Giving a language to voiceless emotions and to invisibility.

An image without metadata, a piece of content lacking a machine-readable structured vocabulary – either way, is a ghost on the web. Invisible to search engines and users alike, it’s lost in the digital ether, unseen and undiscovered. Metadata is the language of the internet, and without it, our creations simply don’t exist. While we know there’s something there, algorithms remain blind, and so, consequently, does our audience. It’s like having a masterpiece hidden in a locked vault – no one will ever know it’s there. Metadata is simply the key to existence and the lifeblood of visibility in the digital age. “Both a universe and DNA”, as John W. Warren beautifully puts it in the paper “Zen and the Art of Metadata Maintenance”. Our narratives, too, must speak this language.

What if the key to unlocking our inner world lies in this same principle of visibility?

What if our unexpressed emotions, our unprocessed experiences, the murky depths of the unfamiliar and unknown within and around us, are like untagged content, lost in the vast, uncharted expanse of our subconscious? Just as search algorithms struggle to “see” and categorize content without metadata, our conscious mind may struggle to grasp and process these emotions, lacking a structured framework to give them form and meaning.

The narratives of our minds often speak a different language than the narratives of our hearts. How, then, can we surface those captive emotions, give voice to the silent whispers of feeling, and paint a vivid landscape of our emotional stories and memories, allowing us to translate our ideas and messages into narratives that truly resonate?

Emotional Cartography: Mapping My Inner Landscape with Metadata. A case study in filmmaking.

The point of departure

This exploration started as a paper highlighting the idea of how a structured vocabulary of emotions can empower creators and communicators to navigate creative blocks and craft compelling narratives that resonate with both humans and algorithms, especially when they are under pressure and time constraints. Its roots stretch back further, but this metadata-driven approach for rapidly decoding emotions truly began to take shape during the production of a social ad-film in 2024 (“Silent Heroes”), amidst my broader research into enhancing film discoverability.

In its education-centric version, the paper was presented in Pedagogical Innovations in Education section of the 17th International Conference for Education, Research and Innovation (ICERI 2024), that took place in Seville, Spain during 11-13 November 2024. The Paper’s Full Title for ICERI 2024: From Numbness to Narrative: A Filmmaker’s AI-Augmented Journey to Emotional Resonance In Storytellling, Unveiling The Potential Of a Structured Vocabulary of Emotions. A Case Study In Rapid Emotional Decoding for Enhanced Creative Communication.

In the face of creative pressure and unfamiliar emotional landscapes, how can we craft compelling stories when a lack of access to emotions is present?

The paper recounts my personal journey of integrating an AI-augmented self-reflection approach into the filmmaking process to overcome emotional barriers and create impactful communication for a fundraising campaign addressing the importance of last-segment-of-life homecare for isolated elderly Romanians, revealing that emotional mastering and understanding is not a prerequisite for creating emotional connection.

Evoking life from seemingly lifeless subjects to activate empathy across fragmented and potentially resistant audience for a cause that may seem devoid of a future presented as a daunting task. The emotionally charged subject matter, coupled with a shared sense of numbness between myself and the elderly subjects, initially triggered a profound creative impasse. I struggled to connect with the emotional core of the story in a way that would allow me to effectively convey it to the audience.

The challenges went beyond the usual filmmaking hurdles. Our actors were real beneficiaries – fragile elderly individuals, whose everyday clothes replaced costumes. Their cluttered homes, untouched for years, became our sets, defying any attempt at cinematic polish. Limited space dictated a minimalist crew and equipment, forcing me to embrace a raw, documentary-style approach. And the hurdles kept rising. Due to alliances with major TV stations, an extra 30-second ad had to be crafted from the same footage. The film’s premiere shifted from an online release to a high-profile event at the Parliament, demanding a sudden shift in focus towards policymakers, stakeholders, and influencers. Then, the unexpected happened: the death and institutionalization of two elders who were meant to appear in the film. It felt like the final blow.

Under the crushing weight of deadlines, limited resources, and my own swirling emotions, the metadata approach became my lifeline. Artificial intelligence stepped in as a reliable assistant, facilitating and accelerating the process. Together, they allowed me to bypass the intellectual maze, circumvent the mind’s tendency to overthink, and tap directly into the raw, unfiltered emotions fueling the narrative. This direct connection to the heart of the story through a structured vocabulary of emotions enabled me to craft a film that resonated with all audiences, uniting them in a shared emotional experience.

The film premiered at the Parliament Palace of Romania on June 19th, 2024, its tagline “Age should not be a sentence to suffering” serving as a rallying cry for the Dignity campaign. The screening took center stage into a national debate titled “Innovation and Quality in Long-Term Care: Perspectives and Practices,” organized by the film’s beneficiary, the White-Yellow Cross Foundation, with the Senate Health Committee.

“Silent Heroes”: The resulted ad-fim

Opening the Door to a Universe of Possibilities

This structured approach to scriptwriting and filmmaking transcended mere storytelling and communication, reaching far beyond the initial goal and generating a ripple effect of unexpected outcomes. Despite its relative infancy, the experiment has already produced significant results:

• Two products instead of one: a 1.5-minute social ad-film and a 30-second social video spot from the film, a possibility unlocked through metada alignment;
• Instead of relying on pre-packaged press releases, the media embraced the authentic voice of the film, weaving its words and emotions into their reporting, resulting in a uniquely unified and compelling communication;
• Enhanced insights for my ongoing doctoral research focused on making independent films more discoverable;
• A wave of new research papers exploring diverse facets of this film production;
• Unlocking new cross-disciplinary opportunities for international research collaboration through doctoral mobilities;
• Developing “Think Clear,” (Gândește Clar) an entertaining personal and professional development program that fosters emotional intelligence through meta-driven artistic expression, a venue where emotions become art and healing becomes creation.

A Roadmap to Structured Vocabularies of Emotions

Though I didn’t initially intend to delve into the realm of emotional decoding, the demands of this filmmaking project, intertwined with the exploration of unfamiliar emotional landscapes like aging alone (the central theme of this case study film), forced me to confront the crucial role of emotional clarity in effective storytelling. The intense pressure of the project, further amplified by facing almost inevitable future trauma, revealed a powerful and unexpected connection between navigating these emotional complexities and the very process of crafting a resonant narrative. This unexpected convergence led to the emergence of some core principles for building structured vocabularies of emotions:

Metadata-Driven Emotional Acupuncture

Unlocking new emotional territories and storytelling clarity through a structured approach to feelings is a profound step, but harnessing the power of AI to translate those emotions into audiovisual landscapes elevates the experience to an entirely new dimension. Imagine visualizing and sonifying the experience of heartbreak of 100 individuals, each a unique symphony of image and sound. Or pain. Or cancer. Or dementia. The possibilities of metadata-driven “emotional acupuncture” are limitless.

Decoding and Connecting Emotions in the Algorithmic Age: A New Narrative Frontier

Narratives are shaped by the evolving digital infrastructure

In the context of digital content overproduction, where the sheer volume of information can overwhelm and desensitize, emotional resonance is paramount and a vital differentiator. While the foundational principles of storytelling and communication remain constant, the contemporary design of these narratives is increasingly shaped by the evolving digital infrastructure, which is fundamentally guided by search engines, and today also by AI.

This search-powered infrastructure presents a fundamental challenge: either creating content from the start with machine-readability in mind or translating the existing unstructured narratives into structured narratives that algorithms can understand. The building blocks of digital infrastructure are metadata.

Due to the limited availability of interdisciplinary educational programs focused on bridging computer science with creative fields, particularly in the context of search, many creators and educators remain unfamiliar with the intricacies of the digital mechanics. As a result, potential new applications that could emerge from this knowledge may remain unexplored.

Through my explorations, I developed the belief that just as search algorithms struggle with unstructured and untagged content, our human systems and stories struggle with emotional numbness when we fail to recognize emotions. By structuring our emotions in a similar way to how we structure web content to make it searchable, we can make emotions discoverable and usable, even if not fully perceived or understood.

AI-Augmented Story Discovery and Self-Reflection

By sketching a story’s blueprint elements of a ‘structured vocabulary of emotions’, this paper highlights also the potential of AI-powered tools to facilitate the development of emotional frameworks for filmmakers and content creators that can empower them to rapidly decode and communicate emotions, even in high-pressure creative situations, without requiring a deep understanding of their underlying causes.

My belief is that these frameworks may facilitate a faster and better alignment between the internal narratives we construct, the stories we share with humans, and the narratives we present to algorithms, leading to a more resonant communication. This alignment may also naturally lead to the transformation of static narratives into dynamic, adaptable and evolving ones.

What is at stake in our computationally guided world is mastering the art of dual storytelling, as we must craft narratives that resonate with both algorithms and human hearts. This dual-audience dilemma is at the core of contemporary storytelling and communication. And I dare to say, also feeling.

Knowledge Exchange and Collaborations

For knowledge exchange and collaborations, don’t hesitate to contact me. With 2 months left for the international mobility component of my PhD, I’m seeking opportunities to deepen my knowledge and refine my research.