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
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.
underwhelming:
Bruce Block opens his book by claiming that he is drawing upon the teachings of Eisenstein. He isn’t. The vast majority of the book is given to analyzing the “hidden lines” within images. Unfortunately, there is a catch. The hidden visual structure within an image may have some kind of resonance - I’m not really sure, but it seems to me to be sister to the kind of “the work of Virginia Wolf analyzed in meta-postmodern-structuralism,” analysis that obscures, rather than illuminating, the essential elements that make a given work of art/lit/film succeed.
Film is made of story, sound, image, and cut - I suppose that it isn’t Block’s fault that he chooses to focus on overanalyzing just one of those categories, but I do wish that the film school grad who recommended that I read this book had not.
Refund.
Better than I thought:
I had to get this book for a class I’m taking (Visual Language of the Moving Image) at UCF. Like most books that we are required to purchase, I wasn’t too happy about it… But, honestly, this one is different. It is very well written and illustrated. I actually love this book. Bruce Block knows his stuff, and, more importantly, he knows how teach it.
This is the first book I’ve read that taught be how to combine pictures and story. If you want to learn how to employ visual structure so you make a movie with real style, than you MUST get this book. It has a new edition that has much better pictures. I had to buy this book years ago in film school. Now that i’m directing commericals I see what Block was talking abut and I can hit a home run every time in my own work. The book unlocked all of the cinematic secrets for me. I give the book to my friends for their birthdays.
I wish I had gone to USC or AFI to hear Block’s lectures. I recommend this book.