Sunday, 7 February 2016

Ideas and examples of Visual Narratives

Story-telling has been acquainted with the use of sign communication and one person has came up with a theory which explains the meaning of the use of sign, "Semiotics", by Charles Sanders Peirce.

 Communicating with images can be unpredictable and unable to fully convey the meaning behind when portraying these to audiences. However, a philosopher Charles Peirce describes that images tell stories using semiotics, a type of visual grammar to communicate with audiences. There are three different categories of signs, such as iconic sign, symbolic sign and indexical sign. 


This theory of representamen in semiosis, it can be sub-divided into different signs: iconic, indexical and symbolic. Iconic sign is one of the simplest since it needs to resemble the object, for example, a picture or a painting of a figure. A symbolic sign is not defined by what it represents and the meaning which needs to be learnt since its meaning is primarily arbitrary and based on the objects’ cultural background, such as a banknote, flag of a country or company logo. An indexical sign is when a certain object is affected by its meaning, for instance, a smiling facial expression is an indexical sign of human’s pleasure or amusement. These signs are used as a combination in visual image thus audiences can have a general knowledge of visual narrative within an image.



These signs are important factor of interpreting a visual narrative as it means these sign can able to help audiences’ lack of specialist knowledge in visual images and as long as semiotic signs can configure the elements of visual narrative, audiences will generally accept these features.


It certainly has its value in this theory and able to match up with the current project of mine, hopefully able to convey the story by using specific signs within the painting or when I'm going to move the painting by using after effects and give the indexical sign from the 'moving painting'.

Links for these images:

1: https://visualpractice.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/untitled-8.jpg

2: http://paulwadey.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/semiosis_0.gif?itok=qyvqfL-e

3: http://d1h8qm6whtl6z3.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/semioticsicons.gif

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