Reconstructing Larry

Scene 47 in Reconstructing Larry. Larry is defending the role of pictures in his academic treatise on new media to his editor, Marilyn who is old school academic.

Marilyn: You just cannot fill the book up with pictures. 180 pages of pictures?

Larry: 175. There’re no pictures inside the front or end cover or on the title page.

Marilyn. 175. Whatever. You have to include words too.

Larry: There are words in it. Or rather on it. There’s the cover. Oh and inside too. I had to include the name of the author and my debt to you as editor.

Marilyn: Larry, I know we live in an age where the only thing young people read is graphic novels or manga. But they are fiction. This is a work of academic analysis.

Larry. Well, it’s about context. Rather than fill the book up with description about who was talking I thought I’d just put in a photo of who was talking.

Marilyn: There are also the ideas. What they are talking about.

Larry: So I show their ideas through pictures. One picture is worth a thousand words.

Marilyn: And a picture can be interpreted a thousand different ways.

Larry: And are words always interpreted in only one way?

Marilyn: Look, my bottom line is this. Take out the pictures, replace them with academic argument, or there is no book.

Larry: Marilyn, I’m a graphics person. This will kill me.

Marilyn: You want to live? Start writing.

Typography

Something else about media and and how it affects what you say.

McLuhan would be pleased. What this time?

Another film coming out that film school I saw today. A film on typography.

On what?

Typography. You know, letters like a, b, and c, big and small, the design of those letters. Aka lettering, fonts, print, type or type glyphs.

Any good?

Usual yahoo fare. Some liked it. Some didn't. Only two minutes long but what students are able to produce these days comes closer to something professional.

What can you say in two minutes?

Cut out the human commentators and speak it fast, flash images, together with words on the screen, you move the narrative along at TV CM speeds.

Which is my point, how deep into an issue can you go with a television commercial?
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Pictures in blogs and books

This looks funny.

The picture?

Well when you open the book, the picture is squeezed into the middle. You expect to see the picture on the outside edge of the page.

Yes.

Watch. On the right page, it's on the right. On the left page it's on the left. Easy to see.

Yet on the blog, the picture being on the left doesn't interrupt the text so much. You go from left to right, reading the text first, seeing the picture on the right, second. There's a natural flow.

True, but, we look at book pages and computer screens differently. The geography isn't the same.

Aha, media. Depending on the media, the message goes to the left brain or to the right brain.

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