Communicating Emotion

Intent - convey the use of metaphor to communicate emotion

Content - news article

Communication Objectives- communicate the emotions the article suggests via visual metaphors

Reference - Shaun Tan's The Arrival 

Shaun Tan conveys emotions in his work in surreal and abstract ways so his The Arrival piece was used as reference to analyse when trying to convey it in my own piece. There were lots of elects to his work which successfully portrayed metaphorical emotions. 

Tan involves pages of the same image but variations of it. For instance, there is a page full of clouds. In metaphorical terms, this can be related to loneliness. Everyone looks at clouds so it is something we all have in common so they bring everyone together. The immigrant in The Arrival is therefore not as alone as we may first interpret. 

On the other end of this spectrum we see Tan emphasising the loneliness of this character by using compositional techniques. Panning out from the character to reveal a vast sea and a single lonely boat. 

A recurring piece of imagery he uses is a paper bird. This could symbolise a familiarity or a comforting reminder of home for the character.

Imaginary creatures and language is used throughout the narrative. It involves the reader in the characters sense of displacement as we too, will probably not fully understand what these creatures and language means.As a reader we can therefore relate.

The main techniques Tan uses to convey the emotions are composition and repetition. I will take these into consideration when creating my own piece using the article below.

The article below is what I used as my content to produce an illustrative piece. 

My initial ideas were a more symbolic portrayal of emotion rather than a metaphorical like the recurring paper birds in The Arrival.

I wanted to portray the sense of loss in my piece with the disappearing place settings and the taking over of the sea. 

Final Piece

I think using a metaphorical portrayal of emotions is quite difficult as I think my work ended up being mostly symbolic. I still think I have managed to represent loss in my piece though. I've used variable repetition in like Tan has with the clouds in his work but I have transformed the original box completely so that the last box is taken over completely. I like the idea of using the composition to get across a message so with my practice I may do more of this to see what results I can achieve depending on what I want my work to say. This may help bring attention to certain aspects of the piece, emphasising a message I want to get across or like in the previous research, a character trait or feature I want exaggerating or to be the main focus.