The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV, and Digital Media
by: Bruce Block (0)
This updated edition of a best-selling classic shows you how to structure your visuals as carefully as a writer structures a story or composers structure their music. The Visual Story teaches you how to design and control the structure of your production using the basic visual components of space, line, shape, tone, color, movement, and rhythm. You can use these components to effectively convey moods and emotions, create a visual style, and utilize the important relationship between the visual and the story structures.
Using over 700 color illustrations, author Bruce Block explains how understanding the connection between story and visual structures will guide you in the selection of camera angles, lenses, actor staging, composition, set design and locations, lighting, storyboard planning, camera coverage, and editing.
The Visual Story is an ideal blend of theory and practice. The concepts and examples in this new edition will benefit students learning cinematic production, as well as professional writers, directors, cinematographers, art directors, animators, game designers, and anyone working in visual media who wants a better understanding of visual structure.
The Reviews
I enjoy books on composition for art and this film- centric book covered similar ground but also drilled down on the subtle and important ways these principles and concepts are unique to moving pictures. After finishing this, there does not seem to anything left to cover in this topic, which could be seen as the mark of a good textbook. This is essential reading for filmmakers, even animators and visualization artists (like myself).
The structure of transferring knowledge by using actual productions as examples is well done. Each chapter can be a book of it’s own and yet it builds to a highly complex art of video without feeling overwhelmed. Highly recommended for those who what to take their skills to a new level.
Everyone should read this book. Fun read and very insightful. You won’t look at a film the same again. Awesome
Professionals and film students have been using this book for decades and now there's a new edition that updates the illustrations and elaborates on how visual structure is used to tell a story. I recommend this book to all of my key crew members because it makes creative communication so much easier. Still the best book I've ever read on visual structure and how to use it.
