some more photographic experiments...

After looking back through some of the videos I have downloaded, I decided to show some of them to my family - the main reason for this was so that I could work out what videos provoke the strongest responses from sitter now rather than wasting valuable studio time deciding in college tomorrow. I also want to keep the photo shoot very structure so I intend to show the exact same videos to everyone who models so the final outcome of expressions are fair in comparison to each other.

From the photo shoot I found that although the television programmes I showed such as Britain's Got Talent and Embarrassing Bodies did provoke an emotional response in the sitter, the facial expressions weren't as strong or as obvious as I thought they would be. I also found that if the person had already seen the programme before then their response was minimal as the shock-factor had been lost.

Here are some photographic examples of the facial expressions created whilst watching these television programmes above:



Channel 4's Embarrassing Bodies
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However, I found that this wasn't the case when showing clips from famous horror movies. I noticed that even if the sitter had seen the film, such as my brother has watched both Hostel 1 and Hostel 2 he did not know what was going to happen next as it was only a short clip of the first film and I didn't actually tell what film he was going to watch initially either. Therefore I found that the shock value was still important in creating a vivid response from the sitter and that it is an important part of ignitiing fear in the viewer whilst watching horror films. I also was surprised too see that the article written in The Telegraph (see earlier post) was quite accurate as so far I have found that the emotional response to watching the videos do vary from person to person and I have found that some people do laugh while others squirm of look away. This concept is defiantly something I want to expand on and I now feel that I will experiment with this idea in the next photo shoot tomorrow. I should my family a variety of different horror movie clips, including the old and new - I found that while the majority ignited vivid response from the sitters some of the clips didn't create any effect what so ever such as Stephen King's It. I also found that the movies that provoked the strongest response from the sitter were Saw, Hostel, The Exorcist and Friday the 13th. However as I felt Hostel and Saw were from a similar torture sub-genre of horror I decided to just choose the one clip which I felt was better - I choose Hostel for the suspense that is created in the clip.

Here are a few examples of facial expressions created from showing the horror films, The Exorcist, Hostel and Friday the 13th:





<---------Hostel (2005) film clip









Friday the 13th film clip----------------->