Monday, February 2, 2009

Narrative as a Formal System and McCloud Reading

In the reading from Film Art, the chapter 'Narrative as a Formal System' presented many familiar concepts. I feel that a lot of this reading that I am doing on the topic of narrative for my major studio class and my narrative strategies class has pretty obvious information, however the terminology and cohesive study of the material which formalizes a system to speak collectively about it is new to me. The terms that stick out to me from this reading are:

- parallelism- 'setting up a similiarity among different elements'
- diegesis-'the total world of the story's action'
- causal motivation- determining the cause of an incident
- temporal order- arrangement of events in time
- the exposition-'the portion of the plot that lays out important story events and character traits in the opening situation'

On a side note, even though my group is presenting on the chapter about Time Frames in Scott McCloud's book, I came across this video on storyboarding where some Disney artist's compare it to comics at one point.