The Visual Story: Creating The Visual Structure...
This updated edition of a best-selling classic shows you how to structure your visuals as carefully as a writer structures a story or composers structure their music. The Visual Story teaches you how to design and control the structure of your production using the basic visual components of space, line, shape, tone, color, movement, and rhythm. You can use these components to effectively convey moods and emotions, create a visual style, and utilize the important relationship between the visual and the story structures.
The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure...
Using over 700 color illustrations, author Bruce Block explains how understanding the connection between story and visual structures will guide you in the selection of camera angles, lenses, actor staging, composition, set design and locations, lighting, storyboard planning, camera coverage, and editing.
The Visual Story is an ideal blend of theory and practice. The concepts and examples in this new edition will benefit students learning cinematic production, as well as professional writers, directors, cinematographers, art directors, animators, game designers, and anyone working in visual media who wants a better understanding of visual structure.
'Bruce Block masterfully deconstructs visual storytelling. Exposure to his material is essential for all students of cinema. This book will make you a better filmmaker.'American Film Institute
If you can't make it to one of Bruce Block's legendary visual storytelling seminars, then you need his book! Now in full color for the first time, this best-seller offers a clear view of the relationship between the story/script structure and the visual structure of a film, video, animated piece, or video game. You'll learn how to structure your visuals as carefully as a writer structures a story or a composer structures music. Understanding visual structure allows you to communicate moods and emotions, and most importantly, reveals the critical relationship between story structure and visual structure.
The Visual Story offers a clear view of the relationship between the story/script structure and the visual structure of a film, video, or multimedia work. An understanding of the visual components will serve as the guide to strengthening the overall story.
The Visual Story divides what is seen on screen into tangible sections: contrast and affinity, space, line and shape, tone, color, movement, and rhythm. The vocabulary as well as the insight is provided to purposefully control the given components to create the ultimate visual story. For example: know that a saturated yellow will always attract a viewer's eye first; decide to avoid abrupt editing by mastering continuum of movement; and benefit from the suggested list of films to study rhythmic control. The Visual Story shatters the wall between theory and practice, bringing these two aspects of the craft together in an essential connection for all those creating visual stories.
The concepts in this book will benefit writers, directors, photographers, production designers, art directors, and editors who are always confronted by the same visual problems that have faced every picture maker in the past, present, and future.
'Bruce's class taught me a key lesson on how to approach filmmaking as a language. Once I understood visual storytelling through that lens, it fundamentally shifted the way I experienced and created films. It not only illuminated the elemental process of adapting words to images, but also guided me to a deeper awareness of how to construct a story.'Sam Esmail, creator, producer, writer and director of Mr. Robot and Homecoming
'No matter what kind of visual storyteller you are, whether a filmmaker, photographer, or graphic designer, Bruce Block explains how visual narrative works in a way that is clear and accessible. 'David Pagani, Creative Director-On Air, DIRECTV'Bruce Block is legendary in the field of broadcast design. His profound insight into the art of visual storytelling will forever change the way you work.'Dan Pappalardo, Executive Creative Director/Partner, Troika Design Group'I think every cinematographer-in-training should read this book. It will teach them how important collaboration with others in the crew is by having an overall concept of all that goes into the creation of the Visual Story.'Rexford Metz, ASC'His book is a sort of Elements of Style for filmmakers, and any screenwriter, director or cinematographer with a point of view will find a great deal of creative inspiration in The Visual Story's guide to the fundamentals of the craft. The Visual Story makes the very convincing argument that all of these media require precise, motivated visual designs in order to be effective - and that having a point to make or a story to tell is only half the battle.'American Cinematographer Magazine'In a great story - and in a great speech - there is ebb and flow, there is silence and there may be thunder. In a wonderful book about the power of the visual in storytelling by Bruce Block, the author uses these three basics of story - Exposition, Climax, Resolution - to show the link between visual structure and story structure.' Garr Reynolds, author Presentation Zen
"Bruce Block has a unique knowledge and understanding of the visual structure of film. The Visual Story is the only book of its kind. it will teach you to become a better storyteller through the use of visuals." - Nancy Meyers, Director of "Something's Gotta Give" and "The Holiday" "Bruce Block masterfully deconstructs visual storytelling. Exposure to this material is essential for all students of cinema. This book will make you a better filmmaker." --American Film Institute "Bruce Block's work gives the visual storyteller a framework for making story-driven decisions, not just visual choices. It gives the filmmaker tools to create harmony and counterpoint between the story structure and its visual realization on the screen." --Randy Nelson, Dean of Pixar University, Pixar Animation Studios "No matter what kind of visual storyteller you are, whether a filmmaker, photographer, or graphic designer, Bruce Block explains how visual narrative works in a way that is clear and accessible." --David Pagani, Creative Director-On Air, DIRECTV "Bruce Block is legendary in the field of broadcast design. His profound insight into the art of visual storytelling will forever change the way you work." --Dan Pappalardo, Executive Creative Director/Partner, Troika Design Group "I spend much of my time in pre-production quoting Bruce Block to my cinematographers, production designers, costume designers, and editors. In all my years in the business I've never found a clearer more useful articulation of film grammar." --Jay Roach, director of Austin Powers, Meet the Parents, and Meet the Fockers "You hold in your hand a key to understanding the complex and ever changing world of modern cinema." --Charles Shyver, director of Alfie, Father of the Bride I & II, and Baby Boom "Bruce Block's in-depth understanding of Visual Structure is inspirational to those working in animation. This reference source is invaluable and essential for any artist." --Walt Disney Television Animation 041b061a72