waiting at traffic lights.
This reflection combines many seemingly seperate elements and disciplines. One of the inherent difficulties in auditing the immersive qualities of a foyer is that you very easily begin analysing the architectural aspects of the space and can neglect understanding what it actually is about that space that immerses you. I argue that the most important feature of any foyer is the way in which it uses light stimuli. The first experience one has of a movie is not the logos, it’s the foyer. And make no mistake, the immersive qualities of the space that prepares you for the film can have a lasting impact on the film itself. As I’m sure many of my group members would argue the experience of the inside of the theatre itself is also important (a dodgy speaker or a bad projector can easily ruin a film). As you walk into Metro Cinemas in Boronia, the experience feels cheap before you’ve even bought your half priced ticket. Whilst in contrast, the beautiful atrium space at Westfield Knox’s Village Cinemas can play host to midnight screenings with Chewbacca-cosplay-DJs or a sophisticated corporate event.
Casinos are designed with one goal in mind, to make you forget what the time is. I think the manipulation of light in any foyer space is incredibly important. Entertainment venues, buy-and-large operate on this principal. The target audience doesn’t necessarily have to be high-income earners to warrant a huge, oppulent foyer. The goal is to encourage spend, Charles S. Gulas and Peter H. Bloch’s entry in the Journal of Business and Psychology suggests, “Despite frequent mention, we know relatively little about the effect of ambient environmental factors on consumer behaviour.” The idea of scent in Real Estate is quite prevalent and research would seem to suggest that cinnamon measurably affects how much consumers are willing to spend. Real Estate agents believe that a well decorated entrance-way to a house suggest that the property is ‘worth every penny’. For this reason, the target demographic aren’t rich just because the space is expensive, the assumptions that are being made here is that by investing in a beautiful space, you psychologically reinforce the idea of inherent value.
When you walk into Eastland Hoyts or Cinema Nova in Carlton, the smell of the candy bar hits you instantly. Scent is immersive because its emotional and emotions circumvent the logical aspects of our brains and drive impulses. Some accountants have suggested that this is the reason credit card’s drive debt; “this failing is rooted in our emotions, which tend to overvalue immediate gains (like a new pair of shoes) at the expense of future costs (high interest rates). The emotional brain just doesn’t understand things like interest rates or debt payments or finance charges.”
Crown’s foyer is incredible, just the sheer number of stimuli, from the water-fountain staircase to the moving head lighting fixtures on the roof, data controlled in sync with the Disneyland-like music which fills the air as much as the trademark Crown smell (Sidenote: the Crown smell is a real thing; my friends’ father works for the company that produces it and he sprays it in his car). The lighting is where I think the real magic happens. There are not only timecode driven intelligent lighting fixtures on the roof. The colours that they use almost usher you from the natural light of outside into a completely artificially lit environment. The casino itself has no natural light because again, it is trying to make you forget the time so that you spend hours and dollars inside.
Likewise with cinemas, the exclusion of natural light in the foyer is a gateway to the experience beyond. If you’ve ever watched a film during the day and come out while there’s still light outside, it’s often not until you actually leave the premises that you remember that it’s still day time. Simon Rankel, an LED lighting specialist suggests, “Contemporary urban lighting design involves holistic light planning. In addition to the importance of functionality, cost, maintenance, light pollution and energy use, the architectural, aesthetic and emotional value of such proposals should also be considered.” “The circumplex model of affect developed by James A. Russell (1980) as a framework for studying environmental impacts on emotional response assumes that affects and emotional states can be best described by two main dimensions: arousal and valence.” Without going into copious detail on terminology, Russel suggests that all immersive experiences exist somewhere on a two-dimensional plane where X is arousal (stimulated to the point of perception) and Y, valency (scale of neurological movement). “perceiving pleasant or unpleasant qualities, and activating or deactivating qualities of external triggers (stimuli), such as buildings, places and events, is the second elementary foundation in the psychological interpretation of emotions.” This is where the crossover between architectural design, media, psychology and business science, essentially comes to a head. A good introductory space achieves good scores in all disciplines. And again, Russel refers to the idea that these all combine to create, “the perception of affective quality”.
The use of the colour red is often attributed to an increase in appetite, yet the colour is also very prevalent in cinema foyers. This, I believe can also be attributed to both the need to sell popcorn and the long tradition of red in theatrical spaces. The red curtain opening, though not as common in theatrical practise today, is as dramatically conventional as they come. Some cinemas still crop their screen with red fabric. At Village Cinemas, Knox, the first level is illuminated, primarily by very diffused, red light eminating from a huge lantern installation that has been there probably since the beginning of time. One of the sounds that I noted in every venue I visited was the sound of gaming machines. Cinema arcades, slot machines, racing voiceovers, air hockey strikers. I wouldn’t be able to say this has a particularly psychological affect, though there is an immersive quality to it, in the sense that the space is in some way narrated by the arcade machines and they give you a very nostalgic sense of place similar to the candy bar smell that also brings that emotionally immersive, nostalgic, home feeling in a place like the cinema.
“Entryways, therefore, not only set the tone for the type of interactions that are valued at the [venue], but also provide a welcoming space for people to gather and exchange ideas.” Ogden, et al. (2010). In their journal article on How Entryways and Foyers Foster Social Interaction Holly Ogden and her peers explore the connections between social psychology and the architectural space. The cinema is an inherently social venue. Christopher Nolan’s exploration of shared dreaming is a play on the idea that the movies are where we go to ‘dream together’. The cinema foyer is more than anything, a baptism of voices. In auditing the immersive characteristics of any cinema foyer, the most prevalent stimuli are conversations. People exiting films, buying tickets, catching up after long periods of time. Cinema Nova has the added bonus of being integrated with a cafe which is a risk in a venue where movie food is almost always purchased in the cinema itself. Again the social affordances of the space are highlighted by the way in which the space has been efficiently constructed.
Just as the psychological and emotional effect of previews before a film are often overlooked the spaces that we inhabit before the film begins are too. Sylvie Droit-Volet and Sandrine Gil’s journal article begins by explaining that, “under the influence of emotions, humans can be extremely inaccurate in their time judgements,” this is labelled the ‘time-emotion paradox’, this is essentially the culmination of much of the previous discussion. When we are immersed in a film, we essentially forfeit our bodies and play host to the experience on the screen. Some have described the process of cinematography as the process of, “chopping the audience’s head off and replacing it with the camera.” When we’re immersed by an environment we can lost our grasp of time especially when the stimuli we use to form relative assumptions is not present and this has a lasting effect on the way our subconscious experiences a film and leaves us with that feeling of awe when the credits roll like you’ve just woken from a mid-day nap (what year is it?).
When emotions are skilfully manipulated by artists, the spectator is immersed, either knowingly or subconsciously. The experience of the cinema is, ultimately defined by the film you see. Though, there is certainly something to be said for design in the context of bringing the audience into the film and as a largely social experience the cinema is designed with you, the audience in mind, to bring you not only physically into the space, but emotionally and psychologically into the world of the film and beyond that, infer some sort of value on your time there; the first step in the escapist journey to the screen.
Lehrer, Jonah. “The Science of Spending.” RSA Journal, vol. 155, no. 5537, 2009, pp. 22–27. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41379923.
Gulas, Charles S. and Bloch, Peter H. “Right under Our Noses: Ambient Scent and Consumer Responses.” Journal of Business and Psychology, vol. 10, no. 1, 1995, pp. 87–98. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25092493.
RANKEL, Simon. “Future Lighting and the Appearance of Cities at Night: A Case Study.” Urbani Izziv, vol. 25, no. 1, 2014, pp. 126–141., www.jstor.org/stable/24920905.
Holly Ogden, et al. “Entering School: How Entryways and Foyers Foster Social Interaction.” Children, Youth and Environments, vol. 20, no. 2, 2010, pp. 150–174. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.7721/chilyoutenvi.20.2.0150.
Olenina, Ana. “The Doubly Wired Spectator: Marston’s Theory of Emotions and Psychophysiological Research on Cinematic Pleasure in the 1920s.” Film History, vol. 27, no. 1, 2015, pp. 29–57. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/filmhistory.27.1.29.
Droit-Volet, Sylvie, and Sandrine Gil. “The Time-Emotion Paradox.” Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, vol. 364, no. 1525, 2009, pp. 1943–1953. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40485970.
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