Bruce Block: The Visual Story: Chapters 1 - 2

So I've just started to skim the surface of Bruce Blocks: The Visual Story, my reading pace seems quite staggered, but I believe that's due to the long recap period required after each chapter. Every page is riddled with diagrams and examples of films to check out, a lot of information in a small amount of space, it can take a while to grasp and fully understand a single point made.
 The main outstanding notes I have made for Chapter 1 & 2 are as followed;

There are three main elements to any film production, these are categorised as
- Story: Building blocks of plot, character and dialogue
- Sound: Building blocks of dialogue, sound effects and music
- Visuals: Which is built upon; The Basic Visual Components;

   - Space: the physical space in front of camera, the space on screen, the size of the screen itself.
   - Line and Shape: lines make up and appear to create all shapes
   - Tone: the brightness of an object relative to the grey scale
   - Colour: the most powerful visual component

   - Movement: to attract the eye via objects  on camera

An actor is part of these visual components, no difference between them and other objects, still use space, lines, shapes, tones, colours and movement.

Visual component can portray emotion and messages to the audience, perfect example for sound is the music in Jaws and Psycho which communicates terror.



A perfect example for colour would be that red indicates danger, its a stereotypical and well known colour for it, but you don't have to stick to conventions, blue could show danger if portrayed to the audience enough.

The next major point made is that of Film progression, diagrammed simply as a point transforming into a line, transforming into a cube, something starting off as simple and evolving into something complex. Examples in films include;

Raging Bull; Fight scenes start of as very simple and end very complex
The Birds; The birds are constantly gathering more and more to attack
The North by Northwest cornfield scene, the scene progresses from very dull to high intensity.




We are introduced to contrast and affinity, a perfect example of tonal contrast would be a black silhouette on a white background or Visa Vera, a perfect example of tonal affinity would be two colour next to each other on the grey scale overlapping.

The more contrast in any visual element the greater visual intensity, the more affinity the less visual intensity. The whole point made was that you need a good mix of contrast and affinity if you are to hold the audiences attention, if there is no contrast to the story, dialogue, visuals etc the audience becomes bored, if there is too much with no affinity it becomes too intense, basically you need good pace to a film.