The One Sense We Can't Film

Every medium has a hole in it. Ours has two, and the other one — touch — is in the two senses we cannot animate. Smell is the more frustrating of the pair, because it's what people reach for when they describe a room feeling like shelter. Ask anyone what their grandmother's house was like and you'll get a smell before you get a colour.

So rather than pretend, we hand it over. It's the only part of the evening you can supply that we can't.

The channel we don't have

There's no version of this we can solve. Screens have carried pictures for a century and sound for nearly as long, and every attempt at scent in cinemas is remembered as a joke, deservedly.

What we do instead is draw around it. Steam is a smell drawn as a picture — a rising ribbon off a cup is doing scent work, not water-vapour work. So is the drift over a pan, the smoke leaning out of a chimney, dust hanging in a shaft of light. When a viewer says an episode smelled of something, that's what happened: we drew the shape a smell would make and they filled it in themselves. Which tells you something useful. The image is already prompting for it, and your kitchen only has to answer.

Whatever the mechanism is — and we're a drawing studio, not the right people to explain it — smell doesn't wait for your opinion. You can look at a room and think about it; you can hear music and evaluate it. Smell has usually already happened by the time you notice it, and it arrives with a place attached rather than a description. Not this is the smell of bread but a particular kitchen, a particular hour, sometimes a decade you weren't planning to visit.

That makes it the strongest tool available to you and the least controllable. You cannot choose which room a smell will fetch, and sometimes it fetches something you'd rather it hadn't, with no undo — worth knowing before buying anything that promises to smell like childhood.

We can draw the fire, record it and light the wall with it. The one thing that would finish the room is the one thing that has to come from your side.

House smell and season smell

They're different jobs and they're often confused, which is why so many homes end up smelling of nothing in particular but expensively.

House smell is the constant — the one you can't detect in your own home and can detect instantly in anyone else's. It comes mostly from things that aren't scent products: the building, the laundry, the cooking, whatever soap gets used. You don't design it, you can't smell it, and it's the thing your family will remember about the place in thirty years.

Season smell is the one you can play with, because it's meant to change. Wet earth after rain. Cut grass. Something baking in winter. Cold air, which isn't a smell exactly and behaves like one. These carry the time of year the way a colour grade does in an episode, and their value is that they're temporary — a house that smells of cinnamon in June is telling you a lie you can detect.

The cheap and real list

The best options are all by-products of doing something, which is why they cost nothing and why they don't stop working.

1. 1

   Anything hot, in a pot

   Tea brewed in a pot rather than a bag in a mug, coffee, a pan with the lid off. Steam is a delivery system — the smell fills the room and then leaves, which is exactly the behaviour you want.

2. 2

   The oven, doing anything at all

   It doesn't need to be baking. Toast counts. A tray of vegetables counts. Warm bread is the famous one, but the effect is heat plus food plus time, and twenty minutes of that will change a flat.

3. 3

   The window, for two minutes

   Cold air, rain on pavement, wet earth, other people's cooking, a garden. Free, different every day, and two minutes with the window wide beats an hour with it cracked.

The fourth isn't really a step: clean fabric. A washed pillowcase, a dried towel, a blanket that's been outside. The quietest one, and the one people mention most when they describe a bed feeling good.

When adding scent backfires

Two ways, and then the part about cost.

The first is habituation. Any constant smell disappears within days. It's why the plug-in that seemed pleasant in week one is undetectable by week three, and why the response is usually a stronger one — undetectable by week five while being extremely detectable to everyone who visits. Intermittent beats constant for exactly this reason.

The second is intensity. Scent is one of the few things in a room that can be too much in a way that can't be turned down. A light can be dimmed and music lowered; a heavily scented room can only be aired out, over an hour, in whatever weather is happening.

Then there's the plain cost. Candles, incense, oils and diffusers are a recurring expense, and a modest one is still real if the month is tight. None of it is required.

And a flame is an open fire in a room, which carries a real risk: nowhere near fabric, never left in an empty room, never left burning while you sleep. Plenty of tenancies and nearly all halls of residence ban candles and incense outright, and the smoke alarm doesn't care about your evening. Smoke isn't neutral for everyone in the building either — many households have someone who can't be around it, and pets with no say in the matter. Scent is also the only choice here that leaves your metre and fills everyone else's, so in a shared flat it's a decision made for four people. Worth being the sort of person who asks.

Matching the room on screen

The best use of any of this takes no planning at all: get your room and the room on screen to agree about what's happening.

An episode with rain on the glass, and your window open for two minutes so the flat smells of wet pavement. A hearth episode, and something in the oven. A tea scene, and an actual pot brewing beside you. It's almost too simple to write down, and it's the most effective thing anyone has ever reported back to us — the picture and the sound come from us, the last layer comes from the kitchen, and the two rooms briefly stop being separate.

Pick a mood, then go and put the kettle on before it starts.

What we're not claiming

No aromatherapy claims here, and none implied. We're not saying a scent will change your mood or do anything to you at all. We draw cartoons about lanterns and aren't qualified to say more, so we won't.

Smell is also more personal than any other channel we deal with. Woodsmoke is nostalgia for one person and a bad week for another. Incense is a temple, a student flat, or a headache depending on who's in the room. Vanilla is beloved and widely hated. There's no list that works for everyone — the three above are suggestions from a studio, not findings.

What's true is narrower and still worth two minutes: a room where something has recently happened smells like it, and rooms that smell that way feel less like waiting rooms. That's the layer we can't film, and it's the cheapest one in the stack.

The evening is warm here.