Visual Literacy: The Art of Cinematic Storytelling
Summary of the video “Understanding Visual Literacy” by Avery Dohrmann.
Visual literacy is the technical and emotional mastery of film language—understanding not just how to compose, light, and move the camera, but why those choices serve the story. It unfolds in two phases: the how (technical skills) and the why (narrative purpose). True visual literacy means treating every frame as part of a collage that communicates emotional beats and character arcs, achieved through deliberate storyboarding and constant variation in lens, framing, and movement to avoid visual monotony.
What Is Visual Literacy
Two Phases of Visual Literacy
Visual literacy breaks into the how phase (understanding technical execution: composition, depth, lighting, camera movement) and the why phase (understanding narrative purpose behind those choices). The why phase is the eternal struggle; even Akira Kurosawa said his greatest regret was dying before he could fully understand why behind the how.
Perfection as Pursuit, Not Destination
Visual literacy is about the endless pursuit of being perfect—striving toward the ultimate unison between image and story. Your choices are never going to be correct; they may be right or wrong, but perfection is unattainable. Great directors like Kurosawa spent careers chasing this ideal without reaching it.
Imperfection as Human Necessity
No director tells stories perfectly—not Kurosawa, Scorsese, or Kubrick. A film must be completed and a story must be told; the most human way to do that is by being imperfect. The choice is between believing in perfection (which paralyzes) and chasing it (which enables eternal improvement).
The Building Blocks: Frame, Light, Movement, Storyboard
The Frame as Foundation
Everything in cinema comes from the frame. A frame is either a composition (three distinct layers of depth: foreground, midground, background) or a subject shot (close-up or medium close-up isolating the subject). Lighting and color are additive—the frosting on top of the compositional cake.
Composition Over Lighting
Composition is what makes things inherently cinematic, not lighting. Composition is the building block; light is the garnish. A man shot in a corner will look bad no matter how it's lit because there's no depth. Composition can exist cinematically without light, but light cannot exist cinematically without composition, especially in storytelling.
Lighting as Support, Not Creation
Lighting should support and highlight composition, adding a cinematic or storytelling layer on top of the compositional foundation. Use fill or absence of fill in foreground and background to accentuate depth, a key light for the midground and subject, and a backlight or rim light to shape the subject. The most important rule: do not draw attention to the light; just support the image.
Camera Movement as Mathematical Progression
Camera movement is the process of moving from one subject or composition to another. Think of it as a math problem: Frame A plus Frame B plus Frame C equals a complete shot. Apply all compositional and lighting rules to the starting frame, ending frame, and all frames in between. The decision of which frames and how to move between them is 100% dependent on story.
Storyboarding: Drawing Before Shooting
Storyboarding is processing all technical framing, lighting, and movement requirements into a concrete plan by hand-drawing every single frame. It doesn't need to be beautiful—crude stick figures in a hallway suffice. The goal is understanding how composition affects story, making movement math easy, and creating the movie's visual language before arriving on set.
Storyboarding Saves Time and Enables Freedom
An hour spent designing a shot on paper saves an hour on set. Understanding composition makes it easy to identify frames at a location. Storyboarding lets you understand what each shot achieves and how it makes the audience feel, rather than just pointing to a cool-looking spot. This preparation gives you freedom to pivot and create if needed.
Visual Language and Storytelling
The Collage Metaphor: Shots as Story Pieces
Imagine each shot in a film as a piece of a collage. Up close, each shot may seem like just another frame, but zooming out, the story becomes visible and takes shape. If all shots look the same or rely on the same coverage, there is no collage and no story—because visually there is no distinction between the pieces. A collage is a collection of different pieces, just like a story.
Blocking and Framing Work Together
Visual storytelling has two freedoms within composition: how people are staged (blocking) to tell the story, and how people are framed to tell the story. Start with blocking—designing actor movement to create visual reactions. Then create a composition that captures that blocking while generating a feeling in the audience or furthering the character and script. You must create blocking that tells the story, then images that tell the story.
Lens Choices Reflect Emotional Beats
Lens choices are a direct component of story and should always be changing. If a scene should feel subliminally claustrophobic, shoot no wider than a 50mm lens on all compositions. As emotional beats change in a scene, change lenses and compositions to reflect those beats. The shift from a 50mm to a 14mm, or from compositions to close-ups, directly affects narrative feeling and audience emotion.
Visual Language Variation Across Scenes
Each scene should have its own visual language. Your framing types and lens choices in one scene should differ from the next scene and the next. Zooming out on the entire film, this variation creates the final visual language. This is why storyboarding—actually drawing your shots—is critical; it lets you see the emotional path of a scene just by looking at the visual choices.
Camera Movement as Expectation Builder and Breaker
Camera movement is the ultimate way to build and break reality, to build and break expectation. The state of the camera should always be changing or staying the same depending on the story and emotional beats. Paul Thomas Anderson rarely uses the same type of movement in back-to-back scenes; each scene has unique movement suited to that scene. This variation is how he creates his collage and tells his stories.
Speed and Type of Movement Matter
Even changing the speed of camera moves has a drastic effect on audience feeling. A slow dolly versus a fast dolly greatly changes perception of a line, scene, or emotional beat. The relation of speed from shot to shot is incredibly impactful—how does slowly speeding up moves throughout a scene help tell the story? The type of movement (dolly, steady cam, handheld, zoom, crane) feels markedly different and should be chosen based on narrative purpose.
Movement Variation as Story Core
In the grand collage of a scene, act, or entire film, movement choices and differentiation between them are where the core of the story is built. You must constantly create and subvert expectations with movement types so each choice feels real, impactful, and grounded in story. If you graphed a typical film's movement types across the narrative arc, it might be a straight line; if you graphed a PTA film, it would look like a crazed heart monitor.
Visual Language as Emotional Communication
At the highest level of visual literacy, every piece of movement, lens type, and framing choice—written down in name only—should be able to communicate the emotional backbone or journey of a movie through words alone. This is when the mind of the individual is replaced by the heart of the narrative. That is true visual literacy.
The Larger Context
Budget Does Not Determine Visual Literacy
Budget does not fully affect the prep or visual literacy being discussed. What matters is the foundation of understanding and intentionality, which can be applied regardless of resources. Many good films exist that don't take the extra step visually, but the pursuit of visual literacy is about setting a foundation for understanding visual storytelling.
Film as Endless Learning
Film is about learning and always will be. No director tells stories perfectly—not Kurosawa, Scorsese, or Kubrick. The human will never be fully taken over by the story, and the medium of film will never be fully understood. It is impossible to be perfect or make a movie the right way, but we can learn and eternally get better.
Notable quotes
Composition is what makes things inherently cinematic, not lighting. Composition is the building block, the light is the garnish. — Avery Dohrmann
At the end of the day, visual literacy is not about creating cool shots. It's about telling a story. — Avery Dohrmann
Do you believe in perfection or do you chase it? If you chase perfection, you will eternally get better. — Avery Dohrmann
Action items
- Hand-draw storyboards for your next project, frame by frame, before arriving on set—even crude stick figures suffice.
- Analyze a favorite film by graphing the types of camera movement across the narrative arc to see how variation builds emotional impact.
- Choose a scene you've shot or plan to shoot and deliberately vary your lens choices (e.g., 50mm to 14mm) to reflect emotional beats.
- Study Paul Thomas Anderson films to observe how he varies camera movement types from scene to scene rather than repeating the same movement.
- Practice blocking actors first, then frame the composition around that blocking to serve the story rather than chasing a cool-looking shot.
- Review your last project and identify whether all shots look the same or rely on the same coverage; if so, plan visual variation for the next project.
- Research Rudolf von Laban's movement theory and apply it to both camera movement and actor blocking in your visual planning.