The Visual Story: Seeing the Structure of Film, TV and New Media by Bruce Block

• Bruce wanted to "make visual structure easy to use and bring the class and visual theory into the present, make it practical, and link it with story structure".

• Chapter 1- The Visual Components

"The basic visual components are space, line, shape, tone, colour, movement and rhythm", all of these are found in every picture we see.

" Actors, locations, props, costumes, and scenery are made up of visual components".

"A visual component communicates moods, emotions, ideas, and, most importantly, gives visual structure to what we're watching".

SPACE: The space in front of the camera whilst shooting, the difference between the actual space we shot and the same space as it shows on a screen and also the characteristics of the screen where we view our pictures.

LINE: Line is non- existent, it is a perceptual fact, it only exists in our minds, line is the evidence of other visual components that allow us to perceive lines, however they are not real.

SHAPE: Shapes go hand in hand as all shapes appear to be constructed from lines, the shape of an object appears when we lower the object to a silhouette.

TONE: which is black and white and the grey scale, tone is dealt with visually when working in black and white, however we have to consider tone when we use colour also as tone is a component of colour.

COLOUR: "One of the most powerful visual components is also the most misunderstood".

MOVEMENT: Although many great films have been made without real movement(i.e using still pictures), we usually rely on movement as a key part in pictures. As we know movement is the component that attracts an audience's eye, it plays a huge role in visual structure.

RHYTHM: There is not only rhythm we can hear but also we can see, you can find rhythm in nonmoving objects and moving objects, rhythm is also used in editing.

'The purpose of this book is to enable you to understand and use visual structure so that you can make better pictures".

THE SCREEN: Refers to the 2-dimensional screens we watch pictures, which include television, computer screens, movie screens, the proscenium of a theatre stage, canvases in museums, pictures in books, magazines, all of these I have mentioned flat, 2-dimensional surfaces are screens.

REAL WORLD/ SCREEN WORLD: "The real world is the environment we live in" which is the 3-dimensional world we inhabit. "The Screen world is created by images on screen". They both sometimes follow the same visual rules.

FOREGROUND, MIDGROUND, AND BACKGROUND: FG- objects close to the camera/viewer, MG- objects that are further away from the camera/viewer and BG- objects that are the farthest away from the camera/ viewer.

VISUAL PROGRESSION: Progression starts as one thing and changes to something else, so its like something getting more complex, like it growing, for example, " A story can have a progression as a character learns and grows".

THE PICTURE PLANE: When anything is discussed in the screen world, there will always be a frame lines surround it to create a "picture plane".

" The picture plane is the "window" within which the picture will exist", "every screen is a picture plane", whether is be a computer screen or a motion picture. The frame lines show height and width of the window or screen, of course the proportions of different screens depend on what type of screen your using.

The picture plane of a television is the edges of a screen, even when you put your hands together up in front of your eye to frame something is a picture plane.