Telling a Story
Joe.Cotter
Posts: 3,362
Most of us if not all have heard the addage that if we want to create a strong image, it needs to tell a story. This, like many things, is easier said then done.
There are many things that go into telling a good story with an image, just like there are many things that go into good design. There was a particularly good point made in this regard from a design newsletter I get from Sitepoint that covered this. Here is a snippit that was particularly well put:
When Hemingway first imagined a new passage in a story, he saw it with complete and authentic detail – the characters, their attire, the environment, and what they thought, did and said. But very little of this fine detail survived the journey to that finished work. Like a great designer, Hemingway stripped away all but the absolute essentials required to tell his story. What remained merely hinted at the scene and left the reader to sketch in the rest. He called this 'the iceberg principle'.
Hemingway gave a stunning demonstration of this principle at a 1950's dinner party. Holding up a napkin, he wagered half-a-dozen guests $10 each that he could contain an entire short story on one side.
When the guest eagerly agreed, he returned the napkin with the following six words.
For sale:
Baby's shoes,
Never worn.
This summarizes a very effective approach to telling a story with an image. The idea of having a full story in mind with specific images that tell a portion of that story is encompassed in storyboarding, graphic novels, and any media that uses single images or a series of single images to tell a story rather then full on active media like film. Images like this, done well can emphasize what is most important and make their own artistic statement that in it's best form can be much stronger then a streaming medium.
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Comments
"He came to the river. The river was there."
E. Hemingway
I think my best images are the ones that do tell a story.
I do not think the story has to be completely laid out in the image, but the image should have elements that make you lok at it and think "There is a story here...I wonder what it is"..and that keeps the viewer looking.
http://rawart3d.deviantart.com/art/The-last-titan-486565337
That image, you really do not know what the story is, but you can tell there is a story...and it makes you want to know what it is.
http://rawart3d.deviantart.com/art/The-Angel-Chamber-514240910
Sometimes it is simply having elements that dont seem to naturally fit together, the contrast creates the story.
Rawn
"It was a dark and rainy night..."
Hemingway's advice is pretty similar to Edgar Allen Poe's. If you read any of Poe's short stories, you'll see there is a lot of background information left out and which the reader must infer. As opposed to certain other authors, who overelaborate and seem to be paid by the word . . .
I was amazed at the detail in H.G. Wells' books. Just reading his description of a room bored the hell out of me.
Now, I know he is considered a classic and I respect that. And of course I was an impatient teenager at the time, but I had read hundreds of books by the time I got to this one in the 10th grade, so I knew the difference between a story that moved and one that just muddled about. So I felt that all the time and minutiae spent on minor details only served to take me "out of" the story. If it weren't for school requirements, I might never have finished the first chapter of any of his books.
I had a similar distaste for Emily Bronte too. From that entire tome, I only now just remember the part about a tragic sled ride.
Yeah, never try Gormenghast.
I appreciated the detail, but it's like ... you go out to eat, they usher you into a room, and there's 15 courses of meals there. And the staff stares at you. Yes, it's all for you. No rush.
I think I got about 100 pages in before I gave up.
A lot of classic literature is like that. In the days before the march of technology gave humanity a shared set of imagery to draw from-- Tolstoy lovingly described park benches because there was a large part of his audience that not only had never seen one, but they were unlikely to ever see one. I can write about a couple sitting on a park bench, and everyone reading this can set the scene themselves, which leaves me free to concentrate on showing rather than telling.
In an image, this is inverted. The audience can see what's going on, but they have to infer what might be going on from nothing more than body language and setting. It's a different sort of mindset, and the best artists can prompt that sort of response from an audience. I always try for that in a finished image, but I don't always make it. I can see the way I'd write the scene, and then try and illustrate it appropriately.
Greetings,
I had the problem described above with Lord of the Rings, the novels. My wife and I refer to it as the 'And LO! Beyond that blade of grass, was another...BLADE. OF. GRASS!' effect.
That's a fascinating concept; that Radio, TV, the Internet, and widespread literacy has contributed to a shared context that we can refer to in shorthand.
While I'm not about to write a novel in memes, I do think that shared context is a key part of storytelling.
I've only managed to tell a story in...maybe two of my renders, ever. It's really rough... The whole 'worth a thousand words' thing is questionable, at best, and only really true of the best images. :)
-- Morgan
One of the problems from the creator side is that we KNOW the story and see it as we create the image. However, as it is a visual medium, not every viewer sees the same thing and interprets the back-story according to their own pretexts. The shared imagery referred to by DarkSpartan isn't a photocopy shared. So that the concept of a park bench is shared, what it actually looks like is not. That said, if I see a bench, in a park, with a couple sitting there, I say; "oh, a couple sitting on a park bench."
I have several images in my gallery that I 'thought' told a story. But, the responses to the image weren't always evidence I'd succeeded.
Life in former times moved slower than today, so the writing was slower as well. We had endless summers where we lay in a meadow, stared up to the sky and tried to discover pictures in the clouds. And I didn't mind reading lovingly, minutely described scenery in books, because that showed me another world (TV didn't, cause we did not have one).
The same books today, my child calls them boring.
I think when you do an image, it is important to stand back and look at everything to see if it
1) conveys the story with everything in the imagery
2) leads your viewer through the image to what you consider your focal point
3) is a key frame in the story or a tween...could what is there be pushed further to illustrate the point of the story
4) is shown to someone who knows nothing about the story, will they be able to get it, or do you have to explain; the more you have to explain, the more you have to relook at your presentation
I used to write poetry (still do on the rare occasion) and I remember getting flustered at how some people would come up with a totally different interpretation then what I had tried to instill in the poem. I would often find out because they would tell me how much the poem spoke to them and explain what they thought it said.
Finally one day out of frustration I told someone, "that's not at all what I meant..." and proceded to explain what the concept was behind the poem. I'll never forget their reaction. The person was very upset and said I ruined a poem that meant something to them and how dare I. This person then went on to explain that the moment I put art work out in the world it's no longer mine and I don't have exclusive rights to what it means.
I of course thought this was rediculous, after all I wrote it, it had a meaning... but then I thought about it.... nope, I was right. Then I thought about it again..
I revisited this concept many times and eventually came to the conclusion that the other person was right. Not only that, but it made me remember the various teachers I had in literature, some insisted there was one universal truth to be gleened ultimately from some author's work, others stressed it was more important to find our own meaning in it.
So, I guess all of this is a long winded way of saying I'm not so sure it's important that others get 'our story' as much as it touches them and evokes something in them.
Agreed, Gedd. The way I see it, the joy of a good artwork is that you've made many works. There's the art you intended, there's the art each person sees, there's the work it becomes over time... countless stories, all wheeling together.
Whether or not that imagery is photocopy-perfect isn't relevant-- Everyone will look at the same words on the page in based on their personal experience no matter what you do. Going back to the park bench, does it really matter if it's cheap aluminium or gorgeous wrought iron and teak? A park bench evokes a number of other things that go with it: The bench, a park surrounding it, a path that got them there and so forth.
Envision the following:
"He took a seat on the ornate park bench, glancing nervously at the woman on the other end. She took no notice, her attention focused on a pair of squirrels playing near the edge of the stream."
If you're like me, you could easily make not only an image from that, but easily fill in details a rather large number of details based on that alone. Who are they? When and where are they? What's she up to that has her paying attention to the local squirrel population?
Now what I intend here and what you see are going to be different: More information is needed before my precise meaning is clear. However, it's a line that could launch a thousand renders.
So... Who wants to give it a shot?
Detail is great, as long as it has a point. I dont need grass explained to me, I am quite familiar with it. On the other hand I could never get into the Harry Potter books because the magic just didn't make sense and was never really explained. Likewise there is a danger with explaining stuff, the more you explain the more likely you are to contradict yourself.
I admit I love details and minutia, but thats probably why I mostly read history now. I'm a big sucker for painstakingly realistic worldbuilding (and a bunch of other narrow interests too) and thats way easier in actual history where the world is just there.
The reason many great books become awful movies. "Sphere" by Michael Crichton comes to mind (or insert your own favorite book that some idiot destroyed by drafting a screenplay) very open ended and the movie just shut it closed because someone in the test audience needed closure (actually that film was doomed three minutes in). I'm guessing writers trust their reader intelligence more than Hollywood screenwriters do, or they just get their work torn to pieces by some exec who thinks pivotal dialog is someone 'splodin before they finish a sentence. The exception is there are a select few authors who can use nothing but $50 words and create an amazing story. H.P. Lovecraft could not finish a sentence without something "eldrich" or "fungoid" but his choice of words were the tapestry of his stories (and yes he was a racist and an egomaniac but he was an entertaining one). Other writers I've read will drop those chestnuts in there to validate their intelligence and not to tell a story, and its like sticking your eyes in a wood chipper, it's like CGI in a film merely because there was not story to tell but they needed to kill some time, at some point it stops being a story and just becomes Rogets Thesaurus, or an Autodesk plugin.
I like this picture for that aspect. I think it demonstrates it well. :)
Well said. Lovecraft's descriptive passages have a certain rhythm and pattern to them that contribute to a hypnotic mood. And despite the verbiage, Lovecraft still left a lot unsaid. We never really got explicit descriptions of many of the supernatural baddies, never got much background information on places and people, and many of his stories end in an ambiguous manner where we doubt the sanity of the narrator.
True, the "hero" of the story would get one fleeting glance at those things and you understood why the story began with them in a padded room, chained to the wall, wrapped in a straight jacket.
Watching some awful Disney show with the kids not too long ago the whacky-"goth"-girl characters mentioned she worshiped "Cthulhu" and suddenly I began dreading (in eldrich terror!) how long it will be before that rodent based powerhouse to lay claim to all those works.
I love this thread. I used to write when I was younger and people said it was very believable, but I just don't have the time for that any longer. So, I've turned to trying to tell stories through art. While I'm more constrained by my knowledge of Daz that my ideas, I love what I do (or am trying to at least
). This thread and all your comments remind me of the things I need to work harder on, and it's inspired me with some ideas that, to me, will be amazing if I can pull them off technically!
I've said it before and I'll say it again... you guys (and gals) are an amazing bunch and I'm quite honored to be able to get your input on things I'm trying to accomplish!
Funny how an image of Brown Jenkin came to mind when I read that!
I tried to be a fiction writer for years until recently discovering I don't want to write prose, I like the visual element. So, webcomic. Now I'm happy. ;)
(I have some RPG credits, but most of those were from a several year spurt ~10 years ago)
An author once claimed William Blake is the father of the graphic novel, I found the quote later again on wikipedia. Kids wanted to be Chuck Norris, or Batman or B.J. Blastowitz (Wolfenstein!) but I wanted to be William Blake, okay I wanted to be those guys too but Blake was awesome! I remember the first time I read his stuff and saw his paintings and thinking I wanted to see things how he saw things.
That eerie night, the tremulous wind shook the little shack while the rain slapped the tin roof. The darkness has finally seeped through its thin walls.
Telling a story is - for me - not quite how it should happen.
I remember learning that we should show readers, not tell them. This is certainly true for the written word, if nothing else it is usually much more enjoyable to read, irrespective of the actual story type.
It is differnet with images, or it is for me; I think that is why I am very seldom even only somewhat-satisfied with an image I've produced. Showing disparate parts in the same image is easy; even making them look good is generally a technical process. Turning the seperate parts into something greater than the sum of those disparate pieces is a whole differnet level of difficult.
This is one of my favourites that has lots of story present. https://cgcookie.com/image/deadpool-and-spiderman-2/
It serves as an example of the benefit of a few words, and what can be done without words or in response to words; plus it's amusing.
Lord of the Rings is considered to be a great work of fiction. I am, indeed, a fan; yet one of the most tedious pieces of writing, is Frodo's trek to Mordor. Maybe it was deliberate, as a way of emphasising the desolation, or the hopelessness; it didn't work for me.
I remember reading somewhere that believable was far more important than factual; for me, this is true of any medium, and why I've been known to comment on the plethora of heels (Please don't turn it into a debate on heels, I was offering it as an example of what kills believable for me... others experiences may vary.).
Well, I know from experience that telling is useful, especially for my attention span. I have read one too many novels where the author is using active voice so much that I feel like screaming. Some use a paragraph to describe an old person. Just tell me that the person is old already. Stop showing me! Please. LOL!
I remember someone trying to point out how I should write. I had written a story set in ancient Roman times of a girl out in the countryside and I described that there were cows and goats on a hillside and this person wanted me to tell the reader what they were doing. I was like "Really?" What do you think goats and cows are doing on a hillside? Geez! Unless the cows and goats are behaving out of the ordinary there is no need.
The active and passive voices should be used. Knowing when and how much is the tricky part.
No one will ever get the same things out of art of any kind. We all have different life experiences that can be vastly different as well. You are right, as long as it makes someone feel something you have really done your job as an artist. Its great if a person *gets* what you are trying to convey but you could probably put 100 people in a room with a piece of art and you would get a large variety of answers as to what the artist is trying to convey or what they got out of it. That's what makes being human so interesting
There are times, however, where artists are inspired to commit violence against egregious misrepresentation.
Like thinking Walter White is supposed to be a hero. WTF, guys.
It seems to me that 'telling a story' is kind of a continuum. A portrait where someone is just sitting in a studio with a light on them is nothing more than a portrait. If they are sitting with a backdrop of, say, a Roman villa, that tells a tiny bit of a story. If there is a table next to them with a fruitbowl (yes, that same fruitbowl we've seen so often), there is a tiny bit more. If they are eating one of the grapes, a bit more. If their boyfriend or girlfriend is feeding them that grape... well, you get the idea.
I prefer (as a viewer, and when I can, as an artist) even a tiny bit of story. Someone in a kitchen with a mixing bowl and spoon is enough of a story to make a picture interesting to me.
Gustave Courbet, The Desperate Man
I would put that lighting and expression is enough to tell a story, no further props necessary, but there's usually some choice of clothing, a particluar visage, scars, use of color or lack thereof, overall cleanliness or griminess of the image, etc... The trick is to have a focus and guide the focus, in some cases subtly in others very strongly.
If we consciously choose our composition, choice of color palette, intensity of color across the image, focus, overall feel of the image then all of these will help carry the storyline that the content of the image is meant to convey, and sometimes that content can be very minimalistic. Many of us have seen a picture with nothing more then a pair of eyes that carried a strong story, and the Nike logo is a single line, but I would submit it also tells a story.
However, I won't dispute that adding a bit more content may add quite a bit to the story, as in Caravaggio's Boy Bitten by a Lizard
As long as everything in the image has some significance to the story or in some way enhances it (if only to add to the mystery.) Any unneeded items are just a distraction. One can have a sparse scene or a very cluttered one, but for either to work the picture as a whole should have something to say.
On a related note, many of the great artworks have besides a story, a sense of mystery, and that is part of having some things unanswered.