Visual Narrative and Media

What is narrative?

It simply called story-telling which consists of a series of events, time, locations and actors. Narrative can be found either in dramas, movies, newspapers, journals, books and many more, which function as telling the story of their lives or experiences. According to Fisher, “narration – communication rotted in time and space – covers every aspect of our lives and the lives of others regard to character, motive and action”.

The natures of narrative are Story and Discourse. Story is more to what the main agenda, the content, setting, actors, time and location, the story plot meanwhile Discourse is more on how the narrative is being told. Discourse makes the story more understandable.

The structure of narrative according to Aristotle’s Dramatic structure is a story need to have a beginning, middle and end, where Aristotle quote, “we have laid it down that a tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete in itself, as a whole of some magnitude; for a whole maybe no magnitude to speak of – now a whole is that which has beginning, middle and end”.

There are two types of components in visual narrative, which are structuralism and post-structuralism.

Structuralism

Structuralism basically means that the narrative are being structured according to a typical concept where according to Strauss “Studies that structure of social system – Binary system create most social events – good or bad, right or wrong, light or dark. All elements of a culture and society are relational”. This kind of narrative often use in folktales, cartoons, and most films and movies. Take this folktale cartoon for example:-

This is an animation cartoon based on fantasy, where the characters are based on a princess, a prince, a king and a villain. The discourses of this cartoon are friendship between the princess and the fishes and her father, forbidden love between the princess and the prince and the battle of power between the king and the villain. The princess often be the damsels in distress and the prince will be saving her from evil and they will be happily ever after.

Post-Structuralism

Post-structuralism basically means that it is the opposite of structuralism, where there is no structured narrative, the meaning is unstable and we will not know what to expect from this kind of movie or films, the meaning are not logically connected as what the producer intended. For example:-

This movie is called the Epic Movie, where the has unstable meaning or plot to its structure, we didn’t know the story line of this movie until we actually see it because this movie are combination from all kind of movies which some are from Pirate of the Caribbean, Narnia, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The story line is not logically connected to any of the plot, where in the middle of nowhere superman appeared but burned down and dead. As we all know superman is unbeatable and strong and how in hell he can be dead just like that. There is no coherent meaning that the producers intended to send to their viewers.  


References:

•  Griffin. E., A. (2009). A First Look at Communication Theory (7^th ed.). Narrative Paradigm of Walter Fisher (p.299-300). New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Lamarque. P. Narrative and Invention: The Limits of fictionality.
• Huisman. R. Narrative concepts.
•  Aristotle. Aristotle on the art of poetry. Retrieved on September 25^th, 2011 from http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=AriPoet.xml&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=7&division=div1.
• Chandler. D. Semiotics for Beginners. Retrieved on September 25^th, 2011 from http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem01.html.

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The Art of Rhetoric and Persuasion

Advertisements as we all know are all around us every day whether we want to see it or not either it is from televisions, magazines, newspapers, billboards and etc. Lots of the advertisements are very persuasive to their audiences and some are not. have you ever think how the advertisements successfully persuade its audience? lets explore with me on the art of Rhetoric and Persuasion.


Rhetoric theory is a way to explain either we are able to persuade or influence audience unconsciously. According to Scott (1994), “Rhetoric is an interpretive theory that frames a message as an interested party’s attempt to influence an audience”. The advertiser needs to create a message that can be understood by relying to the audiences responses using their common knowledge and experiences then the audiences can create argument to the advert as a response. according to Scott (1994), “The sender – crafts the message in anticipation of the audience’s response using shared knowledge – as well as common experiences. Receivers – evaluate the argument, and formulate a response”. 


Meanwhile, the meaning of persuasion according to Blair (2004), “What seems to be a necessary ingredient in persuasion as a kind of cause of behavior change is that the person persuaded assents to the pressure of the vector of influence”. This means that persuasion is about making the audience believe of what the advertiser create or sells.

Take the example for the advertisement above, this is the Nike advertisement. On the advertisement, they have shown three people from the famous football team. As for me, I'm not a crazy football fans and I don't know those guys in the picture, then I may not be persuade for this advert but for those who is football insane fans, they might get persuade by this advert because this advert made them think about the slogan by Nike which is "Every player has the tool for the job, but it's your job to match the player with the tools. GET STARTED". This slogan is truly very catchy and tricky to persuade people or fans of football players to think that if they buy Nike products, they are one step closer to get their dream come true to be a footballer. 


Moving on to the rhetoric in advertisement, according to McQuarrie and Phillips (2007), “rhetoric in advertisement are more concerned with style and content” which means (Scott, 1994) the advertisements are more interested on how to illustrate an image, rhetoric in advertisement is more interested in how to say things and what to say (McQuarrie and Phillips, 2007) by adapting ways of thinking about imagery to fit our needs to make it easier to read the visual message (Scott, 1994).

This advertisement is from the United Colors of Benetton to fight against HIV/AIDS. This advert features an ass of two different colors, one part of it is light and other part is rather dark, this has shown the variety of culture where the dark part represents the black people and the light part represents the white people. Looking at this advert, the first thing on my mind was an ass with a HIV positive stamp on the it then maybe this is a homosexual kind of things. As a fact that most HIV positive are mainly males that were homosexual, this is where the advert trying to say to their audience to stop homosexual and stop HIV from spreading. This image has been said very controversial because of the HIV sign was tattoo on human body part that was similar to how humans sign the animals back to claim that its theirs. This kind of advertisement may be successful because if there's a lot of people talking about something then that event will be more famous and more people will be aware of this HIV. We can see that the unique style and content that occurs inside this advertisement had delivered the main purpose or aims to the people which is to stop HIV from spreading.


Reference:

-          Blair, J. A., (2004). The Rhetoric of Visual Argument. Retrieved September 17, 2011, from  http://www.angelfire.com/planet/samshanks/Blair_RhetoricVisualArguments.pdf.

-          McQuarrie, E. F., & Phillips, B. J., (2007). Go Figure! New Directions in Advertising Rhetoric (p. 3-15). Armonk, NY, USA: M.E Sharpe, Inc.

-          Scott, L. M. (1994). Images in Advertising: The Need for a Theory of Visual Rhetoric. Journal of Consumer Research, vol.21, 252-256.

Gestalt Effect and Schema Theories

Gestalt theory

Gestalt according to Wertheirmer’s theory is wholeness means operational principle of the brain is holistic, relationship of the object create as a whole and the contexts is space and culture may alter meanings. This mean Gestalt is the whole is different from the sum of its parts.

There are five laws of Gestalt which called Principles of Perceptual Organization but I took only three out of the five laws. There are Proximity, Similarity and Continuation.

Proximity

This means that the object is joined as group together. Take a look at the image below:-

As we all know, our brain are too lazy to operate or think anything. It will scan and decide the closest thing that looks like in this image. The closest image that our brain can come out is an image of a Dog.

To explain more on Proximity take this image for example:-

In this image we can see that the vegetables are grouped in term of their forms and types. This is how our brain works; we see an object and form them into group to make one simple conclusion which means this is vegetable’s section in supermarket.

Similarity

This means that the object that we see and look similar to another and often group them as the same. Take the image below as an example:-

We see that this image is a picture of sea lions laying on the ground like sun bathing their body but as you look closer at the end of right side, it doesn’t look like a sea lion but instead it’s a camping bag that shaped and color like a sea lion, because of the similarity of the shape and color it can be mistaken as a real sea lion.

To make more understandable to this similarity law, take a look at this image:-

This image shows gray scale of human look alike body and somewhere in there has a yellow scale of human look alike body but as our brain perceive it, we will group it as the same as the rest because the shape of the image is similar as the gray scale image.

Continuation

This is where our eyes are naturally moved through one object to another or our brain trying to fill the empty spot that was left. Take this video for example:-

When you look at the dominos falling to each other your eyes are forced to see how they flow till the very end and you don’t realize that your brain has been replaying the scene that catches your intention where the dominos are perfectly on timing to fall and accurate place and you will definitely remember the thumbs up. This is what meant by the law of continuation, it catches your eyes in a motion to another object and also making our brain to repeat the event to fill the empty spot inside our imagination.

References:

The Gestalt Principles. Retrieved September 10, 2011 from http://graphicdesign.spokanefalls.edu/tutorials/process/gestaltprinciples/gestaltprinc.htm