Sharan Reddy, the founder of a startup named Indee, has an old connection with cinema. He remembers the many childhood summers he spent watching movies at Kodambakkam’s Liberty Theatre, which belonged to his grandfather Varada Reddy. It’s this connection, Sharan says, that might have led him to a business that’s so closely linked to cinema and its audience, despite having studied computer science.
His company is in the business of collecting audience reactions of movies even before they’ve released. “Focus groups, or special test screenings for movies before release, have been around for many decades,” says Sharan, over a phone call. “But they’re usually limited to a few hundred people watching a movie in one theatre in Los Angeles. There was always a need to widen this research pool.”
It’s for this purpose that he has started Scoop, a website where audiences can watch soon-to-release videos and provide insights to help producers enhance their content’s appeal ahead of release. Instead of getting together a large number of people to one particular theatre screening, Scoop allows people to watch movies on their personal devices for free in return for their feedback.
“We started off by asking around 60 questions to the audience once they’ve watched a video. But we’ve brought it down to just 20 thanks to a new feature we’ve developed to gauge audience reactions,” Sharan says. Scoop now uses facial recognition and machine learning to record audience expressions during a film. Using this, they can create a detailed analysis of what works and what doesn’t in a movie.
“We use webcams or a device’s front camera to make notes of how one reacts. For instance, if it’s a horror movie, we monitor if the viewer is anxious or tense in scenes when they’re supposed to be. If they seem relaxed or indifferent, we take that information to the studios so that they make changes like fixing the background music or re-editing to give the desired effect.”
The best part is that the audience who’ve signed up can also get paid for watching these videos even before anyone else has. “Security is, of course, of very high importance because we’re allowing the viewer to watch a video before the rest of the world has. The moment they try to record it or take a screengrab, the video shuts down and they cannot watch it further.”
Their clients include Warner Brothers, 21th Century Fox, Star and several Indian production houses. “We’re not really looking for film experts or critics to watch our movies because we’re more interested in what the lay man has to say. For instance, we don’t want someone to tell that they didn’t like a scene because the ambient lighting was not working for them. We want hear simpler things.”
What about revealing spoilers, especially in a thriller? “We have our security system in place to make sure our subscribers don’t reveal secrets before the film’s release, especially on social media. Our viewers are asked to sign a non disclosure agreement before films and if they do reveal something, we ask them to pull it down. We’ve had our share of challenges but a lot of the effort we put in is to maintain a high level of security.”
To register, visit www.indee.tv/scoop.
