The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV, and Digital Media

This updated edition of a best-selling classic shows you how to structure your visuals as carefully as a writer structures a story or composers structure their music. The Visual Story teaches you how to design and control the structure of your production using the basic visual components of space, line, shape, tone, color, movement, and rhythm. You can use these components to effectively convey moods and emotions, create a visual style, and utilize the important relationship between the visual and the story structures.

Using over 700 color illustrations, author Bruce Block explains how understanding the connection between story and visual structures will guide you in the selection of camera angles, lenses, actor staging, composition, set design and locations, lighting, storyboard planning, camera coverage, and editing.

The Visual Story is an ideal blend of theory and practice. The concepts and examples in this new edition will benefit students learning cinematic production, as well as professional writers, directors, cinematographers, art directors, animators, game designers, and anyone working in visual media who wants a better understanding of visual structure.

Bruce Block has worked in a creative capacity on dozens of feature films, television shows, commercials, and animated productions. His feature film producing credits include Something’s Gotta Give, What Women Want, America’s Sweethearts, The Parent Trap, and Father of the Bride I and II. He served as a creative consultant on Spanglish, As Good As It Gets, Stuart Little, and many other film and television productions. He is a tenured professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts and holds the Sergei Eisenstein Endowed Chair in Cinematic Design. Mr. Block gives seminars at a variety of studios including Blue Sky Studios, Cartoon Network, Disney Feature and Television Animation, Dreamworks Animation, Industrial Light & Magic, Laika, LucasFilm, Nickelodeon Animation Studios, Pixar Animation Studios, and a wide range of European and American film schools including AFI and Cal Arts. Mr. Block also conducts seminars for digital game designers and companies including Activision-Blizzard, Blur Studio, Google, Hulu, and Tencent. He is a member of the Director’s Guild of America, the Art Director’s Guild, and co-author of the book 3D Storytelling (Focal Press).

www.bruceblock.com