Product Description

The Visual Story offers students and professionals in cinematography, production design, directing and screenwriting a clear view of the relationship between the story/script structure and the visual structure of a film or video. An understanding of the visual components will serve as the guide in the selection of locations, set dressing, props, wardrobe, lenses, camera positions, lighting, actor staging, and editorial choices.


The Visual Story divides what is seen on screen into tangible sections: contrast and affinity, space, line and shape, tone, color, movement, and rhythm. The vocabulary as well as the insight is provided to purposefully control the given components to create the ultimate visual story. For example: know that a saturated yellow will always attract a viewer's eye first; decide to avoid abrupt editing by mastering continuum of movement; and benefit from the suggested list of films to study rhythmic control. The Visual Story shatters the wall between theory and practice, bringing these two aspects of the craft together in an essential connection for all those creating visual stories.

*Encourages the filmmaker to develop a "visual vocabulary"

*Shows the filmmaker how to structure visuals, communicating moods and emotions with style and variety

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #333667 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
"Book outlines the concept of visual presentation as a science, using everything fromt he dynamics of perspective to shape, tone, color and rhythm. A textbook take on what makes visuals work or fall flat." - Variety -- Review

Review
"Book outlines the concept of visual presentation as a science, using everything fromt he dynamics of perspective to shape, tone, color and rhythm. A textbook take on what makes visuals work or fall flat." - Variety

From the Publisher
The Visual Story offers those interested in cinematography, production design, directing and screenwriting a clear view of the relationship between the story/script structure and the visual structure of a film or video. An understanding of the visual components will serve as the guide in the selection of locations, set dressing, props, wardrobe, lenses, camera positions, lighting, actor staging, and editorial choices. The vocabulary as well as the insight is provided to purposefully control the given components to create the ultimate visual story. For example: know that a saturated yellow will always attract a viewer's eye first; decide to avoid abrupt editing by mastering continuum of movement; and benefit from the suggested list of films to study rhythmic control. The Visual Story shatters the wall between theory and practice, bringing these two aspects of the craft together in an essential connection for all those creating visual stories.

Customer Reviews

Great Book, Shame About The Publisher...
This really is a fantastic textbook about the basics of everything visual in TV/Film.
The other reviews go into more detail about its strengths, which are many and I won't repeat here.
On the downside: you can tell the author is a teacher - you get the sense you're in a lecture at times. And the amount of repeated information is amazing. Whilst at times this is useful (re-iterating something that was mentioned earlier in the book), sometimes he repeats the same lines over and over again on the same page, which is dull and gives the reader no credit at all. My main criticism is unfortunately the cheapness of the publishing. This edition actually has 'Color Pages' in the middle of the book (I thought they stopped doing that 50 years ago), whilst the rest is B/W. This is fine for the most part, but on the chapters on Colour, it's really awful. You basically have to imagine most of the concepts he's describing. Whoever thought that was a good idea needs to be shot. Hopefully the 2nd edition has rectified this.
Overall, I think this will be a set text for most universities and is definitely recommended, if you can get past the academic tone and cheap publishing.

Simply Invigorating
After reading this book, I have a greater sense of cinematography and am surprised at how easily this came. Bruce Block explains the visual construction in a simple way by using common concepts to tie every element of a production together in an easy-to-use package. I have not only been able to identify the concepts as I watch film, but apply the concepts in all my design arenas. I highly recomended this book!

A clear and insightful guide to seeing the visual structure of moving images
"The Visual Story" really is unlike anything out there for its emphasis on the ways in which the structure of an image or of images in sequence -- its shape, its apparent spatial dimensions, its movement, its complexity, its rhythm and texture, its color dimensions -- can all work together to support the emotional and thematic dimensions of the story it aims to tell. His explanations are simultaneously simple and insightful, and spending time with this book can really open your eyes to the wide range of ways in which moving images can be meaningful at a level that can be independent of the actual content of the image (who is in it, what is being shown). Essential reading for filmmakers who aspire to take advantage of the potentials of the medium, this book would also be enormously revealing and useful for students of film, for film lovers, and even for those who have a broad interest in the visual arts. His chapters on space and on color, and his discussions of their emotional as well as their formal content, are especially valuable and full of insight. I can't recommend this book highly enough.