This updated edition of a best-selling classic shows you how to structure your visuals as carefully as a writer structures a story or composers structure their music. The Visual Story teaches you how to design and control the structure of your production using the basic visual components of space, line, shape, tone, color, movement, and rhythm. You can use these components to effectively convey moods and emotions, create a visual style, and utilize the important relationship between the visual and the story structures.
Using over 700 color illustrations, author Bruce Block explains how understanding the connection between story and visual structures will guide you in the selection of camera angles, lenses, actor staging, composition, set design and locations, lighting, storyboard planning, camera coverage, and editing.
The Visual Story is an ideal blend of theory and practice. The concepts and examples in this new edition will benefit students learning cinematic production, as well as professional writers, directors, cinematographers, art directors, animators, game designers, and anyone working in visual media who wants a better understanding of visual structure.
Everywhere we go, weâre confronted by pictures. We look at pictures in books, magazines, at museums, theatres, on television, computer screens, and personal devices. The pictures are different sizes, moving or still, in color or black and whiteâbut they are all pictures.
Pictures usually communicate moods, emotions, or ideas to the viewer. We can call these pictures cinematic images. There are three ways that cinematic images communicate with an audience.
Story: The viewer becomes involved in the picture because it tells a story. The fundamental building blocks of story are plot, conflict, and character development.
Sound: The viewer becomes involved in the picture because of the sound. The fundamental building blocks of sound are dialogue, music, and sound effects.
Visuals: The viewer becomes involved in the picture because of the visuals. What are the building blocks of the visuals? Scenery? Actors? Costumes? No. These answers are too limited. The fundamental building blocks of visuals are the basic visual components.
The Basic Visual Components
The seven basic visual components are space, line, shape, tone, color, movement, and rhythm.
These components are found in every moving or still picture we see. Actors, locations, scenery, costumes, and props are made of these visual components. A visual component communicates moods, emotions, and ideas, and, most importantly, creates the visual structure. This book discusses these basic visual components in relation to the cinematic story telling experience, although these components appear in any picture.
SPACE
There are three ways to categorize visual space: First, the physical space in front of the camera; second, the space as it appears on a screen; and third, the size and shape of the screen itself.
LINE & SHAPE
Line is the result of tonal contrast. Lineâs visual partner is shape because all shapes appear to be constructed from lines. Line is an important visual component because it also contributes to the control of space, movement, and rhythm.
TONE
Tone refers to the brightness of objects. Tone does not refer to the tone of a scene (sarcastic, excited, etc.), or audio tone (treble and bass). Tone, sometimes referred to as âvalue,â is an important factor in both black & white and color photography.
COLOR
Color, a powerful visual component, is also the most misunderstood. This book will explain the complex component of color and make it simpler to use.
MOVEMENT
Movement is the visual component that first attracts the audienceâs attention. There are three ways to create movement. Objects create movement, the camera creates movement, and the audienceâs point-of-attention creates movement as they watch the screen.
RHYTHM
Weâre most familiar with rhythm we can hear, but thereâs also rhythm we can see. Rhythm is found in stationary (non-moving) objects, moving objects, and editing.
Controlling the Visual Components
This book will explain visual structure and show you how to use it. The components of space, line, shape, tone, color, movement, and rhythm are your productionâs visual cast members. You may be more familiar with the other cast called actors, but both casts are critical to creating great work. Once production begins, the visual component cast will appear on-camera with the actors in every shot. Both castsâthe visual components and the actorsâwill communicate moods, emotions, and ideas to the audience. Thatâs why understanding and controlling the visual components is so important.
Whether itâs an actor, the story, the sound, or the visual components, audiences react emotionally to what they see and hear. Music can communicate moods or emotions. Alfred Hitchcockâs Psycho or Steven Spielbergâs Jaws demonstrate how well music generates fear in an audience. In Psycho itâs the screech of the violins, and in Jaws itâs the pounding notes of the bass that prompts the fear. In both cases, the filmmaker introduces the musical theme when the murderous character first appears and then, by repeating that theme, rekindles the audiencesâ fear, tension, and horror.
The same communication can occur using a visual component. Certain visual components already have emotional characteristics associated with them, although most of these visual stereotypes are easily changed. âRed means dangerâ is a visual stereotype. In fact, any color can indicate danger or its opposite: safety. Although stereotypes effectively prove that visual components can communicate with an audience, the stereotype is not the only choice. Visual stereotypes can be derivative, dated, or inappropriate. Any visual component can communicate a wide range of emotions or ideas in new and interesting ways. The possibilities are only limited by the picture makerâs talent, imagination, and ability to control the components.
Can you decide not to control the visual components in your production? Yes, of course. Shooting in black & white eliminates color, but even a blank screen contains most of the components, so the screen is never empty. The picture maker who disregards the components is making an unfortunate mistake because the audience canât ignore the visual components they see on screen. The components are always communicating moods, emotions, and ideas to the audience. Left uncontrolled, the visual components can inadvertently contradict the story telling, mislead the audience, or simply bore them.
Understanding the visual components opens the door to controlling the visual structure of your pictures. Itâs the key to staging actors, choosing the lens and camera angle, location selection, art direction choices, and editorial decisions.
Remember, though, that any study, if blindly adhered to, can be misleading. Itâs not the purpose of this book to leave you with a set of rigid textbook definitions. If visual structure were that predictable a computer algorithm could produce perfect pictures. Visual structure isnât math. Fortunately, there are some concepts, guidelines, and even some rules that will help you solve the problems of producing great images. The key is understanding the visual components.
In this book each visual component will be explained and illustrated. Most importantly the process for assigning moods, emotions, ideas, and meanings to the components will be discussed. The purpose of this book is to enable you to control visual structure and use it to support the story you want to tell.
Terms
This book introduces some new terminology and ideas. Here are a few terms that need defining now:
THE REAL WORLD & THE SCREEN WORLD
The real world is the environment in which we live. Itâs the three-dimensional place we inhabit every day.
The screen world refers to the two-dimensional screens where we watch pictures. Itâs the high-tech picture world we create with cameras and computers, and the lowtech picture world we create with pencils and brushes. This includes movie screens, television and computer screens, screens on hand-held devices, screens inside headsets, the canvases hanging in museums, and the pages in books and magazines that display photographs and drawings. All of these two-dimensional surfaces are part of the screen world.
THE PICTURE PLANE
The picture plane is the two-dimensional surface where our pictures exist. The picture plane is usually surrounded by a âwindow.â
In an art museum, the picture planeâs window is the actual frame. In a movie theatre, curtains frame the two-dimensional picture plane. On a television, computer or hand-held device, the picture plane is framed by the plastic edges of the screen.
When we compose a shot using a cameraâs viewfinder or use our hands, we loo...