I was thinking about the selective attention videos Jonni was showing me earlier and that lead me on to thinking about some videos I saw many years ago that made me jump.

Such videos to something along similar lines of this: they present to you two identical pictures and ask you to “spot the difference.” Of course there isn’t any and as time goes on your eyes move closer and a closer to the screen as your concentration increases to try and spot the differences you are told are there to be spotted.

Suddenly a ghostly image appears and a scream comes hurtling through your speakers and the majority of people will jump. There is a crude example of such a video here.

This got me thinking, it’s actually quite easy to scare someone. How many times have you walked up behind someone concentrating on a computer screen for them to suddenly realise you are there, jump and claim you “scared the life out of them.” Probably many times.

And yet, horror films continually fail to scare us on a regular basis. When was the last time you watched a horror film that was actually scary? I found Silent Hill had a good attempt but that was a few years ago now and most people found that rather tame. Of course it varies from person to person but most people I talk to, at least among my male friends, claim they haven’t seen a scary movie in a long time. Of course they could just be embarrassed to admit they were scared but for the moment lets take them at their word and assume all recent horror films haven’t scared them.

Surely we must be able to put some science behind this?

Take roller coasters for example. There is a lot of research and engineering that goes into making roller coasters and exhilarating experience. The problem is now that they simply can’t make them go any faster, drop any steeper or throw people around any more than they already do without injuring people.

So, as a friend was explaining to me, they’re now working on techniques to make people feel disoriented. The current avenue of research is to attempt to recreate the feeling we all had when we were children and went rolling down hills (I say children, I would imagine in Michelle’s case, it was last week as I presume it still works ) and that sensation of tumbling over and over. They can do this already but not without people throwing up everywhere, so the research continues.

I would have thought, in the same way, we could apply new techniques to horror movies rather than just adding even more blood, gore and guts to each film. Maybe they already are of course, but I think so far, the general consensus is that it isn’t working.

I was feeling ill on Monday but with work to be done I headed round to Rich’s flat with George to get editing away on Something Good ’09.

I had already spent three hours the day before on pre-editing and Rich had spent the morning doing some too so luckily we were able to dive straight in and get things done. Even with this big head start it was still 1am by the time we were finished as well as being several bottles of wine later.

The result however was well worth it.

Here’s me busting a groove earlier today.

I spent the day on set filming an Atheist Society parody of Utah Saints’ Something Good ’08, a little idea I had had for an intro video for the society this year.

It was actually a really quick shoot – we didn’t kick off until 4pm and we were finished by about 8pm. Of course this is where the real world begins – since getting home I’ve spent nearly three hours doing the pre-editing for the camera I have – we still have all the editing to do on top of that and that is just one of three cameras we were using!

Never the less the film is now in the can so with a little bit of magic editing and after effects we should have something pretty good.

Having spent Monday in bed recovering I managed to make it to the outside world on Tuesday which worked out quite well with A-Soc’s end of term no-brainer meeting, a screening of Evan Almighty.

I hadn’t seen it before but it turned out to be a good movie, it wasn’t quite as funny as Bruce Almighty but certainly had it’s moments. It really got me thinking how much I appreciate non-Hollywood movies these days, a break from the standard feature film format really has become something of a treat in this day and age but adds so much to the movie.

Another Tuesday night having arrived we set about our usual committee business at which we got through everything on the agenda except the most important point of all – the impending AHS Conference which was taking place this weekend! Still, how much fun would we miss out on if everything was carefully prepared and planned?

The film was good as ever, I almost watched it again when I got home. Turn out was moderate, it’s hard to live up to the high standards that we have so far set this year but Milood came down for the first time and Brett pitched up to the meeting too so there were some victories.

The social continued in The Terrace afterwards and went on until midnight with myself, Brett, Nicola W, Zoltan and Kate dancing the night away.