Skip to main content

Investigation 10/12: Visual Storytelling (Show Not Tell)

Visual storytelling describes the process of telling your story by only using visual elements rather than verbally. An easy way to look at verbal storytelling is to examine a children's book. The narration of a children's book bluntly tells the reader everything they need to know about what is going on. It tells who characters are, what they are doing, how they are feeling, and more all by directly telling the audience. Visual storytelling is the opposite as it uses only visual elements to broadcast the story to the audience, leading them to discern the story from what they see. Visual storytelling is a very general idea with different techniques to do so. Some of these techniques can be found below

Visual Storytelling Through Framing

Since visual storytelling is a visual form of telling a story, framing your shots within a film properly can convey your story without any dialogue. While most films use dialogue to enhance its story, the use of framing is so powerful that a film could be entirely silent and still tell an emotional story through visual storytelling. Let's say for an example, your character is sad and lonely. You want to let your audience know this but you want to show them instead of telling them. Framing your character far away from the camera in a wide shot and having them be separated from the rest of the scene around them shows to the audience that they themselves are distant from the character and can use this to assume how they are feeling. 

In this clip from Neon Genesis Evangelion, the framing is perfectly used to visually tell the audience the emotional weight that is put on the character Shinji. In the scene, Shinji is faced with the decision to kill his friend Kaworu, who within the context of the show has been the only person to show love and affection towards Shinji. Instead of Shinji speaking and saying how he is feeling and how tough of a decision this is for him, the frame remains the same static shot for a whole minute. Shinji within his robot remains the largest subject in frame, showing the power he has over the situation while Kaworu is outlandishly small in comparison. Even if you were to mute this clip, you would likely still be able to understand the scene and what it means because of the visual storytelling within the framing of the scene.
 

Visual Storytelling Through Environment

The environment around your characters is also a way to visually tell your story. Imagine your characters walk into a bar. While you could have another character mention something like "I don't know about this place" or "This place looks sketchy", you could instead visually dress your environment to tell the audience these things. Putting broken glass on the floor, lighting the room with very dim lights, and inserting extras who visually contrast your characters are all ways of visually showing the atmosphere of the bar without directly saying it. Proper preparation of your environment can remove the need for exposition regarding locations.

The Fallout videogames are one of the best examples of environmental visual storytelling. While the interactivity of videogames differ from film, I still feel that examples from Fallout can be good inspiration for visual storytelling for film. Throughout your time playing any of the games you likely will come across a skeleton of a human. These skeletons are often positioned in various different ways but each of them visually tells a story. The lore of Fallout involves a nuclear war occurring in the year 2077, with the events of the game taking place hundreds of years later. These skeletons found throughout the game were all people who lived prior to the nuclear war and who died the day the nukes were dropped. Despite only being bones, just simply the positions that these skeletons are in can tell the player exactly what these people were doing before they died in nuclear hellfire. In this image, you can clearly deduce that these people were in some sort of physical altercation prior to their death, which is all told without the game directly telling you through text or dialogue.
(Link To Image)

Work Log

  • 10/5 - Football Practice Recording (No Project Work)
  • 10/6 - Football Practice Recording (No Project Work)
  • 10/7 - Football homecoming video footage was logged and more edits to project outline were made
  • 10/8 - No Project Work 
  • 10/9 - First scene of script was drafted
  • 10/10 - Script was further developed and football homecoming video was continued
  • 10/11 - No Project Work (Eagle Scout Project Work)
  • 10/12 - Small portion of film was storyboarded
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Investigation 3/1: The Tools Of Camera Stability

One of the most important aspects of cinematography that goes commonly unnoticed is having the camera steady. Even a slight amount of movement within a shot can pull the audience away from the film, so it is important to attempt to have shots. There are multiple different ways that you can use to stabilize your camera, some of which are more effective than others. Tripod Using a tripod is the easiest way to stabilize the camera while filming. By having three points of contact with the ground, a tripod keeps the camera extremely stable. The camera would likely only move due to very large movements on the ground or strong winds. The one downside to using a tripod is that it has to remain stationary. If the required shot involves moving around, a tripod can likely not be used. Overall, the tripod is the easiest, simplest, and cheapest way to keep your camera steady. (Image Source) Shoulder Rig A shoulder mount is one way to keep the camera stable while also being able to mov...
Post a Comment
Read more

End of MP 1 Blog Post

After now reaching the end of the first marking period of the 2019-2020 school year, I am able to reflect back upon the work that I have completed so far. Intention Definition & Exploration Of Ideas Having no prior experience in any particular area of film, I set out to choose a topic to focus on that would allow me to help narrow down my focus. The area I chose to focus on was documentary and mockumentary styled film making. I made this choice with the intention to be able to explore both formal and less formal ideas while also not relying on having to create an entire original idea by myself. The topic of my film (The Game) was chosen because of my familiarity and pre-existing personal opinions about it. Planning Planning an entire production entirely by myself was a change of pace in comparison to how I worked in previous years. I began the planning process by typing out all of my thoughts in order to help establish what I am trying to do. Once I developed an idea for th...
Post a Comment
Read more

O Brother, Where Art Though?/Homer's Odyssey

Throughout O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Coen brothers included various elements in the film that drew inspiration from Homer's The Odyssey . The following are a few of these elements and characters from O Brother, Where Art Thou?  that are meant to reference Homer's The Odyssey . The Sirens In The Odyssey , Sirens are seductive creatures who try to tempt the main character of Odysseus into coming with them. To counteract this, Odysseus fills his ears with beeswax and is bound to the mast of his ship as instructed to him by Circe. In O Brother, Where Art Thou? , the Sirens act like they do in Homer's poem. They're used in the plot as a way to tempt our main characters. However unlike Odysseus in The Odyssey , Elmer, Delmar, and Pete do nothing to protect themselves from the Siren's temptations and allow themselves to be thrown off their path. Big Dan Teague In The Odyssey , The creature of the Cyclops is known as Polyphemus, son of Poseidon. In...
Post a Comment
Read more