Friday Fundas: Recipe for movies to connect with Audience
There are numerous reasons a film script is successful. One of the factors for success is the ability of a movie to connect with the audience. The more the audience is connecting to the script the more engagement happens and eventually they like the film.
Naturally human beings react to 5 senses see, hear, smell, taste and touch and 6th intellectual sense. If the script is able to connect with the six senses then there is a natural connection that happens.
See: Film is a visual medium and it can easily connect to this sense. The visual portrayed connect to the audience. Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali has an iconic scene of the kids running through the fields to see a running train. The scene would connect well with people who spent their childhood near a railway line and have experienced this or even run through a paddy field.
Hear: Audio plays a very important role in the movie. This is where sound engineering plays a major role. Slumdog Millionaire created the sounds that one would hear in the Dharavi area very aptly which made the visuals look more real.
Smell: This is one of the difficult senses to get across to the audience although there has been experiments made to create smell in theaters based on the visuals but nothing has been put into commercial use yet. However through the characters in the movie or in the dialogues this could be manifested. In the movie Lunch box you see the lead character smelling the tiffin box and leaving for lunch immediately. This would get the audience connected to the scene.
Taste: This again can be conveyed through a visual medium. The movie Kahaani had Kolkata as a character in the movie. The street side chat shops have been used to create an ambience and many scenes involve the actors or the side characters eating in those shops. Lunch box is another good example where food plays a major part of the narration and it is shown beautifully that you end up feeling hungry. This makes the audience relate to the sense of taste.
Touch/Feel: Similar to smell this can be narrated through visual elements. Many a times you would have felt goose bumps when watching the movie. In the movie Making of Mahatma when Mohandas starts walking on his own and slowly the scene builds up where more and more people join him the march you get a sense of pride and goose bumps. Compelling narration could manifest a variety of feeling in the audience to have them connected.
Intellectual: The sixth sense of the human is intellectual and a good script should never “insult the intelligence” of the audience and would never connect well with them. In the movie Jurassic Park Director Speilberg and writer Crichton prepare the audience in the first 20 minutes to create a convincing case for the possibility of recreating the dinosaurs which had got extinct 65 million years ago. This created a very successful movie and also allowed them to create more sequels to this.
Every individual is different and there is not a single movie which everyone has liked it. A movie or a script becomes a hit then many people have connected to it. If it is strongly liked only by a set of people then it gets a cult status. Not all hit movies would have connected to the six senses of the audience but all movies that have failed to do so.
