Sniff Film

[Jennifer Curtis]

EXCLUSIVEIn what becomes the first hot package to be unveiled as part of the Toronto International Film Festival market, Oscar winners Morgan Freeman, Al Pacino, Helen Mirren, and Oscar nominee Danny DeVito are set to star in Sniff, a stylish reinvention of the film noir genre that will be directed by Oscar winner Taylor Hackford. Endeavor Content will launch worldwide sales at TIFF, with CAA Media Finance co-repping U.S. rights.

In the Tom Grey-scripted film, two residents die under suspicious circumstances in a high-end luxury retirement community. Retired detective Joe Mulwray (Freeman) is pulled back into the action by his former partner William Keys (DeVito), and they uncover a hidden underworld of sex, drugs and murder in the wealthy community controlled by kingpin Harvey Stride (Pacino), and his femme fatale enforcer, The Spider (Mirren). Sniff is an acronym for Senior Nursing Institute & Family Foundation.

I recently completed the production of my first film. I started work on it last year following a successful bid to a Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures (CFAC) funding call for prospective film makers, in which applications were actively encouraged from those new to the field. As Outreach Lead in the Department of English Literature, I welcomed the opportunity to try and communicate complex ideas to a wider audience through a medium in which I had a long-standing research interest, but no practical experience.

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Arzi and colleagues frame their findings with respect to a human orienting response - driven by the need to seek information that could be important for day-to-day functioning and even for survival. For instance, if you were to see people staring intently in one direction, your natural response would be to follow their gaze to see what they are looking at. (Even infants engage in this gaze-following behavior [see Ross, Kang, Darwin, 2007]).

Orienting to the gaze direction of other people is important for daily operations such as smoothly coordinating a group conversation, or for an infant to learn the names of animals at a zoo. It can be critical to physical survival: if a stranger's gaze alerts you to a huge boulder that's about to break loose, you may avoid being flattened!

Here, we may be observing a similar orienting response with respect to smell rather than sight. Neurobiologists refer to this as "social chemosignaling" - giving rise to behaviors such as the tendency to sniff when seeing others of our own species sniffing. And the response may be so strong that it's not suppressed even when watching a film, in which no aroma is being released.

The focus of Arzi et al.'s research is not on film but on olfactory behavior. Nevertheless, this study suggests that the film experience may be more multisensory and embodied than we think. And it alerts us to the social signals that may be at play even while watching a movie.

As it highlights the role of auditory cues on the film experience, this was one of the studies I presented during the recent Keynote Address I gave at "Music and the Moving Image", a conference hosted each spring at NYU. (Please see the note below about this wonderful conference and associated journal).

The conference for which I served as the Keynote speaker this year was "Music and the Moving Image" - a vibrant conference on film music and sound held each spring at NYU, attracting film music scholars from around the world. The intriguing May 2015 abstracts to papers are linked here, and the associated journal with the same name is linked here. If you're interested in music and the moving image (film, television, video games etc), I highly recommend both!

- Dr Siu-Lan Tan is co-author of Psychology of Music: From Sound to Significance and co-editor of The Psychology of Music in Multimedia. My BLOG on Psychology Today is linked here and the most popular post to date is this one linked here.

Lewis Klahr originally assembled his 1987 film Her Fragrant Emulsion in Super 8 by taking lots of chopped up strips of film and collaging them together with splicing tape. This roll (about 30 or 40 feet in length) was then copied to Super 8 Ektachrome. Lew then constructed his edit for the film from this Ektachrome material.

Hi Megan, thanks for your time today. We know the film is about your story as a marine dog handler working alongside Rex. It must be quite a surreal experience to see your story unfold on screen?

Ryan O'Meara is the editor-in-chief and publisher of K9 Magazine. Ryan is a former professional dog trainer and lives in the East Midlands with his two dogs, Mia & Chloe. He has authored several books on dogs and is a regular media contributor on a variety of canine topics.

Heartwarming film of a true hero REX very much enjoyed the story and watching REX play the role of the Marine Corps Sniffer dog absolutely enjoyed the whole film. I was in tears at the end when he was reunited with Megan. Real heart rendering moment. I once had a family dog called Rebel he was a german shepard too extremely intelligent Dog. He was given to the Police force here in England and passed all levels to become a police trained dog.

Exploring the intersections of activism and filmmaking, Founder and President of the Dolores Huerta Foundation Dolores Huerta will be in conversation with actress, producer, director, entrepreneur, and activist Eva Longoria

Pay no attention to backlash against it you might encounter on social media. Any film that makes this big of an impact is sure to get dismissed by latecomers maddened by the consensus of early raves. And Parasite was a perfect candidate for initial left-wing love and subsequent left-wing scorn, because now people go in prepared to read it as a political allegory. They start putting together an analysis of the film on these terms as soon as the lights go down. Frankly, they could do it even sooner, based on the reputation of writer-director Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Snowpiercer, Okja), plus maybe the trailer.

The film starts out with an image of a couple eating dinner at opposite ends of the table, often signifying a communication gap. In this case, there is something misleading about that. They do not communicate, but are isolated within their own experiences of grief as shadows of their conflict play out over them. Is their marriage over? What is dying between them? As they wander through their house in the following scenes and observe some dried blotches of paint on the walls and a record player on the floor that starts playing after the family cat accidentally triggers it, the story becomes clearer: They have lost someone.

Laura Dern and her producing partner Jayme Lemons saw an early animatic of the film, loved it, and graciously joined the team. They both work closely with Everytown for Gun Safety, so this story was a perfect fit for them. Netflix got wind of the film and they had an internal screening. The next thing we knew, we were in 200 million homes.

Parents of young children often struggle to assess how upsetting a particular film will be for their offspring. Ratings systems can help but tend to be subjective assessments. It might soon be possible to objectively evaluate how intense films might be for younger viewers just by analyzing the chemicals that audiences emit when they breathe, according to a new study by researchers from the Max Plank Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. They described their findings in a new paper in PLoS ONE.

Sure, it seems a bit far-fetched, but tracking the emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) is an active and entirely legitimate area of research. Plastics, for instance, emit VOCs as they degrade over time, thanks to exposure to light, heat, moisture, and pollutants. This so-called "off-gassing" results in a serious issue for museum conservationists and libraries, among others.

Prior studies had shown that people watching a movie in the cinema emit certain chemical signals into the surrounding air, a response to specific scenes. And it's a reproducible effect, holding up over multiple screenings of the same film. According to the latest paper, CO2 levels in a theater will rise until it hits equilibrium.

So it seemed like this "crowd breath" might be a good way to assess how audience members react to specific scenes in films, especially those involving violence, sex, or strong language. This new German study involved 135 screenings of eleven different movies over eight weeks (winter 2013-14 and winter 2015-16) at Cinestar multiplex theaters, with more than 13,000 audience members participating. The films screened included The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Paranormal Activity: Ghost Dimension.

By connecting a mass spectrometer to the cinema's ventilation system and taking measurements every 30 seconds, the researchers were able to monitor even slight shifts (at parts-per-trillion levels) in the chemical composition of the air inside the theater as audiences watched a film. They took data on 60 different compound concentrations and then compared that data to the age classification for the films being screened.

Of the VOCs measured, isoprene proved to be the most reliable indicator for differentiating among the various age classes. Isoprene is a byproduct of our metabolism that gets stored in muscle tissue. It gets released through our skin and breath when we move around; the more we move, the more isoprene gets released.

So what does that have to do with watching a scary movie? "Evidently, we involuntarily squirm back and forth on our cinema seat when we become nervous or excited," lead author Jonathan Williams says. The more nervous or excited moviegoers are, the more isoprene they emit. This makes isoprene a measurable indicator of how stressful a film is, and thus it could be a good way to gauge the impact a given film would have on, say, young children. "Our approach could therefore provide an objective criterion for deciding how movies should be classified," he says.

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