Introduction
Whether you're working on an video, website, image, storyboard, or other visual for new/multi-media, concepts from film (and/or photography) offer important guidance, particularly related to managing visual information in a frame. Any kind or size of frame, whether TV or movie screen, computer screen, personal device screen, or the edges of an image or a website, contains--puts boundaries around--the visual materials that make up your message. We might not readily connect some elements of film with other types of media, but think about it. "Characters" don't necessarily have to be people; a setting doesn't necessarily involve a real place. Other aspects that are important in film--plotting, lighting, and sound, for example--can be equally important in other types of visual, animated, and/or interactive presentations.
This section of the course website contains information about
- "Filmic" ways of perceiving visual information
- Frame space, two dimensional and three dimensional
- Light (and shadow)
- "Camera" (view point) angles
- Action (motion)
- Sound
- Definitions of film terms
- A list of useful resources about film and digital video
Filmic Perspectives
Purposes for using "moving images" include:
- to make people feel something
- to help people learn or understand something
- to help people do something.
Two perspectives from cinema are worth considering in multimedia displays:
Mise-en-scene refers to what we see and hear on the screen
- Set design, props, wardrobe
- Lighting effects
- Sounds and soundtrack
- Performance—what the characters are doing and saying
These aspects of mise-en-scene, which create the story, mood, characters, and context, need to be reconceived for different media and purposes. The "set" my be a space on a web page; the "performances" may be the motion and/or interaction of elements on the screen rather than the acting of people.
Mise-en-shot refers to the techniques that are used to achieve what we see and hear on the screen, for example
- camera position
- camera movement
- scale
- shot duration
- pacing
- special effects
The fundamentals of these techniques can be applied not only to film, but to other types of presentations. Consider, for example, Flash presentations. "Shot duration," the time that the camera lingers on one person, place, or thing, still applies as a designer determines how long any particular scene or motion in a presentation should take. In PowerPoint, features of slides—even the whole slide show—can be animated so that the creator must think about timing, transition, and ways to draw the viewers' attention to particular aspects of the presentation or areas of the visual field. Here's an example PowerPoint show set up to be completely animated. Does the pacing work for you? What about the ways the creator chose to present/reveal information?
What is not part of traditional filmic perspectives is interaction. The possibility of interaction—the users' opportunities to act on and/or interact with materials—adds an additional dimension to multimedia delivered by computer.
Important considerations for developing new/multimedia presentations
Content is key. However, you must be able to convey your content in ways that people understand it or get something out of it. In other words, the message and use of medium are inextricably linked.
According to the "transmission" model of communication, people use media to create (encode) and send (transmit) messages that are then received (decoded) by the audience. In reality, however, messages are always subject to reinterpretation by the audience. When you create and encode (literally) digital images, understanding the potentials of various media aesthetics may help you align your intent with your audiences' interpretation—though the match will never be perfect.
Perception and filmic vision
Our cognitive abilities and perceptions allow us to manage input from the world around us in a number of ways. Perception helps us:
Stabilize the environment. We manage the visual field by determining figure/ground relationships: what's in front, what's in the background; what elements of the field are large and small, left and right, etc. To navigate the environment, we are constantly making judgments about the relationship of elements in the immediate environment.
See Selectively. We pick and choose (rather automatically) from all the available elements in our surroundings what to focus attention on. We may see, hear, and do many things that we're not fully conscious of. (For instance, you're probably breathing right now, whether you think about it or not. The computer screen in your field of vision is clear; the furniture, wall, or window behind the screen is fuzzy.)
Contextualize. We understand things based on the context. We make judgments about the meaning of elements in the environment based on our understanding of context--what should and shouldn't be present; what makes sense and what doesn't. Art can use our shared understanding of context (social context for example) or art can teach us to be part of an unfamiliar context.
Filmic vision offers opportunities to break through our traditional and conditioned ways of seeing and understanding the world. Because art has the power to play with our perceptions, it's important to consider what it means to be a responsible and ethical communicator. Does that mean not upsetting people with disturbing images? Nope. You may definitely want to do that depending on your purpose. However, since the purpose of art is to intensify and interpret experience, ethics does mean that you must be aware of the potential impact of your work and responsibility suggests that you carefully consider your message and media.