audio storytelling to increase intentional film ENGAGEMENT
Movie theaters across the US are shutting down, replaced by minute-long content that fits in our pockets. Alarmed by my own inability to absorb media intentionally, I pursued a nine-month independent study to understand the structures that support our intentional engagement with film. This research culminated in a four-episode podcast series, Filmosophy, which reveals the implicit systems that influence our media engagement and guides listeners to behavioral self-awareness. Filmosophy takes a look at the United States’s and France’s engagement with film to understand the contexts that support and deter intentional film engagement to bring to light the invisible forces on our behavior and inspire meaningful experiences with media. Applying cultural theory, systems design, and experience design to hours of interviews, Filmosophy allows you to better understand the context in which you dwell to understand your own behavior better. You can give it a listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
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Collected over thirty hours of interviews and synthesized key insights into one hour of compelling narrative audio content.
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If you spend hours every night doom scrolling and rarely make it to the movie theater, don’t feel bad…it’s not your fault. Our behavior is a result of the many systems of power, governance, economies, social beliefs, and communities that impact us. In the production of Filmosophy, I researched and compared the US and France’s infrastructures and cultural beliefs that motivate/dissuade film engagement to better understand our behavior.
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In Filmosophy, I explore the “experience” of going to the movie theater, dissecting the beginning and end of this experience, the communities that take part, the economy attached to it, and the infrastructure that supports it. Additionally, this project brought me to Sundance Film Festival, where I volunteered and drew insights on the largest independent film festival in the US.
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Pursuing an independent study for nine months involved international research, conducting dozens of interviews, analyzing copious data, and synthesizing months of research into an hour of compelling audio storytelling. I created deadlines and stuck to them, asking for support from mentors and peers when needed to successfully complete the project.
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Conducted thematic analyses to reveal trends in data, synthesizing thirty hours of interviews and dozens of articles and texts into one hour of compelling narrative
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Utilized non-bias interviewing techniques to conduct interviews, putting interviewees at ease. Implemented guerilla interviewing techniques to increase reach of interviewees.
Read more about Filmosophy here:
I buy myself a 4 pm Sunday movie ticket for a film screening at the Hopkins Center for the Arts. The theater is less than half full and I am the only student: a standard demographic for mid-day Sunday screenings on campus. Dartmouth showcases a weird paradox: although the Hopkins Center for the Arts and the Hood Museum of Art offer an abundance of arts opportunities, Upper Valley locals dominate the average Hop performances while students seldom engage with them. Acknowledging the tension between the accessibility and value of film and the seeming difficulty of motivating viewership, I launched a six-month-long independent research project aimed at understanding and inspiring student critical engagement with film.
Growing up French-American, I was familiar with the French government’s efforts and success in making film culture prevalent. I recognized the impact of cultural and institutional influences on manipulating one’s behavior. Further, studying human-centered design minor—a process of innovation that prioritizes user needs—I embraced curiosity in understanding how individuals respond to their context. To better understand the Dartmouth student’s behavior, I looked to several unique sites: student volunteers at Sundance Film Festival, students in New York City, and in Paris, France. These three settings offered unique contexts for understanding film engagement. At Sundance, I found “extreme users”—students deeply passionate about film, who exchanged their labor to witness the forefront of independent film. I then juxtaposed the rural cultural landscape of Hanover with New York City, home to numerous art house cinemas and movie sets. I then conducted cross-cultural analysis with France to contextualize behaviors in the US in their cultural context. Interviewing students, filmmakers, and experts in these three locations allowed me to understand the interactions between student behavior and their tangible and intangible environments.
Not only did I want to understand contexts that inspire critical engagement with film, I sought to inspire it. To fulfill these goals, I chose to record my interviews and produce an investigative and narrative-driven podcast series with my findings, Filmosophy. As a medium that is designed for a multi-tasking audience, a podcast was ideal to reach students in the midst of their distracted lives and give them a reason to consider their media engagement. When much of our behavior is unconscious, Filmosophy aims to give listeners the tools to understand their media engagement. Awareness, I hypothesized, would motivate meaningful engagement with film.
After receiving generous funding from the Design Initiative at Dartmouth and the Leslie Center for the Humanities, I dedicated my winter off-term to research in Park City, New York City, and Paris. With my suitcase weighed down by forty extra AA batteries, I gathered approximately thirty hours of audio in two languages. I interviewed dozens of individuals with vastly different insights. At Sundance, I met streaming lovers who appreciate the accessibility of watching media on any device. In Paris, I met film students without Netflix subscriptions, subsisting entirely on movie theaters. Understanding how behaviors correlate with the wider cultural context was tricky—there were many potential factors, such as media content, physical space, social networks, government, economy, and social values. To make sense of this data, I began to map interactions between factors and behaviors within one country and between the two, allowing me to scale between the granular and big-picture understanding of the problem.
After three months of research and synthesis, I felt confident about my understanding of film engagement and its intersection with technology and cultural values. However, when I began producing Filmosophy—I realized that turning pages of notes and visual maps into audio form would be far harder than expected. Narrative podcasts involve compiling interview clips, recordings of scenes, sound bites, music, and narration into a cohesive and compelling narrative. So, I got to work translating the sticky notes on my bedroom wall into a story rich with data. Each week, I created a new outline, a new script, re-edited interviews and scenes, recorded my narration, sequenced the episode, edited music, and regulated overall sound. I did the process over and over again, completely deconstructing a prior draft. However, re-producing each draft—or, in HCD language, prototype—deepened my understanding of the data. Understanding the problem, conveying the problem, and fixing the problem cohered into one project. In ten weeks, I distilled the thirty hours of audio into one cumulative hour of audio, split into four episodes.
After a term of wearing headphones and hunched over my computer, I published Filmosophy’s four episodes online. In episode one, “Quality or Quantity,” travel to Sundance Film Festival to explore why movies are important and how to use them to critically engage with the world. In “The Movie ‘Experience’,” consider how your physical environment impacts your experience with a film. In “The Cultural Capital of the World,” understand France’s rich culture of critical engagement with film—but, more importantly, understand its social and cultural cost. In the final episode, “Reframe,” a term widely used in design thinking, feel empowered by your ability to design your engagement with film. This series collects narratives from various cities and countries, creating a mosaic of voices and perspectives. I initially approached this project with frustration at a lack of engagement. However, as I approached the problem one interview—or user—at a time, I became increasingly hopeful. Each narrative helped me better understand the larger context. Follow our story on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
This project originated from my observations on Dartmouth’s arts engagement but led to a much larger inquiry into the systems that motivate critical film engagement. From interviews to experience design to systems design, this project empowered me to use design thinking as a tool of impact in all steps of my research and creative journey. It’s not that students don’t care about stories anymore. Rather, we all respond to the context around us. Thus, to change the outcome of our behavior, we must examine the factors that got us here. And when we do make changes to the system, the users must be at the center.
