Kafkaesque

visual narrative

How can the choice of medium for a visual narrative be exploited as a storytelling device and how can it be used to direct the audience towards a desired reading of the text?

subjective narrative

methodology

story beats

"Start with the disordering event,

and let the beat be about the attempt

to restore order."

- David Mamet

Mamet, D., 1992. On Directing Film, Great Britain: Faber and Faber

mixed media as the message

"The medium is the message"

- Marshall McLuhan (1967)

adaptation and metamorphosis

treatment

"I did not want to respect the novel. I wanted to recreate it. For me Dune did not belong to Herbert as Don Quixote did not belong to Cervantes... the work of art is created from the collective unconsciousness."

-Alejandro Jodorowsky

Cobb, B. (2007) Anarchy and Alchemy: the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Creation Books

"You show the protagonist so that the audience can put themselves under the skin of the man. First of all, I use my camera in such a way as to show things, whenever possible, from the viewpoint of the protagonist: in that way the audience identifies itself with the character on the screen and thinks with him."

- Fritz Lang

Bogdanovich, P. (1967) Fritz Lang in America, Studio Vista

conceptual storyboarding

Storyboard layout for 'Porco Rosso' by Hayao Miyazaki

thematic adaptation

audience

film as a spectator medium?

text and image

image: a still from Naked Lunch (Dir. David Cronenberg, 1991)

McCloud,S. (1994) Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: Harper Perennial

Animal Man #19 (Cover Art by Brian Bolland, 1990)

using film language to direct the reading of a comic

anchorage -

"In Britain, comics have traditionally

been culturally despised as either

lowest-common denominator trash; or as

literature for children, or both"

Sabin (1998)

addition of text to direct the reading

Comics are:

"juxtaposed pictorial and other images in

deliberate sequence, intended to convey information

and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer."

-McCloud (1994)

Robinson, T. Interview with Will Eisner, The A.V. Club http://avclub.com/articles/will-eisner,13907/

research aims

relay-

"Ths is a medium that requires intelligence on part of the reader.

It requires a contribution, participation."

-Will Eisner

(Robinson:2000)

The focus is the strength of the narrative

and the aesthetic appeal of the medium.

addition of text to compliment the image

• To understand how visual narrative works in film, sequential comic art and storyboards.
• To experiment with my own print- and screen-based visual treatments, developing visual language through experiments with sequential design, layout, montage and composition.
• To identify the strengths and limitations of different media to create a successful visual narrative.
• To produce a subjective narrative that uses the medium that contains it as a storytelling device (using layout design, montage and framing).

a page from 'Abstraction' by Shintaro Kago (c. 2007)

layout and sequential design

1. Of or relating to Franz Kafka or his writings.

2. Marked by surreal distortion and often a sense

of impending danger

film noir aesthetic

Kafkaesque

image: a still from 'Detour'

(Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945)

focused on qualitative research

• secondary research -
• case studies of film technique
• and visual narrative enabled me to contextualize my own work

primary research included experiments concepual storyboards and the use of digital art media

image: a still from 'Rashomon'

(Dir. Akira Kurosawa1950)

Fred Madison: I like to remember things my own way.

Ed: What do you mean by that?

Fred Madison: How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.

image: a still from 'Lost Higway'

(Dir. David Lynch, 1997)

film noir

• The paranoid 'wronged' protagonist

isolation

crime

• entrapment

a subjective point of view.