Influence: The Fleeting Reframe
/The first reframe I want to talk about for effects with an influence reveal is the Fleeting Reframe.
To understand this, let’s consider another effect that could theoretically make a spectator feel “less than” for a moment: the No-Tear paper trick.
Imagine this series of events. I hand you a piece of paper and say, “You’re too weak to rip paper.” You try to rip it but can’t. So you think, Oh, I guess this is some special kind of paper that’s hard to rip or something.
That’s the only thing anyone would think (unless they got a wayward javelin through their skull as a child and it pierced the part of their brain responsible for logical thought).
But if you use the no-tear paper in a routine where they are temporarily zapped of their strength, then it becomes a more conceptually interesting moment for them. They may come to the same conclusion (special paper). But the more layers you add to the effect, the less certain they’ll be that’s what’s going on.
We can do the same thing with influence effects. We can couch those effects in a presentation where we do something to temporarily make someone susceptible to influence.
Here’s an example of how that might look… Perhaps you get some of this popcorn-scented spray. Dump it into a small glass bottle so it doesn’t look like something you picked up off Amazon. Have someone smell it. Not just once, but like 10 deep inhales (assuming that wouldn’t kill them—I don’t know what’s in this spray).
Now go through your effect and before the influence reveal you say, “You’re probably wondering what the deal was with the popcorn scent. It’s interesting… that artificial popcorn smell was created in the 1950s. Actually, the popcorn smell might be older than that, but it was added to another compound in the 1950s to mask the smell of that chemical. And the reason they did this is because they were pumping this into the air vents in movie theaters back then. Why put artificial popcorn scent in a movie theater that already smelled like popcorn? Well, because the original chemical compound—the one the popcorn smell was masking—had been determined to affect the brain in such a way that subliminal advertising was 700% more effective. It made subtle brief cues stick in the mind at a much greater rate. So before they made subliminal messaging in films illegal, this was part of that whole scheme to implant certain ideas into people’s heads. It’s not dangerous. The effects are only temporary, but it does seem to work fairly well. For example, you thought of Tom Hanks pretty freely, yes?”
And that’s how such an Imp could be used with Show Reel. (Although it doesn’t have to be used with a movie-based effect. It just works particularly well with that one.)
The believability of the story doesn’t really matter. (Personally, I don’t want someone to actually believe these things.) The goal is just to create an experience for the spectator beyond the ones I identified in the original post this month:
You’re easy to influence
OR
People are easy to influence.
This story—that there is some sort of way to affect people’s minds in such a manner that they briefly become susceptible to influence—is much more compelling. And all you need is to come up with some Imp that supposedly puts them in this fleeting state.