Talking pictures: a creative utilization of structural and aesthetic profiles from narrative music videos and television commercials in a non-spoken film text

Abstract

This thesis is about storytelling. It is presented in three parts, a major output with two supporting components. The first and primary section is the short film. The second is an exhibition of images, props, and environments created for the work. The third is the exegesis. Situated as creative practice, the project tests and develops structural and aesthetic hypotheses in the creation of a non-spoken film text. These hypotheses are shaped by considerations from two areas.The first is design for narrative music video. An analysis of selected texts leads to a creative reconsideration of the role and profile of imagery, space, time, sound, enigma, closure, and narrative voice. The second area is typography. Reflecting on the anti-language, bogspeak, and the culture that has given rise to its development, the thesis develops inaudible typographical voices that operate as narrative contributions to the film.These two areas of consideration support a unique way of telling stories. This is significant because emerging uses of short film now take these texts beyond the theatre. They are marketed as commercially available stories in their own right. As distribution companies are formatting them on DVDs, viewers are seeing these stories not once, but many times. It is useful therefore, for the design of such texts to consider alternative methods of narration that might work to preserve the durability and complexity of their stories as they unravel over repeated screenings.