LENS BASED: Narrative in pictures

From the previous study session where we looked at the origins of lens based media, it was time to look at expressing and portraying a narrative through both still and moving images.

Looking into the power of photography when it comes to conveying the emotion as well as the general visual presentation of an event, we looked at the idea of photojournalism.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, often thought of as the "Godfather" of photojournalism and a master of candid photography was world renowned for his use of snapshot style photography, where he was able to rapidly capture the world in a stationary moment whilst still capturing the movement of actions in his images and therefore portraying the narrative of everyday life.

"I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant" - Henri Cartier-Bresson

We then were asked to mix what we had learnt about both lens based media and the idea of narrative and were asked to storyboard a short 1 minute film.

The plot could be anything we want but we had to make sure that it not only made sense but also didn't consist of solely exposition. To handicap us into really thinking about how we could portray this narrative, the task in hand had to be filmed on a tape recorder shot by shot (which meant any scene changes had to be "editted" on camera) and had to contain no dialogue. This meant that the storyline we were to design had to be fairly precise in its storyboard planning and had to be accurately executed within the hour we were given.

Overall analysis storyboard

Specific scene storyboard

Above are the two images of the storyboards we completed. The one on the left is an overall summarising board whilst the one on the right was a specific scene that was drawn out by another member in our team of 8. This tactic of separating each scene into individual storyboards meant all 8 of us created one and therefore each one would not lack in detail due to rushing.

Our film was completed on time and to a good standard with some slight alterations from the original storyboard but overall was an interesting and informative experiment which I believe we carried out well and without a hitch.


Now working individually on our own project, we were tasked with creating a series of 6 images that told a narrative. Using what we learnt through the making of the 1 minute short film and transferring it to a sequence of still images proved fairly easy and also inspired more ideas that were on a larger scale that would've proved difficult to do through the medium of film.

The narrative we created had to be about an item that meant a lot to us and so I chose a Zippo lighter which I have had for years. It proved quite difficult for me to imagine a narrative about this item but I finally settled on one that is inspired by a particular scene in a Harry Potter film. I plotted the sequence out by sketching a little thumbnail storyboard so that when I set out to capture the images, I knew what I was looking for.

I also chose a little toy bus that I have had since I was a young child. Due to the fact it is a toy bus, in particular a miniature toy replica of the infamous Magical Mystery Tour bus, I felt it only right that the narrative I created around this item was a journey of sorts, or even a "tour". 

I ended up going with the toy bus's narrative and set out to produce the images.

The storyboard I created for this narrative basically outlined my journey from home to Ravensbourne and so I allotted some extra time during my journey to allow for some experiments with photographing. I wanted to play around with perspective and composition to achieve an abstract look that played on the mind of the viewer. To do this, I tried to balance the aperture and shutter speed on my camera to allow for a shallow depth of field and mixing that with the composition of my images to create the illusion of the toy bus being larger than it is.

I feel that this piece turned out quite well considering time factors against me and the obvious embarassment of lying down in the middle of the street. All in all, the idea of perspective didn't work out too well but I feel I tried my best and the effect I achieved through playing around with the depth of field I feel has added a really nice feel to the images.