Visual Story Reflection – Stephanie Hunter

I love being the audience of visual stories. I love the depth and symbolism that can shine through a story’s images. I love how simple yet complex visual stories can be. I loved the creativity and cleverness that went into some of my classmates work. However, I’m not a huge fan of visual story creation. I feel like strong visual storytelling requires a ton of salience decisions; size, color, tone, focus, foreground, overlapping… Then you have to decide how much to apply each of these design elements. How much should I darken that picture? How much should I overlap these two images? And naturally each adjustment you make to any single component effects the overall tone of the piece, if not for the audience, then definitely for you, as the story’s creator. And those decisions don’t even cover the basics of traditional storytelling, such as character, detail, and conflict. I feel like with audio story you just throw a bunch of files in a program and feel successful if the person recognizes the complied sounds but with visual story there is so much connotation surrounding the definition of art that it’s hard to reach your artistic vision. If I use visuals for future stories it will definitely be to enhance another mode of storytelling rather than be the primary story medium. I think sole visual storytelling can be amazing, and with the endless image creation capabilities we have available to us, how can it not be. I just don’t know if my stories are ready for that kind of medium.