Grammar of the Shot, 2nd Edition

Introduction

One gets the impression that life today is all about experiencing communication in one form or another. We are constantly speaking on mobile telephones, watching television, using the Internet, listening to the radio, reading books, newspapers and magazines, looking at billboards and advertisements, going to the movies, and so forth. Our ability to understand these communications and gain further meaning from them is reliant upon our education—can we read, write and speak a language, recognize images and sounds, decipher symbols, etc.

This education, whether it is from schooling or just living life, helps determine how well we can compute what we take in. Collectively, over time, we have learned to codify our visual communications—from ...