What if you could go on a journey to a place that didn’t exist? Meet people that never lived? Form memories that never happened? What if you could choose to go anywhere that you can possibly imagine? What if I told you, it’s possible!

Ask any bookworm why they prefer books over movies and they will tell you that it’s about imagination. A movie show’s you another world, but it doesn’t take you there. You can view it, but you can never visit. No, books are a different beast, not a mere two-hour vista through a porthole to a world you will never see; no, books take you there. A skilled author doesn’t merely show you a world, nor do they simply describe the world, a skilled author takes you there.

Books are time machines and teleporters in one, many a soul opens a book and is lost to the living for days or weeks until they come out the other side a changed person. With experiences that they never experienced, memories that never happened and friends that they never met. Reading gives the reader a sense of Fernweh, a longing for a place that they have never been.

If you ask a movie buff the same question, you will hear a similar story about movies. Movies allow the brain to disengage almost entirely. The viewer see’s exactly what the producer intended them to see, they hear what they were intended to hear. Dialogues are no longer imagined, the tone, the pitch, the delivery of every word is heard by the viewer as if they were witnessing the conversation first-hand. The soundtrack of a movie can be more important than the visual cues, there are many a scene too confronting or too complex to be portrayed in movies where what isn’t shown on screen is conveyed in audio; the strength in this being it engages the imagination to ‘fill in the blank’ and the imagination can be a whole lot more creative than any move producer can be.

AudioVisum.

Movies are a little limited, a little 2D if you will, their flaw lies in their very nature. They disengage the viewers imagination and they remove any mystery or allure in the scenes portrayed. What this means is, when the director wants to create an exciting scene, they show smiling faces, a high-energy environment; possibly a party. But every viewers idea of a great part is different, the director can only show one. The same applies if describing a dark alley, or a murder scene, every viewers idea of the most confronting or grotesque scene is different, but again, the director can only convey one scene.

AudiVisum crosses the divide between books and movies.