The Melbourne International Film Festival is a foreign language art house film festival. In a world of superhero Hollywood blockbusters and sequels, our task was to raise awareness and attract audiences to films they’ve never heard of, starring actors they don’t know, in languages they don’t understand.

To create a new kind of movie trailer - The Emotional Trailer - we created a way to collect emotional data, that in-turn created a new emotional script for each film in the festival. With the emotional data script, we were able to physically display the way a movie would make people feel if they went to see it, and condense the entire move experience into less than a minute through our Emotion Simulator.

The Emotional Trailer is the perfect idea and channel amalgam, in that both the media and idea were co-dependent. Small format outdoor and PR promoted the Emotion Simulator activation.

We first held special preview screenings with movie critics to capture the 6 key human emotions of fear, anger, surprise, disgust, sadness and happiness for every film at the festival via our custom mobile app and biometric sensors. This data created an Emotional Script condensing an entire 2 hour film into under one minute. The data was then fed via electric stimulation into the facial muscles of willing participants to act out the emotional arc of an entire film, using the human face as a display. Before each film at the festival, audiences experienced the Emotional Scripts in a custom-built movie chair we called the Emotion Simulator. The simulator sessions sold out within two days. These live experiences were filmed, creating Emotional Trailers for every film at the festival, that the audience in the cinema, watching the live stream or on social media could book tickets from.

To do this we first held special preview screenings with movie critics to capture the 6 key human emotions of fear, anger, surprise, disgust, sadness and happiness for every film at the festival via our custom mobile app and biometric sensors. This data created an Emotional Script condensing an entire 2 hour film into under one minute. The data was then fed via electric stimulation into the facial muscles of willing participants to act out the emotional arc of an entire film, using the human face as a display. Before each film at the festival, audiences experienced the Emotional Scripts in a custom-built movie chair we called the Emotion Simulator. The simulator sessions sold out within two days. These experiences were filmed, creating Emotional Trailers for every film at the festival, that the audience in the cinema, watching the live stream or on social media, could book tickets directly from.