"We'd shoot a scene with multiple cameras side-by-side shooting at different frames rates, play it back to the class later, and ask which one looked "more like a movie" to them. Invariably, even if they couldn't explain why, everyone always picked the 24p version"
Isn't this the most expected result? How could it possibly be anything else?
At the time, yes, absolutely, and that's why I did it. It was a lesson that everyone understood intuitively the moment the saw the comparison, even if 30 seconds prior to that they thought it was nonsense, or didn't really have thoughts one way or the other because they never given much thought to frame rates before.
But would this experiment yield the same results today? For people in certain demographics or below a certain age, I think almost certainly not.
I also think that a lot of the people who would've easily identified the 24p clip back in 2004ish when this class took place may no longer do so now. I never would've thought this before 2018ish, but I had experiences with people around and since that time that surprised me and turned me completely around on this view.
Though there is one other alternative that that I wouldn't have difficulty believing. I think it's possible that more people than I just predicted would identify the 24p clip as "cinematic", but that they may not view it as a desirable look, inherently more dramatic, having much impact on the viewer, etc.