Bruce Block — The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media
Bruce Block's practitioner's grammar of the image: contrast and affinity, the visual components, and story structure drawn as a graph.
- book
- reel
Bruce Block, The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media (3rd edn).
Good for
A working designer's book rather than a scholar's. Block's method is to name the visual components (space, line, shape, tone, colour, movement, rhythm) and then argue that all of them work through contrast and affinity. His colour chapter is the one that says colour meaning is learned inside a film rather than given by nature: "If presented consistently, the audience will learn that a green color scheme means danger" (vs 260). His tonal-contrast line, "Without tonal contrast, lines don't exist" (vs 100), is the shortest correct thing anyone has written about Lighting.
The story-structure chapter draws intensity as a curve and insists "picture makers must understand story structure or they may never be able to correctly use visual structure" (vs 246), which links Structure back to the technical codes.
Cited across Colour, Lighting and Structure.
In the library
Held in Reel, the local research library of scanned and indexed film books. 16 parts, 1,390 indexed passages. Page numbering is auto-checked.
Cite passages from this book as vs <page> — for example vs 214.
Strongest on
Measured, not guessed. Each figure is how much denser this book is on a concept than the library average — so common words don't crowd out real specialisms.