Week 7: Visual Narrative and the Media: An image speaks a thousand words – because I made it so.

Question 1: Why is narrative important when shaping a visual image to the audience?

A narrative is...

(from 1:36 - 3:15.)

... story-telling.

For a large portion of our elementary and secondary English classes, we were occasionally asked to write a narrative. The term"narrator" derives from this. A narrator is the person telling the story, like the one in the video above.

A narrative is made up of a story and discourse (Louis, 2005). According to Chatman (as cited in Louis, 2005), a story is the content of the story – what happens in the story – whereas discourse refers to the intended meaning and is concerned with how the message is conveyed. To simplify matters, the semiotic equivalents are in a way like:-

story = denotation; deals with superficial things like what is seen

discourse = connotation; goes under the surface level, relates to intended meaning

Lamarque (1994) identifies “four basic dimensions of all narrative: time, structure, voice and point of view”. This is equivalent to temporality and duration, genre, subject and focalisation, respectively from our lecture slides. “Structure” refers to the framework in which the narrative is fit into, “voice” is the narrator of the story whilst “point of view” literally means that – the perspective in which the story is told from.

The purpose of a visual narrative, according to Ware (2008) “is to capture the cognitive thread of the audience”. “Cognitive thread” here refers to an individual’s ability to draw on their existing schema to follow what is being told to them, either in a verbal or visual manner. In short, the statement made by Ware (2008) basically means that the aims of a visual narrative is to capture the audiences' attention by telling a story they are familiar with. In an advertiser's point of view, narrative is important because in order to successfully promote the product they are selling, they would need the advert to have a narrative the audience can identify.

To answer the question, a narrative is important when constructing a visual image to the audience because without all the components of a narrative, the audience may have difficulties in associating with the image displayed to them. A story without meaning and vice versa is something not everyone can associate with, thus narrative is important when constructing a visual image for an audience.

This video is a video without a narrative. The video does not have a message nor does it have a story. Personally, I zoned out after a while. The only thing keeping me alive (at least) was the jolly music and very adorable cat.

References:

Barbatsis, G. (2005). Narrative Theory. In K. Smith, S. Moriarty, G. Barbatsis, & K. Kenney (Eds.), Handbook of visual communication: Theory, methods and media (pp. 329-350). New Jersey, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Lamarque, P. (1994). Narrative and invention: The limits of fictionality. In C. Nash (Ed.), Narrative in culture: The uses of storytelling in the sciences, philosophy, and literature (pp. 133-156). London: Routledge.

Ware, C. (2008). Visual thinking for design. Morgan Kauffman. Burlington, MA: Marta Kauffman Publishers.