Movements We Create Standing Still

How do you maintain viewer attention when movement has become background?

I’ve developed an educational simulation intended to foster certain aspects of critical thinking. I’m now working on a video demonstration of the program I hope to share soon. However, since this is not intended as a product (and I really tire of most software demonstrations), I’ve chosen to narrate this as a dialogue between two fictional characters experiencing the program themselves for the first time. This approach feels fresh and relatable.

But I’ve been worrying that portions of the walkthrough are visually motionless — same static image, interspersed with occasional typing and closeups.

Then I read this bit of advice (from Claude AI) which offered:

Movement is a proxy for the thing they [viewers] actually want, which is momentum — the sense that something is developing. People listen to two-hour podcasts staring at a frozen album cover.

It made me think! I do stare at nothing moving while listening to lengthy podcasts.

Perhaps, I’ve become numb to the imagery our media serves up. Does anyone feel surprise and astonishment anymore when a movie’s car chase results in a car miraculously being catapulted into the air, erupting in fire, and spiraling to a landing upside down? I suspect those who do stunts and pyrotechnics in movies must lobby for contracts with studios to include a certain percentage of these empty movements.

A neuroscientist I follow, Jeff Hawkins, says that thinking is movement. Specifically, it’s firing patterns of neurons in the cortical columns of the neocortex, each column of which contains a model of the world that it navigates to predict and construct its own piece of our reality.

I’m not doing justice to his very detailed theory of human intelligence. I bring it up only to suggest that the momentum being mentioned is referring to new and changing thoughts we take in. We then navigate — we move — through these neural reference frames to construct a changing mental landscape.

So, if I listen to a 2-hour podcast, I’m constructing meaning as I hear the words spoken. The meaning isn’t being transferred to me. Rather, I’m constructing the meaning. The words are priming that construction to occur in a certain way as my brain moves through these reference frames.

My takeaway from this is that I don’t need a great deal of action on the screen to draw my viewers into what’s happening. I just need captivating dialogue that has momentum.

The fact is, if some idea is at all novel to me, I probably wouldn’t even notice a flaming car somersaulting over my head.