Frame Formats and Visual Storytelling

Whether you are producing a single illustration or a panel that’s part of a comicbook sequence, the way you format/frame the graphic can dramatically affect your viewer’s response.

The format and size of the frames in a comics sequence can affect a viewer’s perception of mood, time — and the importance of a panel’s content

When a relatively large comics panel is preceded or followed by smaller panels in a sequence, it’s implied that the larger panel contains the most important or more dramatic information.
See below.

We read sideways, left to right. So, long horizontal panels can give the impression of a slow pace due to the relatively long distance between the left and right panel edges. See below.

Thin vertical panels give the impression of a fast/staccato pace due to the relatively short distance between the left and right panel edges. See below.

Of course what the panel contains can dramatically affect the sense of time! See below.

A tree viewed over the course of the four seasons certainly slows down the sense of time, even in thin vertical panels that normally indicate a fast reading clip.

Please add your thoughts on this subject.

Map Orientation in Visual Storytelling

Most sequential visual storytelling media frame their visuals in rectangular formats — usually in horizontal rectangles.

The audience has grown up looking at rectangular maps with North is at the top of a map, South on the bottom, East to the right and West to the left.

Viewers of visual storytelling media have this map orientation stored in their subconscious and creators of visual stories can use it to their advantage.

If it’s important to your story that the subject is traveling in a specific compass direction, you can position he/she/it in the frame to reflect that direction. Doing so will resonate with the map orientation in your audience’s head.

For example, cinematographers and directors of old western films usually showed wagon trains moving West with a right-to-left bias within the frame – echoing the western direction of a map.

(If the wagons gave up and headed back to the East, the directional bias of the wagon’s movement would change to left-to-right.)

All shots in a sequence — long, medium and close-up — showing a wagon moving west would have the right-to-left action bias.

A neutral shot (Frame 3 in the sequence above) is where the action moves directly towards or away from the viewer. Neutral shots can be used in a sequence with an action bias that goes in any direction. However, when using a neutral shot, it is best to establish the action flow bias before the neutral shot and then reestablish the action’s bias after a neutral shot.

Note that in the case of Panel 3 above, even though the horses are neutral (moving directly away from the viewer), the dirt path they follow bends from left-to-right, maintaining the sequence’s action flow bias.

This topic is related to the larger issue of action flow continuity – the subject of a future post in this series.

Have thoughts on this topic? If so, please post it in the comments.