#poweroftheimage

[amycauser-blog]

How to create narrative in an image? Does this work?

Let's look at a few tips for visual storytelling

1) The story you want to tell should lead image design, not the other way around.

Too often we use story to stitch together the image...kind of a visual glue for disparate items. This is a flawed process. You crate the story, decide what elements are required to tell the story, distill it to it's essence, and then begin to create the visual interpretation of the story.

2) Lighting is the foundation for good storytelling.

The loss of B&W has had a huge impact on visual storytelling. It is too easy to hide bad lighting within gobs of color. Bad lighting will quickly tear down your story though. There is a reason that lighting lands in the "top 5" list for stunning cinematography. Learning the difference that low-key and high-key lighting can have on the "mood" of a piece is essential for effective storytelling.

3) Composition leads the eye through the storyline.

We seldom think of composition playing a part in storytelling. Normally we think of it in regards to balance, tension, movement, order, and a whole host of "design terms". I took a little time flipping through a number of tips and definitions for composition, but never found one that talked about storytelling. Yet, I've reviewed tons of portfolios and missed vital elements in a visual narrative due to bad composition. If the composition doesn't support the story, then chances are good that we'll lose some aspect of the story as our eye bounces around the image.

4) Eye Movement is critical to story pacing

While composition sets the stage for eye movement, the design elements that guide our eye through the image set the pace for the story. Should we be high energy or low, should the action build to a crescendo or tamper off to a whimper. The sight lines we create often set the pace at which our eye moves through the image. If you are trying to slow the eye down, do you give it details in specific areas to capture it's attention? If you are trying to build tension, do you utilize tangents? If you want to create speed, do you use simple clean lines and minimal visual information so that the eye moves quickly through a space?

5) Color and tone set mood.

Wanna high energy scene? Don't use soft pastel colors. Want a nice serene moment, leave your high impact hues in the tube. Lighting lays our foundation, but color and tone finesse the mood and create a heightened emotional impact. Don't under estimate the ability for effective color management to greatly impact your storytelling.

6) Story is where it is all at.

Seems weird to come back to this, but it bears repeating - you've got to have a story to have a effective visual narrative. You've got to have a great story to have great visual narrative! There is no amount of presentation, finish, color management, or composition that can create a story in an image...without first having a story.

Does this work? Can we try this out? 

[amycauser-blog]

narratological research concerned with pictorial narrativity generally proceeds from the assumption that although single pictures may evoke or imply stories, they are unsuitable for storytelling in a strict narratological sense

- https://www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de/index.php/diegesis/article/view/128/158

Can a single image tell a story? Does it imply a story and we guess the rest? Is film more effective?

[myresearcharchive]

Proliferation of Images of Police Violence (Inevitably) Cause Loss of Public Confidence?

Does "the proliferation of formal networks of surveillance (and the increase in official surveillance footage of police malpractice that this could generate) inevitably contributes to a loss of public confidence in the criminal justice agencies involved?"

"Perhaps we need to be mindful of the context within which these images enter the public domain. As Fairclough (2003) argues, in order to understand the potential effects of images, we need to consider the discourses within which the images are situated. The examples of violent behaviour by police officers briefly outlined earlier are typical of the manner in which ‘official’ surveillance footage of alleged police violence becomes public. Routinely, footage of this nature enters the public domain in the context of the prosecution of the officers involved. The behaviour is constructed as an aberrant/abhorrent act, and the prosecution can be seen in part as an attempt to minimize the potential impact on public confidence in the criminal justice agencies involved. Criminal justice agencies may indeed be operating under the gaze of an increasingly combatative and critical range of news media, but arguably the potential threat to confidence and legitimacy posed by images derived from official surveillance footage is frequently diffused by the situating of these images within a narrative of the identification and punishment of the individuals involved." (p. 4) Kearon, 2012

So much for official surveillance, but what about informal surveillance?

"...social networking and image sharing sites have become informal sousveillance repositories containing large amounts of publicly accessible information and images. (For example, a search of YouTube carried out in January 2012 using the phrase ‘police brutality’ yielded over 49,000 video clips, many of them sousveillance footage.) Consequently, given the development of an increasingly fragmented, critical and combatative media environment, allied to the emergence of sousveillance networks and a significant increase in the number of these publicly available images of alleged police violence, it could be argued that these developments have the potential to disrupt the ability of ‘image led policing’ to manage symbolic challenges to public confidence in the legitimacy of the police and other criminal justice agencies.

"However, the assumption that this proliferation of sousveillance technologies automatically poses a significant challenge to public confidence is not without its problems. The fragmentation of forms of news and social media and the various other developments that have already been outlined all have a profound impact on the nature of the potential audience for these media narratives. In particular, the fragmentation of forms of media has been mirrored in the fragmentation of the audience (Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998; McRobbie and Thornton, 1995). It is reasonable to suggest that in order for sousveillance images of police violence or other examples of malpractice to have a significant impact on public attitudes, they must be disseminated widely. But while social networking, video and image sharing sites have the potential to reach large audiences; in reality this ability is partial and conditional. As Wilson and Serisier (2010: 178) state: ‘The sheer ubiquity of distribution platforms and imaging devices does not in itself automatically equate to enhanced accountability of the powerful, nor does it inevitably lead to increased public condemnation of police brutality.’

"Dean (2008) argues that one obstacle for the dissemination of potentially critical images is (paradoxically) the significant and increasing volume of these images available via social media and image sharing sites. Against the backdrop of tens of thousands of sousveillance images (often shaky, ambiguous and fragmented smart-phone video clips lacking information about context), potentially powerful and damaging footage can easily become subsumed in an avalanche of competing images. Jenkins (2009), using the example of YouTube, argues that the potential ability of social media and image sharing sites to disseminate critical images and information to a global audience is also significantly curtailed by the behaviour of audiences themselves. Those images which do reach an audience in the tens of millions tend to feature banal, innocuous, ‘entertaining’ themes that do not challenge dominant tastes and norms, whereas Jenkins argues that critical or challenging images become the preserve of small, marginal ‘niche-publics’. There is a growing recognition that audiences do not engage with social media and image sharing websites in an uncritical and undifferentiated fashion. Rather, there is a tendency to use these resources to construct virtual social networks of like-minded individuals engaging with sources of information that reflect the views of this niche audience (Andrejevic, 2007). In their research on Australian video activists, Wilson and Serisier (2010) found that even among the activists themselves there is a perception that their images of police violence and misconduct reach a relatively limited audience of individuals already predisposed to be suspicious of the State in general and the criminal justice system in particular. Wilson and Serisier (2010: 177) argue that rather than simply conceptualizing sousveillance as a manifestation of the ‘many’ watching the ‘few’, it is perfectly feasible that sousveillance can often be an exercise in the few watching the few." (p. 6-7)