Comments on: Visual literacy in multimedia journalism

By: Mindy McAdams

Mindy McAdams — Sun, 27 May 2007 19:10:02 +0000

Eric, you’re certainly correct: Motion is essential to any story. We move either forward or backward in time in every story. In a photograph, sometimes stopping motion is precisely what conveys the story.

By: Ron Sylvester

Ron Sylvester — Sun, 27 May 2007 10:34:09 +0000

My favorite examples are two scenes in “Citizen Kane” after he tries to mold his talentless wife into an opera singer. One is as she’s singing, the camera pans up above the stage to two stagehands on a catwalk. One glances at the other and holds his nose. The other is when the reviewer holds up a string of paper dolls he’s carved from his program. Maybe there’s a reading assignment in scripts (not the computer kind). One of the best texts on storytelling I ever bought myself was a book with three screenplays by Woody Allen.

By: Eric

Eric — Sat, 26 May 2007 00:37:59 +0000

Mindy,

I think the point here is that “motion” is needed to tell a story. That my be a “motion” of images as in a film, slideshow, etc. It may also be a motion of thought such as a graph of data over time. This type of graph has a starting point, intermediate points and an ending point, thus showing some type of motion.

With a single photograph, the motion must be inferred in order for it to portray a story. Some photos aren’t meant to tell a story at all, but rather just capture a moment within the movement of time.

By: Megan Taylor

Megan Taylor — Fri, 25 May 2007 22:15:02 +0000

Grok!