I didn’t first understand gavino either :D, but before reading his topic I had already started placing movie scenes and I grasped that what I am doing is actually making a Massive Memory Palace using movie scenes.
So, what gavino himself says:
1. Pick a journey or memory palace and select some loci Let’s use our homes as memory palaces. There are many loci we can use - many rooms and objects. We usually want to memorize things in order, so we choose certain loci in a certain order and we get a journey in the memory palace. For example we pick 1. Doorstep 2. Clothes hanging on the coat-racks. 3. Sofa in the living room 4. TV in the living room 5. Bed
2. Into the loci you selected you place extra loci. These extra loci can be for example movie scenes or real life locations. Let’s use both:
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On the doorstep we place the Statue of Liberty, next to it we place the Oval Office (of White House), and thirdly a movie scene from Titanic - the young lovers (Jack and Rose) hanging on the edge of the ship. Now there are 3 extra loci on the doorstep. Will we be able to recall all these three by just looking at the doorstep? Usually with difficulty, I could remember that I placed there Titanic and Statue of Liberty, but I forgot the Oval Office. For solving this problem Gavino suggests using pegs - a prememorized list of objects. My 1st peg is wand, second is swan and third is pig (for me they resemble number 1, 2 and 3 respectively). Now I have to associate the pegs with extra loci. I visualize that 1) Liberty Woman is holding wand instead of her torch 2) The president of US is a swan that sits on its chair in the Oval Office 3) Pig gives a push to the young lovers and they both fall over the board into the icy waters . Now I can recall the extra loci on the doorstep by recalling in which loci the wand, swan and pig were on that doorstep.
Note: I usually don’t bother to use the pegs, instead I link the extra loci with each other. For instance Titanic crushes into the Liberty Woman, that falls onto Oval Office and lits it on fire with it torch, president runs out and jumps into icy waters to cool himself. -
I repeat the same process at 2.nd locus (coat rack). Only this time could use more extra loci, let’s say 4 of them, and this time they are all different movie scenes from Titanic. And again I use pegs (now I could use my 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th peg) and/or linking to remember the scenes.
And the same goes for loci 3,4 and 5, into each goes 4 extra loci.
Now we have 3+4+4+4+4 = 19 extra loci that I can easily recall. And that’s not all- as I said in my previous comment, each movie scene has actually many more loci we could use. E.g. the first Titanic scene - there are two actors, both count as separate loci. If I’m very thorough, I could even use the scene to remember a whole list. E.g. “lamp, suite, elephant, rocket and bottle of vodka”. The story would be: A guard enters the deck, flashes his flashlight at Jack and says: “Could you please take off your suite, sir, so I could check if your rocket is the size of an elephant.” Drunken Rose drinks more vodka, shatters the bottle and uses what’s left of it to cut off Jack’s manlyhood and shows it to the guard: “See?! I fell in love with a man whose balls aren’t bigger than my nipples.”
My movie scene placement system
As you by now surely understand that my movie scene placement system is actually a special case of gavino’s MMP system. It’s a special case because I don’t use pegs and I reach the 4 extra loci per locus by using 4 different journeys (actually 2 journeys, I just change the direction of the journeys and thus both journeys count as two) that all cross the same locus. I you look the pictures at my google site you can see for example that into the locus where I placed the 2nd scene of Lisbon, I also placed Gandalf fighting Balrog, then a potential movie scene from movie 3 and another one from movie 4.
For recalling all the scenes in that locus you need to look at the different sides of that locus: for recalling the Balrog scene you look the wall that goes in the direction of Gandalf story, for recalling the Lisbon scene you look the opposite direction.
And when you want to use the scenes to memorize info, I suggest you follow the scene journeys (as I did with Gandalf at my webpage), not to pick all the 4 scenes from different movies of the same locus (the lisbon, balrog, and 3rd 4th movie example).
I added some extra info to this wiki page about using the both directions of journey to memorize 2 different lists of items.