Out of Class Exercises - Narrative

Family stories are often strung together through bits of repeated information and through old photographs passed around, the faces studied for clues to who our grandfather, great-grandmother, uncles, aunts, and cousins were; how they felt; what their lives were like. When we think about love and family, we tend to focus on the cliches that have evolved to describe strong emotions: I love you. You can tell me anything. A diamond is forever. Our need to construct coherent family narratives often depends on reading each other and our actions in order to explain our relationships.

Exercise: Choose a family story of your own to tell, about an individual family member or occasion. Then pick a medium in which to tell your story: in words, with pictures, or in any combination that makes the most sense to you.

→Cut Up
Take some old poems, journal entries, etc. and simply cut apart the lines with scissors. Now place the lines on a clean sheet of paper, helter-skelter, mixing them up from your different sources. Throw in additional lines from a dictionary, magazines, and/or books. Play around with them, shifting lines, discarding some, adding others. When you have something that pleases you, glue it down on the page.

→ Single Image Narrative:

1. Choose an image. It can be a photo, painting, a magazine image, or anything, just as long as it has good narrative content. The best images have a good mix of foreground, mid-ground, and background elements.

2. Create multiples of the image, either on a coping machine or in a computer application that allows image manipulation, like Photoshop.

3. Using a consistent aspect ratio, crop out various shots from the whole. Try to fine 8 to 14 shots, and have at least four that use a moving camera.

4. Arrange the “shots” onto paper and experiment with various arrangements.

5. Paste in place and add arrows where needed. Don’t add text.

6. Show the sequence to your classmate and ask him/her to talk their way through the narrative.