Week 2 - The narrative in visual communication

Artists have always grappled with ways to portray their stories in a way that will engage an audience. One way stories can by told is through cinema and about 7 billion people a year will pay money to view these movies. There has always been a need to tell and portray stories and over the centuries this has been done in different ways such as stone carvings, paintings and cinema.

The beautiful thing about being able to tell stories through visual language is that they can be understood by many people and not only those who can read. As time went on the stories were able to be represented and told better. For example in Greece the story of Odysseus was capture through a sculpture and we were able to see the emotion in the moment just before he was about to be stabbed in the eye. By being able to see emotion in the story made it more intriguing to the viewer. These stories can have many different purposes such as to entertain, communicate power, political motivations or tell history. Since the early stories from Greece and the Middle East which were only stone carvings we have seen cinematic effects being used. Such as in the Trajans column in Rome various view points have been used to capture the moment from different angles.

Linguistics views communication as the production of meaning and suggests the one message is going to mean different things to different people depending on different factors.

It focuses on the receiver and the social, political and economic environment in which they live. This theological approach to design applies not only to graphic design but to fashion designers, product designers, illustrators and architects.

Noise - The unnecessary in an image.

Redundancy -  What doesn't need to be there.

Paradigm - A set of views, concepts, assumptions or practices that create a way of viewing reality for the community that holds these views, concepts, assumptions or practices.