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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

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