ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a conceptual framework as a way to help students best understand the unique ways video, as a set of moving images, communicates a story. It emphasizes the concepts that video photographers in journalism or other areas of mass media need to keep front-of-mind when working in the field. The chapter reviews the ways early filmmakers developed a visual language. The fundamental rules they developed more than a hundred years ago still underpin all media content built around moving images. The cinema industry in early years focused on innovating cameras, projectors, and exhibition systems. Once early cinema became a commercial endeavor, collections of short films were assembled in sequence for projection at exhibitor's site. The chapter describes the logic underpinning visual storytelling that was developed more than a century ago, during age of early cinema. Film producers came to realize that the power of moving images was not in a single image itself, but in connection between shots.
