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"What does the artist want to tell us?"
This often used sentence leads us to the central point of our approach presented in this video.
Professional visual artists usally don't use arbitrary graphical elements in their work,
but they are very aware of the decisions they make.
In this example by Caspar David Friedrich the romantic mood is emphasized by
multiple design strategies.
For example the centered position of the moon,
its bright pastell colors which are in contrast to the rest of the environment
and the framing through the persons and the plants leads to a round harmonic arrangement.
The big tree is not placed there randomly.
It builds the counterweight to the couple which leads to a very balanced and harmonic
arrangement
of the visual tension in the image.
Balance, harmony and the round enclosing frame
visually transport content-wise attributes
which should be told in this romantic scene of a couple
which fully merges in its togetherness not caring for the rest of the world.
Classic artistic tools and methods known from painting can also be applied
to modern media like film,
where camera angles and lighting plays a big role.
The collected knowledge of methods for storytelling using subtle visual tools
is known as Cinematography.
As we could see in these examples, visual artists use specific styles and composition
principles to emphasize the narrative content and to convey emotions to the viewer
- explicitly but also implicitly.
This means that graphic design has not only aesthetic purposes
but can be used to deliver messages between two parties, the artist and the viewer for example.
Classic media like paintings or movies
have a fixed dramaturgy because of their linear nature.
Authors decide what the content-wise dramaturgy is and how it should be visualized.
They do it once when the project is created and the visuals will never change again.
In interactive media the dramaturgy can change all the time, unpredictably
depending on the user interaction.
So, if we say that the visual design expresses dramaturgy
then we should consequently react visually when the dramaturgy changes
due to user input or other dynamic influences. And this is, what we worked on
in this project.