Gargi Somani
This course was an introduction to visual storytelling. We explored various methods by which a story can be represented and understood. What visual languages can one use to express the feelings/act in the story? The course started with an introduction to narrative theory, visual grammar, and languages. The aim was to create a coherent visual atmosphere across multiple visual mediums.
To get started, we began with some writing exercises wherein we started writing any childhood instance that first came to our mind and wrote continuously for 5 minutes straight, and then for 2 minutes straight. With the constraint of time, some important parts of the story got deleted, altered, or added, some changed the chronology of the story. We then wrote a 500-word extract to explain the instance in detail, which then acted as a brief for the next person.
The next step was to start collecting snapshots from movies which evoke a sense of the act or feeling in the story, this helped the recipient in understanding the story better. We swapped stories with our peers, then started making mood boards, collages on the basis of acts/feelings depicted in their stories. The reason for swapping stories was how different stories can have several interpretations on the basis of personal experiences as well.
The recipient then makes a mind map of the story trying to analyse different feelings and acts in the story from a third person’s point of view and identifies a core object in the story.
We then explored different mediums of representation like zines, animation, posters, comic strips, greeting cards, etc trying to evoke the feeling/act in the story keeping the object as the core. The artwork could come through personal interpretations with objects/feeling and so on. The takeaway from the elective was that a story can have multi-faceted understandings, and how can one represent it using visual grammars/languages. The learning that we take from this course was how to tell the same story in different ways across mediums to weave a coherent narrative.
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