The Power of Visual Language in Audiovisual Narrative
Audiovisual Language Functions:
The importance of the image arises from its power of meaning. It’s understood as a system of signs through which we can deliver speeches with meanings. In the audio-visual narrative, these meanings are arranged to form a set or history. This composition process is done using a series of techniques or resources.
Speech & Language = Audiovisual Narration
Audiovisual Narrative:
It is a language involving the use of resources and conventions to bridge natural reality and the medial world.
Elements of Visual Language:
Space:
When mounting the various pieces of film that make up a scene, a new space and environment arise from the image. This captures the viewer, giving the impression that the fragments together constitute a united action.
Types of Space:
- Geographical: Used to place the action at any given location.
- Dramatic: Used to locate and create an atmosphere for the psychology of the characters and situations. It is often used to emphasize ideas or feelings.
Time:
Time is a variable, not necessarily linear. It can even speed up or slow down.
Forms of Time Use in Film:
- Suitability: Equality between the time of action and the projection.
- Strain: Elongation of the subjective or objective duration of action.
- Continuity: The true time flows in the same direction as the film.
- Simultaneous: Two critical times alternate, where the action moves from each other. (e.g., films of persecution, suspense, or when a character comes to save the protagonist in danger.)
- Flashback: “Jumping back in time.” It goes back to earlier times, usually through someone’s memory.
- Psychological Time: A series of long shots with little action may increase the perceived duration of the film.
- Ellipsis: Removal of narrative and descriptive elements of a story. Despite being removed, sufficient information is given so that they can be assumed as occurred or existing.
Movement:
Movement is the displacement that the camera makes, either freely or on its own axis.
Types of Movement:
- Within the Frame: The camera remains still while the characters move within the frame.
- For Fragments: Action shots from different angles are mounted to create a dramatic continuation of the action.
- Rotation: Movements based on the three axes of movement of the camera.
Pace:
Dynamics is the impression given by the length of the shots, the dramatic intensity, and the effect of assembly.
Shot Level:
The set of images that constitute a single outlet.
Types of Shots:
- Great Shot: Shows a big stage or a crowd. The person is either not present or is diluted in the environment, far away, lost, small, overcrowded.
- Overview Shot: Shows a large stage in which the person is incorporated and occupies between a third and a fourth part of the frame. It has a descriptive value.
- General Shot: Embraces a small group of people or a particular environment. Focuses on the action and the situation of the characters.
- Full Shot: When the upper and lower frame nearly coincide with the head and feet of the human figure. It has a narrative value and begins to enhance the expressive or dramatic value.
- American Shot (or 3/4): The lower and upper limits of the screen match the head and knees of the person. It has narrative and dramatic value.
- Medium Shot: Presents the human figure cut by the waist, from the waist up. There are also variations like the medium close-up (the bust) and the medium long shot (from the calf and up). It has expressive and dramatic value, but also narrative.
- Close-Up: The whole face of the person. It has expressive, psychological, and dramatic value.
- Extreme Close-Up: Shows a part of the face or body. It emphasizes details but can also be purely descriptive.
Angles:
- Normal: The camera is level with the geometric center of the target or with the eyes of the human figure. The camera is located at eye level of the characters, regardless of their position.
- High Angle: Camera tilted toward the ground. Used to describe a landscape or a group of characters, expresses inferiority or humiliation of a subject, or the impression of heaviness, doom, etc.
- Low Angle: Camera tilted up. Physically lengthens the characters, creates a distorted view, expresses excitement, superiority, triumph, etc. The optical axis can be completely perpendicular to the horizontal axis, facing the camera up (“worm’s-eye view”).
- Dutch Angle/Canted Angle: If the camera is tilted, the angle and the plane are also tilted.
- Impossible Angle: Achieved by means of effects, tricks, manipulation of the set (e.g., an image taken from within an open bar).
The Favorable Outlook: A good shot is one in which all the elements needed at the time of the description or narrative film are shown with optimal visibility.