Earlier this month, Christopher Olson and I presented at the 2013 SCMS conference work I started in my graduate school and he is helping me finalize and expand. These are some preliminary thoughts about approaching the study of how spectators engage with films.
This presentation (SCMS13_presentation_022513) comes from an interest we have in trying to understand how spectators make sense of films and what leads to differences and similarities in the reception of the same film. In this presentation, we address the cognitive and affective theoretical approaches to film spectatorship and reception that informed our approach, as well as the apparent lack of studying the actual reception processes. We then outline the method that was designed to measure the moment-by-moment or minutia reception process, as well as discuss a pilot project to employ this method, and we conclude with our thoughts for applications of this method.
This image is an example of how this method allows for the comparison of moment-by-moment reception between two different film spectators.
It's Playing, Just With Research 