We all feel the same basic emotions, fear, anger, surprise, disgust, sadness and happiness. So in promoting the Melbourne International Film Festival, we set out to create movie trailers that spoke every language, emotion.

To do this we first held special preview screenings with prominent movie critics to capture the six key human emotions for every film at the festival via our custom mobile app and biometric sensors.

This data created an Emotional Script, condensing an entire two-hour film to under one minute.

The data was then fed via electric stimulation into the facial muscles of willing participants to act out the emotional arc of an entire film, using the human face as a display. This helped participants decide which film they wanted to watch, based on how it would make them feel, and provided great content we could use to entice other audiences to the festival.

Before each film at the festival, audiences also experienced the Emotional Scripts in a custom-built movie chair we called the Emotional Simulator – the simulator sessions sold out within two days. All these experiences were filmed, and created Emotional Trailers for every film at the festival. Trailers that the audience in the cinema, watching the live stream, or seeing on social media, could book tickets directly from.

Our technical and production partner, Airbag, did a great job in leading the technical aspect of the campaign. Director Steven Nicholson experimented on himself with a small multi-tap transformer before hitting the science books and using TENS devices to finally isolate combinations of stimuli and electrode placements that worked for each of the important muscle groups on the face. Steven also wrote the software that converted the data we gathered about the films into a format that worked for the Emotion Simulator, so his contribution was invaluable to the success of the project.

The excitement around the Emotional Simulator and Emotional Trailers resulted in the highest ever sales in the Melbourne International Film Festival’s 65-year history.