Audience Perception and Cognition towards Moving Images: Review of Short Film Delirium

Abstract This short paper discusses the creator's video project Delirium recorded in India. The video aims to explore the viewer's perception and cognition towards this moving image. Also, the genre was designed in the realm of psychology to explore both complex parts of storytelling and viewers' point of narration. This short film examines the efficiency of storytelling to attain the audience's attention engagement level. The film experimented with questioning the law of physics related to time throughout the film. The film developed with several visual aspects and audios for the same. The results of the study show that the film concept was very effective in maintaining their curiosity. Viewer's perceptions and cognition are essential to explore and understand how moving images engage them as entertainment media. This study suggests the scope of extending the investigation towards the motion picture parameters such as visual and audio in a larger format. We identified that more than 48% of our participants attended physical objects screened in the movie while 28% of participants perceived and recalled more subjective quality of the film (the facial expression of the character, the rhythm of the scene, and syncing of music with visuals, connotative meaning of the plot including the lighting). We recommend further investigation in larger film format on perception and cognition for the research domain like age and gender categories. We anticipate that our research methodology would aid in understanding how cinema affects the viewer and in designing a film to have a more excellent visual experience.