A good place to begin the study of film technique is with the still image. By having students first learn to analyze the composition of single images, they can later begin to better understand how images are used within the larger context of a series of moving images.

Understanding how images or signs mean is the study of semiotics, one of the critical approaches in Module 4. Semiotics focuses on how images or signs acquire cultural meanings based on certain codes audiences apply to those images or signs. The meaning of a red image is based on cultural codes for the meaning of red — related to danger, power, sexuality, etc., depending on the cultural context. Or, during the medieval period, images often assumed powerful religious significance. People would destroy images perceived to be sacreligious. Or, they were reluctant to put pictures of people in their bedrooms for fear of being possessed by those people.

Visual literacy is an educational movement that emerged in the 1960s that posited the need for students to become more literate about the visual aspects of their media environment. This includes the ability to understand the uses and power of images in the culture (Gitlin, 2001). It also includes analyzing the compositional elements of images — drawing on art education, as well as the photographical techniques employed in creating images. These meanings of compositional elements and techniques are themselves constituted by cultural codes. For example, the meaning of placing an object or person higher up in a picture or to employ a angle-up shot on an object or person is tied to cultural notions of power associated with being “higher up” in the social hierarchy.

To study images, students could bring in art work, photos, ads, drawings, etc., and describe their perceptions of the meanings of these images related to composition, technique, and cultural codes. To find images, they could use the Google search engine and click on the “images” option. Or, they could search the many museum or image collections on the web (see some in the visual literacy resource list below).

Composition elements. In studying the image, they could focus on the relationship or placement of specific objects within the image based on which objects/people are placed in the front/back, upper/lower, left/right of the frame. They could note where their eyes initially falls and then moves to in the frame. This is typically left to right — so ads often place appealing objects on the left side. They could explore reasons for placements of objects/people in the frame — why, for example, someone may be placed in the upper part of the frame based on their power relationships to other people/objects in the frame. They could also note the balance or symmetrical relationship of objects in the frame, as well as the size and shape of objects — as having a parallel balance or unparalleled or uneven balance. If, for example, one side of the frame contains a lot of large objects and the other, very few small objects, the viewer may pay more attention to the few small objects on the one side.

And, they could note the use of contrast of light and dark images in the frame to attract attention to certain aspects of the image.

21st Century Literacies: Structual Comparisons

In their seminal book, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (1996) describe some of the basic elements of visual composition.
(Click here for lecture notes related to this book)

One of those elements is that of the relationships between participants in a frame that suggest certain power hierarchies or narrative relationships. For example, in a beer ad, two people could be looking at each other in a manner that suggests a romantic relationship, a relationship associated with drinking beer. And, these images could also be used to establish a connection between the portrayed people in the image and the audience. Students could identify how certain images serve to imply relationships between people in an image and also between the image itself and the audience.

Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) also describe some aspects of what they define as modularity: color saturation, differentiation, and modulation; representation, depth, illumination, and brightness. Students could study how varying these features in a digital photo changes the meaning of images. They could first download free editing software, or use available editing software such as Photoshop™.

Photoplus

VicMan's Photo Editor

Myimager

As part of The On-line Visual Literacy Project at Pomona College, Brian Stonehill notes the following further aspects of composition:

• the dot: a pointer, marker of space

• the line: the restless articulator of form, in the probing looseness of the sketch and the tighter technical plan;

• shape: the basic outlines, circle, triangle, and square; direction, the surge of movement that promotes character of the basic shapes;

• value: the most basic of all elements, the presence or absence of light;

• hue and saturation: the make up of color — coordination of value with added component of chroma;

• texture: optical or tactile, the surface characteristic of visual materials;

• scale: the relative size and measurement of an image;

• dimension and motion : both implied through sfumato and other techniques.

Webquest: How to “read” a painting

Webquest: Analyzing the Hiroshige Woodblock Images: Fifty Three Stations of the Tokaido

Framing and point of view. Students could then analyze the relationship of the image to themselves — whether the image places or positions them as close-up versus faraway from an object or person. And they could analyze the perspective the image invites them to adopt in viewing the image — one of an outside voyeur or an insider participant.

21st Century Literacies: Framing and Point of View

Images as rhetorical actions. Students also need to recognize that the meaning of images are based on their rhetorical use to persuade or engage viewers based on social and cultural meanings. The Walker Evans photography of scenes of poverty during the Depression was designed to foster empathy for people experiencing poverty.

21st Century Literacies: Images As Persuasion

The PBS program, The Power of Stills, includes analysis of the use of images in American photography history.

Other resources for visual literacy activities:

International Visual Literacy Association

Visual Literacy resource links

Visual Arts Topics Index

Visual Resource Library

Marist College — Visual Literacy Links

University of Nebraska, Lincoln — Visual Literacy Collaboration

Visual Literacy and the Net

Digital Images and the “New” Visual Literacy

Open Directory Project — Visual Literacy

Visual Literacy Exercises

Visual Literacy in the Age of Digital Photographic Reproduction

2Learn Teacher Tools: Visual Literacy

University of Iowa Communication Studies Resources: Visual Communication

Course Projects and Issues

Visual Arts Young Viewers Index

A Routledge Journal: Visual Studies

Module 3: Word document

Visual Literacy: Starting with the Image

Studying Images through Still Photography

Comics and Film Technique

Film Techniques

Lighting

Editing

Sound

Using Film Techniques to Convey Cinematic Meanings

Defining Purposes for Editing Decisions: Creating Storyboards

Analysis/Evaluation of Film Technique

Film History

Television History

Accessing On-line Films / Film Reviews / Ratings / Information

Animation and Special Effects

Film Study Methods

Writing about Films

Film Study Resources

Film Journals/Magazines

References

Teaching Activities