Lecture 7: Visual Narrative and the Media

Tutorial question: Why is narrative important when shaping a visual image to the audience?

In week 7, Chris Woo conducted a lecture on Visual Narrative and the Media. But first, what is narratives? Narratives is defined as story-telling. Visual narratives in this case became a very successful phenomenon that every society in acquainted in many different sorts of mediums, examples of these mediums are visual images such as still art and paintings, photographs, and comics all have its own purpose of telling a story. (Pimenta, Poovatah, 2010) Why is narrative important when shaping a visual image is because, without a story the image would be unclear and the purpose of the image would be lost.

Now, what are the components of a narrative? According to Lwin, (2010) a narrative has a dualistic  nature, in order words the narrative has a story and its discourse. The story is the "what" factor which are the content that includes the events, characters, time and location of the narrative. As for the discourse is "how" the narrative is being told, in this case the use of visual images such as pictures to tell a story. 

Take the image above as an example, it is in a form of a comic strip discourse. The story is told chronologically with each image having its own caption to explain the story plot. Using the word "splash" to give the audience a imaginary feel to the visual image that they are reading is also important because the audience is able to feel the reality of comic strip. Characters used in the comic strip is a very well known cartoon where their genre of work is comedy which gives the audience a clue to expect a joke. Therefore, this comic strip is a good example of what a visual image with a narrative would look like, it carries all the characteristics mentioned by Chris Woo in the lectures and the audience is able to relate to it.

In conclusion, it is important to have a narrative in a visual image for an audience because the dualistic nature uses the power of the plot, events, characters, time, and location to tell the story and the discourse is one of the most important factor to consider when transmitting the visual image. It can be in a form of photographs and historical art to tell the society a story. According to James, (2005) the discourse of story-telling is important although in the form of picture. For example the pictures from the political-cultural photographs from Budapest in The House of Terrors tells the visitors the story of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.

References: 

James, B. A (2005) Imagining Post-communism: Visual Narratives of Hungary's 1956 Revolution. USA

Lwin, S. M. (2010) Narrative Structures in Burmese Folk Tales. 

Pimenta, S., Poovatah, S. (2010) Design Thoughts: On Defining Visual Narratives.