Purposes of editing
Storytelling – storytelling is the conveying of events in words,
sound and/ or images.
Stories have been shared by human beings for tens of thousands of
years as a means of recording and representing the world and for the purposes of:
·
Entertainment
·
Education
·
Cultural preservation
·
Installing moral values
Crucial elements of stories and storytelling include:
·
Plot
·
Characters
·
Narrative
·
Point of view
The term ‘storytelling’
is used in a narrow sense to refer specifically to oral storytelling and in a
looser sense to refer to narrative technique in other media.
Plot – cause and effect process that develops – through the
product, the cause and effect relationship and the ordering of events and
working out how events may have manifested.
Story – the story is the whole world and what is taking place
chronologically – the narrative elements and all the means as when to
communicate.
The phase’ visual
storytelling’ applies to film and a host of other media.
Sometimes it carries with it a perspective edge: in a pictorial
medium, you should tell your stories visually
- rather than, for example, through lengthy dialogue.
Show, don’t
tell, in other words.
As a concept, “visual storytelling” refers to the way that
producers of moving image products convey the meaning of action and events
through images without recourse to the written or spoken word.
This is principally achieved through two techniques:
·
The choice of shots;
·
The way those shots are edited together.
Visual
storytelling is seldom purely visual.
In film, it needs concepts and music and noise and much of the
time a modicum of dialogue to work most fully.
But given the power of the image, a director who invests in
‘purely visual’ passages first and then considers how his/her images might be
reinforced by the other inputs, gains huge dividends in the long run.
