There are many formates that are wordless and work successfully. Formates I found work well are animations, films, games, single images and books and comics. But before I look into these separately I looked at why and for how long wordless imagery had been around.
- Wordless books - the origional graphic novels,by David A Berna, 2008, published by Abrams New York.
- Pictures & words, new comic are and narrative illustration, by Roanne Bell and Mark Sindair, 2005, published by Laurence King Publishing LTD UK, edited by Roanne Bell.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_film accessed 22/04/2014
Wordless images have been around for centuries throughout the world from cave paintings to the Chinese scrolls. These depicted what events were accruing at the time and were used to communicate or leave an everlasting impression for the future. So for as long as we know we have used wordless images to communicate a meaning, and the best part about these wordless images were that anyone could read them as they used familiar gestures or shapes so that anyone could read meaning; it broke the language barrier and still does today.
Now days we have come to rely on words and speech and generally expect to see them along side images or in films. But there are still some paths where we see silence used to help or enhance a point. An obvious example of this is narrative illustration as you still get a variety of illustrations containing words or being silent. This can be done in many different ways from comics to single images that contain a silent narrative. And because they have chosen to create silent works they find other ways to show communication and meaning, an artist well known for this is Jim Woodring who develops his silent narrative through gesture alone using expression and actions to communicate rather than text. Though panels that use text in them do help convey a passage of time, this is done by how long it takes the reader to read the text. Where silent narratives allow the reader to use there imagination to fill in what's not there and help progress the narrative in there own way. Tom Gauld said " I think that because we are so used to reading words, we find them reassuring to have in comics, and sometimes this is bad as some readers can just skim over the pictures to get to the next set of words. In a story told entirely with pictures, especially in one image per page books like Klimowski's or Masereel's, the reader is being asked to look into the picture more to find the story, and narratives can be more abstract or poetic".( Pictures & words page 10). I find this really interesting as after reading this I found myself taking more time when reading comics and I think if you really want to make the reader think making them work and look deeper into the image because its silent will help get the message across better. So when looking at making silent works I will need to think about adding blank sections and really intricate parts so that the viewer spends more time reading into the image.
Due to the technology at the time from 1894 to 1929 for entertainment people would go to the cinema to watch silent films. These films contained no sound or spoken dialogue so actors had to emphasize there body language and facial expressions this was so that viewers could follow what was happening. The only text that appeared in silent films were title cards these showed character dialogue, but even though they had these within the film the muted gestures still told host of the story.
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