What’s the difference between watching your favourite film in a cinema (even watching more than once) and at your own place? Let’s have a quick revision of what Immersion is in the first place.
Deep engagement (or sensorial engulfment) with a stimulus
One of the reasons that we decided to watch an art piece in a cinema, or a cinema-like space (e.g. RMIT theatre) rather than in front of our own laptop, would be the environment, right? A totally dark space, an overwhelming surrounding sound system, the huge screen with you sitting in front of it, all helping us to create a deep engagement with what we are watching, till to make us immerse in it. Even though, as the technology of cinema is keep improving, we could easily have a more technically immersive experience these days, no matter the IMAX theatre, Dolby Atmo system, and the 4DX theatre that became extremely popular in the East Asia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu4M5SL6Em4
My relatively immersive experience, would be attending the RMITV movie night where screening an Oscar-winning film, Inception. Besides the ‘environment’ that the RMIT theatre was pretty cinema-liked with free snacks provided, the incredible visual effects while protagonists were in dreams, and the interesting theory behind this (i.e. Lucid Dream trick), would be what caused me been immersed in that 2-hour film (of course, this kind of supernatural genre films would always be my favourite that easily pulled me in even I had watched them before).
As well as, a numerous amount of visual effects, so called Computer-generate Imagery (CGI) could be one of the factors that made us been immersed in films, like what Shane Denson mentioned in this week’s reading, filmmakers nowadays intended to use CGI as a shortcut to stimulate our nervous system and perception, that made us fell into the world of films without passing through the middleman (the story plot I guess?) like what drugs and cigarettes could be able to, which made fancy films like the MCU and the Transformer series being that unprecedentedly popular over the world.
Impressive, huh? cr. GCTV
Another reading that recently published by Ute Hall, had also stated that Cinema is highly linked to our nervous system as well, but using a totally different term called ‘Trance’, that seeing this kind of immersion as a ‘psycho-physical technology’ (an article where full of abstractive terms like this), by using the example of the Montage editing trick. Sometimes, something noticeable coming out in between ordinary editing scenes might pull audiences out of their trance, however, when this kind of tricks had been widely used by editors, it would become something ordinary instead from time to time in audiences’ point of view, where a movie that without a various of tricks would be treated as boredom.
Whoosh~ cr. tvtropes
For instance, the ‘Whoosh pan‘ transition, which might look pretty distractive and weird a decade ago, however, when it had been overused by editors (by us?), it had naturally turned into an unnoticeable and cool trick in commercial videos (for me, attractive and immersive as well), that they can’t live without it if a video maker wants to be considered as professional and gain more views on YouTube.
Reference
Hall, U. (2017). Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics. Amsterdam University Press. pp. 23-31
Denson, S. (2016). Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Mediation of Post-Cinematic Affect. Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. pp. 193-200
Cineworld Cinemas. (2015, January 19). 4DX at Cineworld – How does it work?. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu4M5SL6Em4