Visual Storytelling - Week 2B

As mentioned in the previous post, in Session 2, we got into narration and storytelling but in order to get into visual storytelling, we had to go through some examples. One of them was the pictures with the bird in the cage.

The question is: where did the bird go? Did it break free? Did the bird explode? Did someone let it go? One can create many stories from just looking at these two pictures. In other words, the viewer creates the story. And this is how we were introduced to visual storytelling.

Getting more into the subject, James also mentioned the Kuleshov Effect, an editing technique established by a Russian filmmaker around 1920. Basically, he put an expressionless man as the first shot, then a shot of an object or a subject, and then again the same shot of the man. The goal was for the audience to create a connection between the pictures and perceive the emotions of the man.

Source: here.

As you can see there is a connection that can be made in each situation. Even though this is not exactly what we were asked to do, it was a really good example for us to get into the concept of the whole storytelling process. I do believe that all this explanation helped because the idea for the suspense storytelling exercise that we were asked to do next, came quite easily. 

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My team and I sat down a thought of a quick story that we could do easily by using our surroundings. Before I explain the story, I'm going to insert our actual Story Board and then I'm going to explain the context, in case it's not understood. 

                   You can see it as a presentation here.



Our story was:


We see a girl studying, alone in a classroom and typing on her computer. Suddenly, she receives a text saying that her hair looks really nice. She looks around to see if someone is about, but she sees no one. Because of that, she replies to the text and asks “who is it?”. The unknown person replies with “Come outside.” out of curiosity, she comes outside of her classroom and she finds a friend of hers just surprising her. After that, they go inside the classroom to study together. A few minutes after they settle and they start working, the girl receives another text from an unknown person saying “your hair actually looks nice today”...


Even though it wasn't meant to have the element of surprise, we added it because it built to the suspense at the end.


It was a really interesting exercise and something that I had never tried before in any of our other courses. It was, overall, a really good introduction and everything was clear and very well structured. It would be intriguing to use it with other genres as well because I feel like we only do things revolving around drama. Can't wait to see what's coming next!