Meaningful Thoughts

This exercise was adapted from an exercise by David Muir and inspired by the Kuleshov Effect.

You will need:

paper
something to draw with
some Post-It Notes.

Instructions:

1. Establish a scene with two characters over a few panels, ending on a close up on one of them.

2. Draw a panel of something random, whatever comes to mind.

3. Back to your characters, and then a close up of your other character.

4. Draw another random thing.

5. Fill in more panels as needed to make the comic feel like it implies a meaning.

Example:

Thoughts:

The gutter (the space between panels) is where a reader creates a meaningful connection between two moments. Closure is how we create a seamless narrative out of a sequence of panels. It’s why comics work.

Lev Kuleshov, a Russian filmmaker and theorist, posed this question to filmmakers in 1910: “What makes cinema a distinct artform, separate from photography, literature or theatre?” In answer to his own question, Kuleshov said that a film is a cognitive event in which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation. He tried to prove this by showing the same image of a man edited together with different images, showing that the various juxtapositions implied different things about the man.

The same thing is true of comics, and this exercise is a version of Kuleshov’s proof. By showing something (anything), and then something else (anything else), we ask readers to create meaning using closure. We don’t need to know what that meaning will be, or even have an intent behind it, it will still occur. Humans are compulsive makers of meaning. We can’t help it.

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