We all feel the same basic emotions: fear, anger, surprise, disgust, sadness and happiness. And no matter where you are from you don’t just see a film, you feel it. So using the human face as a display, emotional data collected from film critics and an innovative use of technology, we created movie trailers that spoke every language. The Emotional Trailer.

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 also experienced the Emotional Scripts in a custom-built movie chair we called the Emotional Simulator. The simulator sessions sold out within two days. All these experiences were filmed, and created Emotional Trailers for every film at the festival. Trailers that the audience in the cinema, watching the live stream, or seeing on social media, could book tickets directly from.

The highest ever sales results in MIFF’s history. The Emotional Trailers drove an 800% increase in social shares. Tickets to preview films sold out within two days. The excitement around the Emotional Simulator and Emotional Trailers drove the following festival records.

800% Increase in social shares for the festival

Biggest ticket sales in MIFF’s 65 year history

$30,165,012 in earned media

Number 1 attraction at the festival

14 million people reached

40% Increase in mobile traffic to website

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 visualize the way a movie would make people feel through a human face, and condense the entire move experience into less than a minute through our Emotional Simulator.

To do this we first held special preview screenings with prominent 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 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) is a foreign language art house film festival. In a world of Netflix, iPads and superhero Hollywood blockbusters, 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.