Films as Technological Artefacts

Since the birth of cinema and the creation of the film industry, technological developments have driven changes in audio-visual language. More recently, the digital revolution and the expansion of the internet have had a major impact on the production of audio-visual content. The rapid evolution of media technologies has introduced new ways of communication and the possibility to represent more complex aspects of reality in different media, but such technologies still need to produce the desired experiences among audiences. In this context, the argument in this paper is that films should be understood as technological artefacts that can be studied with the tools offered by the human-computer interaction (HCI) field and the user-experience approach. User-centred designs, when applied to film, can provide useful methodologies to study the viewer experience of different audio-visual contents. In this paper, we present several studies in which the user approach has been taken. First, we describe a methodological tool to study emotional experiences from watching fully scripted films online and in natural contexts. Second, we describe three studies that focus on the emotional reactions to films of people with different cultural orientations. The results of these studies indicate that the integration of ideas and methods from film theory, and from the user-experience and cognitive psychological approaches to emotions, can provide a useful theoretical and methodological framework in which many aspects of films, and audience reactions to them, can be addressed.