Visual Narrative II

To Do This Week

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

Work on the 5 slides from last weeks in-class assignment. Consider the 6 panel transitions and word-image relationships McCloud writes in Understanding Comics.

Develop the Visual Narrative Assignment 10% - DUE March 7

Notes

Story summaries. Fix plot summaries to improve grade.

Thursday is an optional workshop day to finish your Diagrammatic Story, due on Friday.

In-class 5-image stories: the difficulty of narrating without words, changing frame, adding words to 5-shot stories. Not graded, but part of participation. Share on Slack a single screen grab of 5-image series and related text.

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

Image & Text

Word Specific Combination
Picture Specific Combination
Duo Specific Combination
Additive Specific Combination
Parallel Specific Combination
Montage Specific Combination
Interdependent

Photo Narratives

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

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)

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.