Kineasthetic empathy through the lens of cinematography for dramatized narrative: physiological and phenomenological alignments in the act of creation

William Primett^1*Ksenia Mukhina¹Mehmet Burak Yilmaz¹Willeke Rietdijk^1,2Pia Tikka¹

• ¹Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia
• ²Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE), Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden

Film and actor-driven narratives showcase a deliberately structured and authentic depiction of emotions, and are considered a reliable resource for validating affective states when coupled with physiological data. In affective computing studies, the portrayal and perception of emotions often follow distinct conventions by assuming a single-directional mode of interaction between the viewers and the elicitation material. We design a study from the perspective of the cinematographer, who is actively engaged in the creation of the source material while witnessing it. Thus, the image emerges in the interaction between the cinematographer 'reading' the actors during the filming, and visa-versa. The captured movement, physiological data, and first-person accounts are gathered from six participants and organized into a multimodal dataset. From this, we introduce a phenomenological data explorer framework, a visualisation tool that's used to assess the affective and motor responses during the filming process, while considering the phenomenological experience and narrative immediacy. In turn, we draw triangulations between visual perception, sensorimotor patterns and the narrative structures that play out to inform the bidirectional nature of empathic engagement in cinematic storytelling. Our findings emphasize the role of kinaesthetic empathy, in which embodied decision-making responds to predicted inner states, shaping and modulating emotional understanding throughout the filming process.