ABSTRACT
Emblematic shots can effectively “tell a story” with a single image, communicating complex, abstract, and associative ideas that visualize a movie’s themes or even its central underlying subtext—what a story is really about. A key aspect of emblematic shots is that the associated ideas prompted by some or all of their visual elements play a pivotal role in communicating the themes they visualize. Creating effective emblematic shots can be very difficult, because their composition needs to be as thoughtful and precise as that of a masterful painting or photograph; every single visual element and its placement within the frame should signify something. The narrative impact of emblematic shots often relies on audiences making visual connections between multiple visual elements in the frame.
