Understanding Visual Storytelling
When considering the visual design to your next video project, take a step back and realize that it's your story to tell. Empower yourself. You can.
Not many people think of the punctuation and grammar that goes into the design of great filmmaking. Those words are mainly associated with essays or novels. If you aren't thinking in this mindset, you should begin to. Bruce Block writes a wonderful fundamental book that teaches you all the 'grammatical' laws (if you will) to cinema. The book is entitled, THE VISUAL STORY. I highly recommend it. Below you will find the crucial rules that lay the foundation for creating emotional catharsis in moving images. Go ahead, break them!
The Rule of Contrast & Affinity: The greater the contrast, the greater the visual intensity; the greater the affinity, the less the visual intensity.
Visual Intensity: The contrast of the basic elements that make up a moving picture. i.e. the color blue and the color magenta share an equal amount of the same image (contrast); the color blue dominates the image with only a small speckle of magenta (affinity).
'Grammatical' Laws to Cinema: At the most elementary level, every moving image contains the following basic visual elements; space, line, shape, tone, color, movement, and rhythm.
Visual Storytelling: Creating a beginning, middle, and end, purely with the basic 'Grammatical' Laws to Cinema, and controlling those elements by adding or subtracting Visual Intensity using the Rule of Contrast and Affinity.
Example Using Color:
Act I:
Meet the color Blue. He dominates the entire frame. He is feeling blue because he doesn't have another color to share his space with.
ACT II:
Magenta pops up in the corner of the room. He likes her. He decides to get a little closer. Magenta fills a great portion of the screen now. Blue no longer lives on it alone.
Magenta leaves after meeting Blue, and Blue fills the frame all on his own again. Magenta then fills the frame and has every hue imaginable waiting on her beckon call. She has to fight all the other hues off. Green pushes in, then Yellow; but no one balances her quite as well as Blue does. After all they are exact opposites.
ACT III:
Magenta runs into Blue; this time she doesn't let him get away. They share the screen now and live happily ever after.