The Importance of Silence

During my experience of reading and watching media. I have slowly began to show some appreciation of silent moments in comics and films.

When it comes to characters, some times given them too much to talk about can make them annoying. In the Miramax version of the Thief and the Cobbler, the main character and the thief end up saying too much in every scene they are in. For example, there is a scene where the Cobbler escapes a cell and he states that he was free. Another scene where he's changing the Thief he making a lot of yelling  and it distracts us from eh intimation of the scene. In the edited version of the film which include unused storyboards, the same scene is a lot better without any of the main characters saying anything. Doug Walker addresses this saying hat instead of the two characters saying anything and instead says the story is told through the animation.

In this re-edit of the film, Thethiefarchive attempted to restore the film to the level that the original; movie's director Richard Williams wanted the story to be about.

In the same instant can be used here with the Spider-Man animated series. There is an entire scene where there is no pace. It feels very rushed and doesn't take a break. The animations moves from scene to scene and it feels like it was very rushed in telling a story. I can see this through the way the frame and timing are set up. Although I am looking into how comics can visual tell a story, comics also have their version of how time can be visually interpreted. Even when there is a scene which can be visually shown to use the voice over still feels obliged to basically state the obvious.

Spider Man TAS Season 01 - Episode 01 (Spider-man: The Animated Series 1994)

Although these examples are a different medium, the idea of using dialogue or words can be applied in comics. At times, visuals can convey a clear message but then the words included in the speech bubble repeat this unnecessarily. Eisner (1996 p.66) explains that it “is important not to repeat the information or to bore the reader by dwelling on details that have already been conveyed with the drawing or with the text”. This means that visuals have the ability to convey ideas without the assistance of words.

References

Eisner, W. 1996. Graphic Storytelling & Visual Narrative. 5th ed. Tamarac: Poorhouse Press.

TheThiefArchive, (2013). The Thief and the Cobbler Recobbled Cut Mark 4 Pt. 1. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZibUpH-AME&list=PL18B0CA620B61D076&index=1 [Accessed 20 Oct. 2015].

S. Templeton, E. (2015). Spider Man TAS Season 01 - Episode 01 (Night Of The Lizard). [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_Lv1XrY1Cw [Accessed 20 Oct. 2015].

Spider-man; The Animated Series. 1994. [television broadcast]. Fox Kids. November 10th.