Page 170 - Mediapedia Mobile

PART I1I SHARING YOUR WORK
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Slide Shows
Let’s test this claim.Cover the bottom of this page and look at the three stills on the left page. Follow images from left to right. What expression do you see on the young woman’s face?
Slide shows are dorky, right? This is certainly true when people sit down for an endless and shapeless strings of unedited photos about a summer trip, the new baby, or some other subject they’re wildly excited about, that their friends and family are mildly interested in, and that put third- party viewers to sleep. People used to do this all the time with slide projectors, and today they can do it electronically.
personality, wit, or design. The results are predictable, canned, forgettable.
Now cover the left page and look at the three images below on the right. Study the face of the young wrangler. What does her expression tell you now?
Such slide shows are cousins to dreary PowerPoint presentations of busi- nesses, classrooms, and organizations. PowerPoint’s predesigned style sheets (fonts, colors, layout, backgrounds, and so on) seem to leave no room for individual
THE POWER OF MONTAGE
With this chapter we are entering the world of time-based media—forms like cinema, television, radio, music, and animation. Time-based media are a notch more complicated than photography, il- lustration, or desktop publishing, where the viewer can always pause, linger, and go back over something. Not so with media forms that roll on in an unalterable progression.
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CHAPTER 5: SLIDE SHOWS
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chapter 5: SLIDE SHOWS
Don’t blame the applications. As a communications medium in its own right, slide shows are extremely powerful. Slide shows can be transcendent. They can inform and delight us. They can move us to tears. They can change attitudes. They can implant themselves into our memo- ries just as a Hollywood movie or Broad- way performance can.
Only the central image is switched
in these three-image sets. The theory of montage, first put forth by Russian film- maker Vsevolod Pudovkin in the 1920s, suggests that if you were to see only the first version, you’d perceive a different emotion on the young woman’s face than if you only saw the second. In the first, the young wrangler’s expression seems loving, as if she is responding to the long lashes and gentle eyes of her horse. Her expression in the second appears wary or even alarmed because of those teeth.
TIME-BASED MEDIA
Something special happens when images are strung together in a series. Ideas
and emotions emerge. Within sequences,
Our brains connect images that
Slide shows are a media form that exist in time. Like theatrical shows, they
meaning takes form in a way that’s differ- ent from the way meaning is attributed to individual images.
stream before our eyes. We are pattern- seeking creatures. We’ll infer patterns among different sounds, gestures, or images. We are also symbol-reading creatures. We instantly imbue complex and abstract significance into words and im- ages. It is so natural for us to make sense out of a string of pictures that we rarely give the process a second thought. In this chapter we will look closely at the process, because doing so leads to better and more effective slide show presentations.