This is the golden rule of visual storytelling (and life)
If there’s one golden rule for telling stories with pictures it’s probably this: one thing at a time.
The audience can only focus on one idea per shot or panel, and so a big part of the job is breaking down bigger ideas into their smallest units and then deciding what order to show each unit.
One unit = one shot.
I discovered this making this film years ago. Visual storytelling is not unlike how the binary language of computing works: large files are broken down into their smallest possible pieces — a binary unit (or byte) — and then transmitted in a near endless string of distinct bits, to be reassembled by another machine.
What is a film or a comic but a long string of distinct images?
Even a simple sentence like “the cat sat in a tree eating a mouse” is actually three ideas, and therefore three shots or three panels: a tree, a cat in the tree, a cat eating a mouse.
One thing at a time
I wonder if the golden rule of visual storytelling applies to life as well: I can really only do one thing at a time. Which is a shame really, because I…
