Visual
storytelling is an essential skill for any artist, especially ones in
illustration or film. The Arrival by
Shaun Tan is an excellent example of telling a story without relying on text –
since the story contains only images. It tells its story successfully in my
opinion, by using skills that illustrators and film editors use.
Illustrators can tell a story in one image. They guide your eye to a main focal point and then secondary focal points. It could be something like a main character performing an action, a secondary character reacting to the action and an object or prop that tells us more about the setting. Like the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” the combination of those threes things can suggest an entire tale.
The Arrival is a collection of many illustrations, and that is where the film mindset comes to play. Through the power of suggestion, our minds fill in the holes in between the pictures. An example in The Arrival would be seeing an image of a hand barely touching an envelope; the next picture is a man holding an open envelope looking at it intently. Our mind fills in the actions – that the man picked up an envelope and then opened it in between the two images. That first picture might not have been the man’s hand or the same envelope; that second image could have been a man closing an envelope. The reason visual stories like The Arrival work is because we fill in the blanks.
A risk with this kind of storytelling is the lack of being explicit. It is very reliant on the reader's own cultural background and experiences. The Arrival was clearly about immigration, but because that topic doesn't cross my mind often I initially found a different meaning to the story. I confused an old man for the main character and thought he had aged and then was reliving life again as a young man until his family joined him in the afterlife. While I enjoyed my interpretation, it just further highlighted for me the difficulties with telling a story in purely images.
If an artist does a good job with the focal points and the order in which images are presented, and their audience has had similar experiences in their lives, then their visual storytelling will be successful.
Illustrators can tell a story in one image. They guide your eye to a main focal point and then secondary focal points. It could be something like a main character performing an action, a secondary character reacting to the action and an object or prop that tells us more about the setting. Like the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” the combination of those threes things can suggest an entire tale.
The Arrival is a collection of many illustrations, and that is where the film mindset comes to play. Through the power of suggestion, our minds fill in the holes in between the pictures. An example in The Arrival would be seeing an image of a hand barely touching an envelope; the next picture is a man holding an open envelope looking at it intently. Our mind fills in the actions – that the man picked up an envelope and then opened it in between the two images. That first picture might not have been the man’s hand or the same envelope; that second image could have been a man closing an envelope. The reason visual stories like The Arrival work is because we fill in the blanks.
A risk with this kind of storytelling is the lack of being explicit. It is very reliant on the reader's own cultural background and experiences. The Arrival was clearly about immigration, but because that topic doesn't cross my mind often I initially found a different meaning to the story. I confused an old man for the main character and thought he had aged and then was reliving life again as a young man until his family joined him in the afterlife. While I enjoyed my interpretation, it just further highlighted for me the difficulties with telling a story in purely images.
If an artist does a good job with the focal points and the order in which images are presented, and their audience has had similar experiences in their lives, then their visual storytelling will be successful.
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