Week 7 ~ Visual Narrative and the Media:

"a selection of events from the characters life stories that is composed into a strategic sequence to arouse specific emotions and to express a specific view of life." (McKee, Story, 1997, pg. 33).

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

Production and story elements combine to convey a narrative to an audience. Here I will mention some aspects of narrative that must be considered when analysing a visual image.

I take a film narration to support my arguement. We as the viewer, allow ourselves as the audience to enter a film narrative through a device known as the 'suspension of disbelief'.

In storyline of film narration, the plot may be linear or non linear, it may include subplots which may run parallel to, comment on or intersect with the main narrative.

Opening introduces the narrative in film. The opening usually contains a lot of information which sets up the narrative and establishes time, place, location, mood and often the important characters in the narrative.

Whereas in closure, the said sequence finishes off the story, resolving the narrative possibilities established throughout the text, tying up loose ends and letting the audience to leave the narrative. There will often be an image which is similar to the opening images in order to close the cycle of the narrative.

In film narration there will be conflict. A narrative requires conflict and in film there is usually one main conflict and several minor conflicts. Conflicts are presented in the form of problems or issues. One way to view the development of conflict in a narrative text is to see it as:

equilibrium ---- problem ---- disequilibrium ---- resolution ---- new equilibrium

Then the cause and effect. A story element which makes the narrative to proceed. Whereas the climax is usually, but not always, the most suspenseful part of the story. Often smaller climaxes build to the major one.

Some aspects of film narrative such as setting, charaters and time are also important.

Hence narrative is important when shaping a visual image to the audience. 

The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station

Narrative is important because it allows audience to look at not only the ways in which 'reality' is constructed within a story of visual image or text, but also the implications and effects of them being presented in that particular way.

References:

Huisman, R. (2005).Narrative concepts. In Fulton, H., Huisman, R., Murphet, J. and Dunn, A. (eds.), Narrative and Media (pp. 11-­‐27). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Infanger, S. (2001). What is Narrative? Retrieved October 21, 2011. From http://www.class.udaho.edu/narrative/theory/what narrative.htm

Week 6 ~ The Ancient Art of Rhetoric and Persuasion

“Rhetoric is a poor substitute for action, and we have trusted only to rhetoric. If we are really to be a great nation, we must not merely talk; we must act big.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt quotes (American 26th US President (1901-09), 1858-1919)

Question:

Explain and exemplify how an insurance sales person would sell insurance rhetorically and how he/she would hard sell the product.

Rhetorics is a form of persuasion. A persuasion must have a proposition and argument. In order an insurance sales person want to sell his product, it is good for him/her to sell it rhetorically. He/she has to have persuasion techniques in order to pursuade the clients and to make his/her insurance saleble.

Selling an insurance is just like selling advertisement. In this case, McQuarrie and Philips (2008), Go Figure! New Directions in Advertising Rhetoric.

a) Rhetoric in advertising more concerned with style than content.
b) Advertising rhetoric more interested in how to say something as much as what to say.
c) Advertising style is not new. Since antiquity, there are different rhetorical styles: rhyme, anaphora, antithesis or synthesis (p.5).
d) Advertising style consists of the medium, genre, strategies of production and creative imageries to show an argument.

Therefore from my personal view, these four aspects can be applied in selling insurance.

Selling insurance can be a very lucrative business. It will give a person the ability to work for himself, work from home or work from an office with a group. 

The insurance business allows easy access for those wanting to enter the field as well as many selections to advance through continuing training and licensing. In addition, being an insurances sales person can be a very lucrative and financially rewarding career once a person learns how to sell insurance.

Insurance allows many people to work for themselves and those sales person who are good at it make good money. Selling insurance affords them the ability to have their own business.

Professional insurance agents are viewed more as financial advisers than salesmen. They assist people hedge against risk exposure, just like a hedge fund financial adviser helps businesses hedge against risk buy selling commodity futures.

Speaking of which, many insurance agents also sell financial products like stock, bonds, commodities, annuities, retirement plans in addition to selling insurance policies.

Another benefit to selling insurance policies is that one can start part time. Even if one have a full time job, it can be started in the evenings scheduling appointments and meeting with people. Insurance is a better low risk way to get into the selling or get into the insurance business.

Selling insurance can be and has been the entry point for many successful business people. And again, learning how to sell insurance is something that is easy to do.

Therefore, there is no question of hard selling the product if the sales person understands the strategies and the objective of selling insurance.

Reference:

McQuarrie, E. F. and Philips, B. J. (eds.) (2007). Advertising rhetoric: An  introduction. Go figure! New

dimensions in advertising rhetoric (pp. 3-­‐18).New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc. Retrieved from Universiti

Brunei Darussalam Ebrary Website.

http://thinkexist.com/quotations/rhetoric/

Week 5 ~ Gestalt Effect and Schema Theories

“Knowledge is conceived as a continuous organization and rearrangement of information according to needs, purposes meanings” (Gestalt theorists)

Gestalt is a psychology term which means "unified whole". It refers to theories of visual perception developed by German psychologists in the 1920s. The attempt of these theories are to describe how we tend to arrange visual elements into groups or unified wholes when particular principles are used. 

Out of many laws of Gestalt Theory, I have selected 3 laws, they are law of Proximity, Similarity and also Common Fate.

Law of Proximity

The concept underlying the concept of proximity is grouping. When we have a group of objects, we tend to look them as forming a group. Proximity occurs when elements are placed close together. They tend to be perceived as a group.

I take this example of proximity in Grouping Images

The 2002 Europe Music Awards site illustrates a different use of grouping. The MTV and Europe Music Awards logos form a separate group in the top left corner, whereas the logos of the sponsors form a group in the bottom right corner.


The white space as shown on left right figure helps form the two groups, as do the two blue triangles in the corners. Note that the triangles are not present in the "unoccupied" corners, hence they reinforce the notion of the two groups.

Look at the two organizational logos shown above are bigger and positioned top-left. Thereby increasing their importance in relation to the cluster of smaller logos to the bottom-right.The two clusters of logos not only form groups for design purposes, but also for semantic purposes.

Another example of law proximity will be Proximity in Icons. Here is another aspect of proximity is the propensity to perceive items organised on a line or curve to be related to each another.



In 2008 Web designer Stu Nicholls created a nifty (albeit non-traditional) circular menu.

As the circle that all eight icons sit on, and because of the light gray circles that compose the "background" of the menu, the icons are perceived to be part of a same group. It helps that the icons are thematically the same with similar colours, sizes, and styles.

Law of Similarity

The next law of Gestalt is the Law of Similarity.

Similarity occurs when objects look similar to one another. People often perceive them as a group or pattern.


The logo above (containing 11 distinct objects) appears as as single unit because all of the shapes have similarity.

Unity occurs because the triangular shapes at the bottom of the eagle symbol look similar to the shapes that form the sunburst.

We group things perceptually if they appear to be the same to one another. This is also the reason behind why so many designers prefer to apply blue, underlined links, or at least have all the links appear distinct and the same as each other.

Similar appearance equates to similar function. In the screenshot of the Opera browser’s old Preferences dialog window as shown below, the menu items are grouped by colour. The gray background of the first four menu items group them together, and also sets them apart from the other items. They are also highlighted by the icons that sit beside the first item in each group.



Common Fate

The third law is the Law of Common Fate.

The idea of "common fate" is not complicated, it is simple. We perceive materials or objects moving (or appearing to move) in similar direction as related to each other, more so than elements that are static or appear to be moving in opposite directions. Those related objects are sharing a "common fate."

The vehicles in the photo on the left form two "streams," the left "stream" moving from bottom to top of the image and the right "stream" moving from top to below.

Although this is an completely static image, movement is implied, and relationships immediately develop.

In our designs, elements that move with one another relate to one another, while elements that resist that common movement or move in a opposite direction, do not relate. This is a powerful, primal sensory cue among humans. Just think of the drivers’ reactions when a vehicle comes down the lane in the opposite direction from everyone else. Chaos and consternation ensue within moments.

Reference:

Wertheimer M (1944) Gestalt Theory

http://nicefun.net/learning-theory-of-gestalt-vt2659.html