November 19, 2018

The movie language of picture books

A curious thing happened to me when I was interviewed by a bookstore not long ago. They asked the question, “What are your influences? Which books did you read growing up?” To which I responded, “As a kid, I never read many books because that’s not the family environment I grew up in. But, I did watch many movies.”

The Never Ending Story DVD cover
I was raised by mum, dad, and The Neverending Story.

I then went on to list the movies that I feel had a huge influence on me, the ones I watched probably hundreds of times and wore the VHS tape thin in the process.

When I got the edited interview back, we decided to ‘cut’ these bits about movies and focus on the very few books I did read when I was a kid. But it got me thinking, do ‘book people’ think ‘movies’ aren’t legitimate inspiration?

I wouldn’t say I’m a movie buff. A movie buff to me is someone who’s good at movie trivia. Those weird questions like, “Who played Eric in the 1953 production of Eric goes to Broadway?” I don’t know the answers to anything like that. But, I do love movies. I love watching them, unpicking them, analysing how they’re put together and what the director is trying to achieve in doing so. In the end, a movie is a story so why should it be any less legitimate as an ‘influence’ than a book?

The movie language of picture books

I think it’s interesting that whenever I hear very experienced illustrators speak, they talk of picture books like ‘designing a theatre set’. They ask a question on every spread like, “Whose on stage when? Where are they standing? Whose in focus?” etc. I’ve caught myself talking about spreads to my wife with language like, “OK, so, for this shot, we’ll look at Eric from above”… I use the word ‘shot’. Not drawing. Not angle. Not spread. It’s movie language.

Picture books are combinations of words and pictures. Just like movies. I’m convinced that my years spent in front of TV watching movies has given me an intuitive sense of how to set up a ‘shot’. In other words, how to compose an image to do all sorts of things – heighten the drama, show power and dominance, make the viewer feel unbalanced – all those things that movie directors do so well. Some of the best picture book illustrators working today come from a background in film. This isn’t an accident.

So yes, books are wonderful influences, and I’m sure that mentioning them on a bookstore blog is crucial and helpful for promoting sales. But we shouldn’t feel guilty for sitting down and watching a movie once in a while. We learn from other storytellers in many many ways; movies and books are just as good an influence as each other.

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