Visual Narrative II

To Do This Week

Read: Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud - pgs 118-215

Blog Prompt:

Take 5 photos with your phone that uses one or more of the 6 transitions McCloud writes about in Understanding Comics. The photos could be shot around your home or out on an errand, with or without people, fiction or nonfiction. Think about how you can juxtapose the 5 images so that we can "read" a micro-story of an event, a movement through space, a setting and/or character situation. Post these 5 photos in a sequence and write a brief statement about your photo story with ideas from McCloud.

Notes

5-photo stories - the difficulty of narrating without words, changing frame, adding words to 5-shot stories

McCloud and visual storytelling - closure, rhythm, transitions, abstraction, show and tell

Review Types of Visual Storytelling:

scroll/timeline (linear) (The Run, Cabin site)
nonlinear or multilinear (repetition, patterns) (Cascadian Chronicles)
sequential (chronological frames) (Appleseed)
spatial montage (simultaneous frames, comics pages)
cinema (duration, temporal frames, rhythm)

McCloud Review (part 1):

icons, realism < ---> abstraction Rhasmagian
picture plane -> language -> reality triangle pg 51
blood in the gutter (panel-to-panel relationships pg. 70)
closure - what to leave out (the gaps in storytelling)
time frames - using the frames to express time, multi-linearity pgs 101-105
expressing motion
expressive lines

McCloud (part 2):

show and tell
classical division of word and image (movies)
collision of word and image in Modern art
Ads, pop culture, tv, web
Idea > Form > Idiom > Structure > Craft > Surface

Photo Narratives

Sophie Calle

Victor Burgin

Duane Michaels

Shaun Tan, The Arrival

99 Ways to Tell a Story by Matt Madden

99 Ways to Tell a Story - Template — Template

99 Ways to Tell a Story - Subjective — Subjective

99 Ways to Tell a Story - One Panel — One Panel

99 Ways to Tell a Story - Thirty Panels — Thirty Panels

99 Ways to Tell a Story - Things Are Queer (After Duane Michaels) — Things Are Queer (After Duane Michaels)

McCloud - Word & Image (pg 153-155)

Word Specific Combination

picture illustrates the words

John Balderssari - Pencil Story — *John Balderssari, Pencil Story*

Picture Specific Combination

words like a soundtrack for visuals

Richard McGuire - Here — *Richard McGuire, Here*

Duo Specific Combination

image and words have the same message

Additive Specific Combination

words amplify or elaborate the image

Humans of New York

Parallel Specific Combination

words and images do not intersect

Montage Specific Combination

words are an integral part of images

Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro, Pry

Interdependent

words and images work together to convey an idea each could not convey alone

Digital Comics - Erik Loyer

In-Class Activity

Lynda Barry — Lynda Barry X-Page Exercise (from her book Syllabus).

Get a blank piece of paper. Draw a big X on one side.

Think of a moment in your past. Something real. Something vivid.

Respond with words and phrases to the following questions:

Where are you?
What time of day or night does it seem to be?
What season does it seem to be?
Where is the light coming from?
What kind of light is it?
What’s the temperature like?
What does the air smell like?
What are you doing?
Is there anyone else in that place with you?
What are they doing?
Why are you there?
What are some of the sounds you can hear?
What are some of the things you can see?
What’s directly in front of you?
If you turn your head to your right, what’s there?
If you turn your head to the left, what do you see?
What is behind you?
What’s below you and around your feet?
What’s above your head?
What emotions are you feeling in this space?

Visual Narrative Assignment 10%

DUE March 7

We have discussed many strategies/approaches to visual narration and how story time — events and incidents, actions and reactions — can be made visible and relational in pictorial space through:

single frame composition
scroll navigation
nonlinear navigation
panel-to-panel relationships
cinematic sequence
spatial (simultaneous) montage

In this assignment, you are to use images to tell a story. The images may include symbols, shapes, colors, drawings, graphics, photos and/or video. Your images may be accompanied by text (narration or dialogue), but images and their spatial relationships should drive the narrative, not the text.

In other words, try not to make illustrations for a pre-written script. Instead, investigate new ways to organize images — on the single page and from page to page — in order to get across your particular visual story. Remember, the pictorial frame and the user’s navigation of the frame(s) are elements of visual storytelling.

Please don’t worry too much about the quality of images. Use your pencil, phone camera, AI image-generation, public domain image downloads. Play with Photoshop or Illustrator. Use Google Slides or just load the images and captions into a blog post. Remember that you can take any of these short assignments and complete them as your final project.