Megan's new favorite movie is Fantasia 2000. She loves the scene with the whales were they fly off into space. She also likes the segment with the ballerina. At night when she is getting ready go down she says, "Whales! Whales!" which means Fantasia.
If you've never seen the movie it's worth a look. The animators do a fantastic job conveying a complex story with no dialogue.
It's the polar opposite of radio. I was listening to Morning Edition on the drive into work and the reporter was talking about a dinosaur model. He painted a picture of the model with words which I then instinctively drew in my own mind. This is visual radio and it's a hallmark of NPR. If you listen for it you will hear it used continuously.
Creating a visual medium through speech is something that is unique to radio and podcasts. This is interactive listening where the story teller is using words to paint pictures in the listeners minds. In this way radio is a much more interactive experience than TV. In a sense using movie pictures is lazy for both the viewer and the producer.
It's said that a picture is worth a thousand words. That's overly simplified. The right words can evoke far more emotion and introspection than 1,000 pictures. Because having the words or speech alone forces us to create our own imagery. And in so doing we move ourself into the story.
A while back I talked about the Holocaust show on PBS. I was deeply moved by this statement:
"Small children usually cried because of the strangeness of being undressed in this way, but when their mothers or members of the jewishsonderkommando comforted them, they became calm and entered the gas Chambers playing or joking with one another and carrying their toys. Hundreds of men and women in the full Bloom of life walked all unsuspecting to their death in the gas Chambers under the Blossom-Laden..."
This was done as a voice-over of the personal memoirs of the camp commander. The only images were him writing and a small house in a field. It was up to us to create the image of the scene in our minds, and in so doing the effect was greatly magnified.
Wow, I'm not sure how I got from whales to holocaust in five paragraphs. Oh, well, the miracle of blogging.
Posted by jherr at February 18, 2005 09:42 AMThanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
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