Brayden Sathrum

2/6/23

DTC 354 

Visual Narrative I

“Understanding Comics,” by Scott McCloud, digs deep into the origins of comics and how they can be defined and manipulated to create extraordinary stories. Comics are an excellent way of exploring visual arts because they rely on a blend of pictures and text in order to tell the tale. After reading about how comics create the effects that they do, there are a few key takeaways that I will apply when creating my diagrammatic writing piece.

One part that stuck out to me was when McCloud describes how “less is more” and that finding a balance between subtracting and adding content is key. I believe this fits well with all types of storytelling because knowing when to allow your audience to infer information can elevate their experience. Especially in genres like horror, granting the reader the ability to let their mind generate some of the imagery can be effective. In terms of the diagrammatic writing assignment, I think it shows how using intentional language in a simple sentence can have more depth than a descriptive paragraph. 

Another piece of this book that I took note of was when McCloud talks about gutters and how the space in between comic book panels tells its own story. To me, this is beneficial when considering how I want to tackle my diagrammatic story. Knowing that my tale will be told through slides, there will be empty space around the content. When deciding how I want to structure my story, I want to take these gutters into consideration. Leaving spaces blank intentionally could, at times, leave readers with a better sense of the story than if I had a slide full of content. I believe this fits well with the idea of “less is more” as well, since having space left open is a minimalist approach to writing.

 By combining these two concepts from McCloud’s book, I think I will be able to create a story that is intentional with every slide. I want to ensure that every piece is strategically placed and has its own meaning. McCloud’s guide to comics also shows how this medium has a lot of crossover with other kinds of writing and, as such, uses similar rules to create a strong piece. I think learning from other visual arts is an incredibly helpful way of improving your own writing style. Overall, I’m excited to take these ideas and apply them to my diagrammatic story as I think it will strengthen the storytelling.

Dramatic Writing & Great Rock and Roll Pauses:

The Great Rock and Roll Pauses story focuses on the relationship between a family. Sasha Blake, the mother; Lincoln Blake, the brother; Drew Blake, the father; and Alison Blake, the one narrating the story. Alison, the narrator, explains that Drew does not understand his son Lincoln and through the story he sounds worried about Lincoln not having a friend come over, and he is also worried about his son’s obsession with music. The conflict I believe is Drew not understanding his son and being worried about him, which caused that conflict between both of them and Sasha as well. At the end Alison talks about the walk she had with her father outside in the desert. Drew starts to understand that he needs to accept his son just like he is not to worry about him obsessing with music. He wants to understand his son, and try as many times to be able to do so. For me, the format of this story was an interesting one, I have never read something like this before. All the colors and arrow, and graphs, and shapes, everything made it look well coordinated and intriguing to read. The narrator had a great way to demonstrate when someone was talking and thinking, and which colors represent each character. That was a lovely detail from this diagrammatic form.

After reading Dramatic Writing and Great Rock and Roll Pauses, many ideas for creating my own diagrammatic form have come to mind. From the story Great Rock and Roll Pauses, there were many colors used, especially vibrant ones, which in my case I don’t enjoy using myself. But, they can work if they are well integrated, just like in this story. I would prefer pastel colors and black & white to do my own diagrammatic form. The Dramatic Writing reading has some great examples of how I can experiment with my font size. I liked this quote from that reading, “A diagram is an image that works (23).” Which made sense for me after reading the story Great Rock and Roll Pauses.

After reading part of the book “Understanding Comics,” there are several different ways that I could approach this next assignment. For one, I could use unique ways of sequencing text in order to get across my story. In the recent story that we read in class about the rock and role pauses (the name escapes me), the author used many different ways to relay information.

One example that comes to mind is when she used a graph of a cycle going in circles to explain the flow of a conversation that she was having with her mom. Using this style showed off how a conversation in their family typically flows and the fact that it is shown to be a cycle shows that these kinds of conversations happen a lot.

Time frames are a great way to communicate to readers about the order of events that are happening in the story. For my own assignment, I could have text flash on screen to say things such as, “1 Hour Earlier” to show off something important in the story. This might work well in something where there is a lot of drama happening. Maybe there’s a murder mystery that needs to be solved, and the author wants to cut to a flashback of a scene where two characters are arguing with one another in order to further the suspension and get readers more invested in the plot.

I doubt that I will write a murder mystery for my assignment, but it does still give me some ideas for things that I could do. I am probably going to be writing a sci-fi war story of some kind, and maybe within this story there could be cuts backwards in time to events that started the war and influenced the characters in the story. I will have to give it some thought.

– Gibson

Classical Aristotelian 3-Part Structure

A young man is undergoing abuse at the hand of his narcissistic father. During the first part of the story, he undergoes intense abuse before finally rebelling against him, only to be shot down. The second part takes place over a decade later, in which he is finally able to kill his father and free himself of the abuse. In the third and final part, more years have passed, and he must now overcome the trauma he has faced in order to avoid passing it onto his daughter and continuing the cycle of abuse.

Kishotenketsu 4-Part Structure

A science-fantasy adventure that takes place in a world where a person’s thoughts and feelings can have real effects on their physical reality. The story starts by introducing the audience to a society full of war and violence, with many people obsessing over not having peace and desperately wanting war to end. The development sees the war get worse and worse, only for an ancient being to reveal that because they are so obsessed with not having peace, they continue to attract circumstances that make them obsessed for peace. The conclusion arrives when thoughts creating reality are revealed to the population, but they don’t believe it. They return to the never-ending cycle of war, while the protagonist is left to find their own peace.

Episodic Structure

A story about a battle in a sci-fi universe told through the perspectives of three different groups of people. There is the first faction and the second faction who are battling out against one another, and a group of civilians stuck in the middle simply trying to get out alive.

Surrealist/Fantasy Mode

A group of friends who have the ability to shift their consciousnesses to other realities find themselves stuck in a strange dimension surrounded by impossible terrain and fantastical creatures. This dimension is populated by strange flying creatures as well as an intelligent race of intelligent beings that are made of pure energy. It is unknown how the friends can escape and how this reality came to be.

Personal Anecdote

A short retelling about the time I accidentally set the fence on fire at my dad’s house during the Fourth of July. It humorously exaggerates my anxieties and fears that eventually come true as I nervously hold a roman candle the wrong way.

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud was a very interesting read and I thought is was very engaging. This reading has given lots of ideas on how to think about our next assignment, the visual narrative. What really stood out to me was the importance of negative space, or “gutters” in comics. The use of no content actually makes content that the reader creates on their own. This creates the imagination of the viewer to kick in, almost animating the scene in their heads. Each different viewer could have thought how a scene played out differently. This gives a sense of creativity and thought to your work. I will use negative space in my next work as a tool and will use it thoughtfully. Another interesting subject McCloud talks about it “Time Frames”. Time is a very tricky thing and can get really confusing very easily. The example McCloud gives where time moves in one single frame was very mind boggling. I never really took the time to think how comics can progress time in a single frame. When I create my visual narrative, I am going to make sue how to convey time with meaning. I also saw a neat connection between Japanese styles of plot and imagery. In Understanding  Comics McCloud discusses how the Japanese comics provide a lot of scene development and are very, in the moment, than goal oriented. I can’t help but draw a connection to the Kishōtenketsu plot structure we have been talking about in class. Both of these, coming from Japan, really focus on creating an atmosphere and being in the moment. I really think I want to implement that kind of structure in my next project.

Aristotelian:

This story will be about a relationship between father and son and the growth of their relationship in the mid 90’s California. When the son was born the father was always swamped by work and was too tired to raise a kid when he got home. The wife took up to raising the kid and took care of all his needs.The son knew that his dad worked to keep food on the table and a warm house to sleep in. But that didn’t stop him from wanting a more involved dad. The wife is tragically killed from a car accident when the kid is just 10. This puts a dent into both of the father’s and the sons lives as they now have to go to school and work while taking care of each other. Over the course of the story the father and son grow and learn more about each other. The father learns that he needs to take off time from work to support his child from home. The child learns more about how much dad actually can take care of him and learns what it is to be an adult. As well as to make your own decisions. This all leads up to the day of the funeral. The dad and son had some time to understand each other and get some closure with the passing of their mother/wife. And in the end the father and son are stronger people and go on to face the world with a new perspective of life. 

Kishōtenketsu: This story would focus on a man sitting out in the middle of a field surrounded by mountains. The man is describing his surroundings and is at peace with the world around him. The man continues to roll in the grass and continues to run into the endless plains. He looks at the mountains and views them in awe. Then the camera will pan downward under the earth and will show a car crash and a dead body of the same man. This will infer that the man in the plains had died and had reached some sort of “heaven” or “Nirvana”.  The story ends with this character being content with his situation and continues to explore the endless heavens. 

Episodic: This will be a story about different household pets in different people’s homes. The pets will be of different kinds of animals and different breeds of certain animals for a diverse “cast”. The show will tell these stories about how pets and humans affect each other’s lives and how we go through life together. These stories would be fictional and would have a different conflict with different pets and owners every episode. Each episode would be its own little story that makes up the whole overarching story of how pets and humans are closely linked with each other and makeliving in this world just a bit easier. But, not saying that sometimes taking care of pets isn’t difficult. 

Surrealist: When I think of surreal I think of crazy landscapes and weird imagery that brings thoughts and feelings into the viewer. I want to create a story that takes place in modern day Washington (2023). In this world, the main character who would be nameless is wandering around his school campus late at night where they stumble and fall on the ground. When they get back up they seem to have fallen into a pocket reality that is full of crazy surreal imagery that is constantly changing the more they walk through it. The base form of a school is still there but everything around it and in it is completely chaotic and creepy. The character’s personality is described through these environments as a way of communicating the main character’s thoughts and feelings toward periods of their life. The story ends with our character being transported back to “reality” where the story just seems to continue on without any sort of resolution or explanation. 

Personal: What many stories try to tell is a story about coming to age and realizing that it is now time to grow up. They do very well because the audience can really connect to it on a personal level. The story of my “coming of age” was when I moved across the whole continent to work for the Walt Disney Company at Walt Disney World. The story starts with a young man who had a dream of becoming an Imagineer, a creative designer for the Disney theme parks. Ever since he was little he’s wanted that to be his future. Well, while in college he had a chance to partake in the Disney College Program! Where he could work for Disney as well as make connections that could potentially get him to become an Imagineer! He took the chance and he got in! He was then flown down to Florida and started working for Disney. It was a lot of hours and a lot of work, but it was worth it. He made friends along the way and eventually found a person he loves. He worked with them for almost a year where loss and homesickness grasped him. In the end, he learned that there are a lot more opportunities for him in the future and Disney may not be the path that he is supposed to follow. The story ends with him moving back to Washington where he is now currently working on his degree to benefit his future. 

“Great Rock n’ Roll Pauses” was a really fun and emotional read, and almost feels like hypertext with the way that the structure of the story uses links and points you in certain directions. In this case, the reader doesn’t have the freedom to click and direct themselves, but it is similar. The conflict in this story is centered around the dad’s relationship with his son, and the strain that his job and personal history has on it. He doesn’t understand his son, and is trying to find ways to connect with him. We get the perspective of the daughter, who loves her dad very much, and is seeing these events happen through the biased lense of a child, but we also get a lot of truth from the observations she makes. We see that her dad is tired, working long hours, and feeling like he is doing something wrong with the way he interacts with his son. The resolution comes on the walk with his daughter, when she opens his eyes to how her brother thinks, and why it’s okay for him to be different. The way that this is presented at the end of the story is unique. We don’t actually get a narration of the events, but instead we get the finished graphs that Lincoln wanted on the rock n’ roll pauses, telling us that his dad helped him and changed his thinking about his son and music. I really like the structure of this story because it’s very satisfying to figure out how to read it, and then reread it in a different order. You spend more time thinking about the text and it slows you down so it feels like you’re getting more of the story.

In the film Fargo, each previous event works as a ripple effect on the next event; each scene builds from the previous by taking the current issue and stretching it out to include more issues/problems which thicken the plot. The plot is driven by causality: Jerry brings the Ciera to Fargo for the kidnappers, the kidnappers go grab Jean, get pulled over because of the dealer plates, shoot suspicious trooper cause Jean is in the back, single homicide turns into triple, and the plot just goes on and on.

As these ripples unfold, we can see the characters transform through the actions that they take to handle these ripples. Margi goes through a transformation once she widens her scope of suspects after an awkward visit from an old friend. This scene allowed Margi to have a realization, gaining knowledge which she did not have before. The ripples eventually cause the father-in-law to transform, going from an individual who wouldn’t even invest in a business opportunity without financial fund security to wanting to meet with a kidnapper face-to-face armed with a ton of cash.

This arrangement of ripples taking place one after another represent a tragic plot as we have laid out before us an arrangement of incidents which inspire fear in the characters and in our audience once we realize this plan Jerry put in place has derailed.

Great Rock n’ Roll Pauses uses diagrammatic storytelling to tell a story through Alison Blake’s perspective. The story follows the interactions that occur within the Blake family from Alison’s point of view. Throughout the story, Alison tries to analyze and make sense of the actions and behaviors of her family members, Sasha (Mom), Drew (Dad), and Lincoln (Brother). Throughout the slides within the story, we are provided with information that Alison deems important in our understanding of her family dynamic.

The story’s conflict revolves around the relationships between the family members, or the lack thereof. I think that a majority of this conflict is centered around Alison’s father Drew due to the fact that Drew is hardly ever around and when he is home he is very distant and does not show much affection. It is also revealed that when he is home he uses gin to calm his anger which can be said to add to the conflict. In addition, he struggles a lot with connecting with his son Lincoln. I think that this is somewhat balanced out but also adds more conflict with Alison’s mother’s somewhat apparent favoritism towards Lincoln.

The conflict is resolved when Drew asks Alison to go on a walk with him in the desert. During this walk Drew starts a discussion about how he needs to do better with Lincoln. The conflict is therefore being resolved because Drew recognized the problem and is now trying to fix it. As for the change in characters, there is an inward change because nothing is really changing on the outside it is the inside that is being changed for the better with the mending and development of their relationships.

For my diagrammatic storytelling, I want to incorporate the visual aspects seen in Great Rock n’ Roll Pauses. The shapes and the colors help to move and allow the story and keep me engaged. In addition, I think that the placement of the text and the arrows/shapes leading the text made it easier to follow. With the text being so minimal, the visual elements really bring everything together and create a bigger impact on the story you are trying to tell.

The story “Great Rock n’ Roll Pauses” is about a family told from the daughter, Alison’s, point of view. Alison tells this story through a diagrammatic slide show. In this slide show, she goes through the past, describes the characters, and explains how her dad is struggling to understand his son’s obsession with pauses in songs. 

The conflict occurs when the dad tries to figure out Lincoln’s obsessions with music, specifically the pauses in songs. Lincoln was playing the songs with pauses when his dad asked him why he liked them so much. He didn’t get the answer he was looking for so he snapped, causing Lincoln to cry and causing him to run inside. The mom explained the importance of the pauses and followed Lincoln into the house to comfort him. The conflict was resolved when Alison and her dad went on a walk into the desert. During their walk, Alison and her dad talk about many things. But most importantly she helps her dad understand the importance of the pauses. 

The characters’ changes throughout this story are internal. Especially with the dad, after he talks with Alison about Lincoln’s obsession with pauses, we know that he changes because the story ends with different graphs of pauses that he helped Lincoln recreate. This shows that he has begun to understand and connect with Lincoln and his obsession. 

The diagrammatic form of the story expressed the story elements of the plot and characters very well. I think this format helped the reader visualize the story better. For example, when Alison was talking about her mom’s collages she organized that slide to look like a collage. Also, when she was talking about saying good night to her brother through their shared wall, she used a block in between the text to represent the wall. For my diagrammatic story, I will use a lot of visual elements like shapes and charts. I’m not the best at storytelling so I think adding these different graphics will help the reader to better visualize the story. Along with the graphics I will use colors that represent that part of the story similar to how colors were used in “Great Rock n’ Roll Pauses’. 

The Great Rock n’ Roll Pauses revolves around the observations and interactions between Alison and the members of her family. There is already a sense of conflict between Lincoln and their father who does not understand Lincoln’s fascination with the pauses between certain rock songs. There is no concrete resolution, only a glimpse of it through Alison’s observation and the conversations she has during the night walk with her father. The only observational resolution we get is that Lincoln and their father come together to listen to something. The diagrammatic format helps to visualize the complicated dynamics between each member of the family in relation to Lincoln or Alison. It also gives a sense of how certain thoughts and actions relate to each other in order to move the story on.

In terms of inspiration to my own diagrammatic story, this type of story utilizes heavily on visuals of the text and uses very basic shapes that can be interpreted into different objects that the text draws attention from. The shapes help to illustrate out how the story flows and the inner turmoil certain characters have in the situation they are in. I noticed how in one of the instances within the story Great Rock n’ Roll, there was a scale with the father’s questions and Lincoln’s answers. The father’s questions and remarks later on are in red while Lincoln is green, the complementary color of red. This pattern of using complementary colors between Lincoln and the father caught my eye as interpreting their relationship as strained in some way. While these colors may seem random, there is a sense of purpose as to why they were chosen either to illustrate the scene or the relationships between characters.

Great Rock n’ Roll Pauses centers around the speaker, Alison Blake, and her family. She gives us insight at first into who each family member is and what sorts of behaviors they encounter in their home from each. The main plot of this story focuses on one day in their life. As for the story’s conflict, the simple answer is that Dad had a rough day at work and essentially takes it out on the speaker’s brother. This conflict is resolved once the dad has a chance to go on a walk with Alison and calm himself down. However, I feel that there is a larger conflict in play within the story. Based on this story alone, Alison’s brother seems to me to have a form of autism. The family clearly has different views and opinions of the brother and his obsession with pauses in songs, and this creates an underlying conflict between each character. However, this specific conflict is not fully resolved by the end of the story.

I liked the diagrammatic form that was used to tell this story, especially since she establishes early on that this form of storytelling is how she keeps a journal. I liked when she used basic shapes to help readers visualize the story. For example, when she’s talking about the wall between the bedrooms she uses a basic rectangle shape to show what’s happening/being said in each room on either side of the wall.

For my diagrammatic story, I want to use fonts and simple shape graphics to get my voice heard, rather than using words alone. I’m a writer, and I tend to ramble in my stories so I think this will be challenging for me. I like the idea of using blank slides and blank spaces to represent pauses and bring a sort of anxiousness to my readers. On page 15 of Diagrammatic Writing, Johanna talks about enframed text and how it can be used as a “side thought” to the other elements on the page. I think this would be a great way to show what my character is actually thinking about the scene or events unfolding around them. I also like the idea of aligning the next slide’s text with where the text ended on the previous slide to help the story’s flow and pacing. If you want the pacing to be slower or allow for a pause or change of idea in the next slide, you could start the text elsewhere, showing that it’s not particularly connected to the previous slide’s ideas.