Ward+Wk+11


 * 4/11/12** Week 11

"A surprising and disturbing impression emerges from this melange of artistic and non-artistic photographs. One would expect the artless pictures to suffer when compared to the conscious works of art that surround them, but oddly enough they do not." - Malcolm

This line stood out the most to me and really seems to give emphasis on my project. The images that I am using are by no means art. They were originally taken for a video game advirtisment. Yet despite that it tells multitudes of stories that captures an audiences interest with barely saying a single word. Just by showing the destruction of local landmarks (a common motif in invasion sci-fi) and the desperation of the people presented in the images. While the main character in this story is never really seen, he is behind the camera taking the pictures, what little text there is shows his response to these images and how he struggles to run for safety or go through with his mission which may end in his death.I guess the main point of it all is, you don't need an 'artful' photo in order to tell a straightforward story. All you need to do is go from one moment to the other to get the audience invested in the people they see(or even don't see).

"Photoshop manipulation is one thing; caption manipulation is another thing." - Morris

While most of the trailer images that I am using for this project do not originally have text, I have included text in order to create the nameless character taking these images and serving as a sort of narrator to the audience. Though I'm not entirely sure if this manipulation would be accepted in a journalistic sense discussed in Morris but it serves a good enough purpose to tell one of many stories that are presented in the game trailer's images. There is a distinct challenge though in figuring out exactly how much text should tell the story and how much the images will tell the story. I admit being a writer that I am used to using text instead of images but this project offers a difficult but intriguing opprotunity to experiment with how to have images tell a story.

"In 1966, John Szarkowski of MOMa had the novel idea of removing the walls between all these compartments and look at photography as a whole."- Malcolm

Interestingly enough, being able to get rid of these barriers would, in my mind, also get rid of the conventional ideas on how to tell a story through images. As long as these stories have a beginning, rising action, climax and falling action leading to a conclusion; I can be told with any combination of text or images as long as the process of going one point to another makes sense. This is how I'm planning my story, to have the imagery tell their give the audience exposition with the text serving as the narrator to get them from one point to the next. How successful this will be, i'm not sure but I won't know until I try.