preface
The 21st century is a new economic period characterized by "informationization", in this increasingly information-rich social background, newspapers, books, etc. carry information can no longer meet people's communication needs;
Various non-verbal symbols such as images and sounds play an increasingly important role, making the past single text form gradually transformed into a multi-mode form.
Multimodal discourse is a linguistic phenomenon in which people use various sensory channels such as hearing and vision, using language and images as the medium, to communicate in various ways and forms.
A film poster is a multimodal text composed of text, pictures and spatial layout, and is also an external packaging form of the film. Whether a movie's poster is accepted by people is directly related to its advertising effectiveness and box office.
This paper mainly focuses on the posters of "Mind Agents", adopts multimodal visual grammar, examines the meaning of posters from multiple angles, and explores the meaning of posters from two aspects: the interaction between posters and the audience.
Theoretical basis
Halliday proposed three functions of pure reason, namely conceptual function, interpersonal function, and chapter function, and proposed a new point of view:
Language is both a social symbol and a latent semantic, and its semantic origin includes other symbolic systems. Therefore, it can be used both for the study of multilingual texts and for the study of other non-verbal texts.
Analysts have taken the idea that language is a social symbol and extended the theory to other symbols beyond images, colors, sounds, movements, and so on.
They believe that these symbolic resources are no longer secondary, but form independent and interactive symbolic resources with language and writing, and participate in the construction of meaning.
Then, this paper constructs a visual grammar system with "representative meaning", "interactive meaning" and "constitutive meaning" as the main research objects.
Multimodal interpretation of "Mind Agents"
"Mind Agents" is a novel with an emotional theme, which "humanizes" the five emotions of "happiness", "sadness", "anger", "boredom" and "fear".
Different colors correspond to different emotions, and each character has its own unique personality and way of thinking;
The activity of emotions in the mind will have a certain impact on the actions of the protagonist Riley, they are like making a bold fantasy in Riley's mind, resulting in huge ups and downs in Riley's actions. The most prominent feature of this film is that every emotion in human life is personified, visualized, and concrete.
However, in the poster, images of different sizes, texts of different sizes, pictures in different positions, colors of different brightness and other elements constitute a multimodal discourse, and the reproduction, interaction and composition of these words are very worth playing.
"Reproduction of meaning" refers to the activities of visual images, like language, that can faithfully reproduce people, places, things, and the inner world of human beings in the objective world.
The semantics of reproduction can be divided into narrative reproduction and conceptual reproduction, and narrative reproduction reflects the relationship between subjects in the way of interaction between subjects.
"In narrative images, vectors are signs, and elements in the image form diagonal lines, that is, strong diagonals, which constitute vectors." Conceptual representation, on the other hand, represents the relationships between participants through attributes, categories, and characteristics.
This poster uses blue as the main color and based on it, a silhouette of the brain is drawn, thus forming a conceptual image;
In a sense, this shows how deep and extensive the knowledge contained in movies is, and it also shows that movies are closely related to the human brain.
In the picture, the subject will be the most prominent. In the middle of this photo, there are five protagonists who are standing in front of a multi-purpose operation table, showing that they are working on the operation table.
The facial features of each character are very conspicuous. They can form vectors from different angles such as looking up, looking down, staring, squinting, and looking straight.
Between these different characters, they have different expressions and postures, from joy and sadness, to fear and nausea, to vivid anger.
Therefore, these characters reflect the conflicts and entanglements between the characters in the movie from the side, allowing the audience to have a certain guess about the various behaviors of each protagonist in the movie;
The space of imagination is constructed, so as to realize the effect of graphic communication, and to a certain extent, the publicity and attractiveness of the film are improved.
The meaning of interaction refers to the interconnection between the creator of the image, the object or person represented by the image, and the observer of the image, and also indicates the attitude that the observer should adopt towards the object represented, including the four factors of contact, social distance, attitude and form.
This connection embodies a connection between the image and the observer, and the observer conveys what kind of information to the observer through the image in his mind.
In the entire poster, only Fu Fu makes direct eye contact with the audience, and has imaginary interpersonal interaction with the audience.
The flames were always burning above his angry head, his eyes were angry at everyone, his mouth was wide open, his hands were tightly clenched, and he showed his fiery character in front of everyone most intuitively;
This also makes people speculate about his fiery performance in the film, which attracts everyone's attention and speculation, while also enhancing the interaction between the poster and the audience, thus achieving the effect of promoting it.
In video representation, the intimacy of the image viewer and the video audience determines the social connection between the two. The size of the image reflects the distance of the interaction between the participants and the audience in the image, and thus the intimacy of the two.
Intimate proximity means seeing only the face or head; Personal close-up refers to visible head and shoulders; Personal distance refers to being able to see above the waist;
Social proximity refers to seeing the whole person; Society can see the whole person from a distance and surround it with space; Public distance refers to the distance of at least 4~5 people.
In this poster, each protagonist can be clearly seen, they can not only see their all, but also surrounded by the surrounding space, which is a manifestation of social distance;
This shows that there is an alienated social relationship between the participants and the audience, which means that the film has a certain fiction and fantasy, it does not belong to the real reality.
The posture of the image is expressed in the form of "perspective", "angle", etc., which reflects the attitude of the observer towards the participants in the image.
If the viewer looks at the participant in the image from an angle of looking up, it indicates that the participant is in a strong position for the viewer; The flat or horizontal angle indicates the relative equality of the two; Looking down shows that the viewer has power over someone.
In this poster, the overall background is mainly socially distant, a kind of alienated relationship. The male protagonist seems to be looking at the audience angrily, but the kind of gaze that can be seen from far away makes the audience feel very uncomfortable.
The other four characters widen the distance between the characters and the audience from the four perspectives of looking up, looking down, staring, and looking sideways. This structure is consistent with the personality characteristics of each character in the picture, as well as the viewer's perception of the picture, thus arousing people's strong interest in the film in a sense.
Modality is related to the "truth" we pursue, and it is a form of "realism" of image expression, which is divided into three types: high, medium, and low according to the saturation of colors from the perspective of sensory information processing. ”
The color tone of this poster is blue, there are characters of various colors, some angry, some happy, some sad, some disgusted, each character has their own style, these highly saturated pictures, all represent a strong emotion.
In addition, characters, words and colors together form a whole, rich picture, resulting in the visual effect of color fusion and rich picture, which attracts people's attention and stimulates people's interest in reading.
Constituent semantics are consistent with discourse semantics in functional linguistics and consist of three sources: information values, framing, and prominence.
Information value is achieved through the location of the constituent elements; Image-taking is whether there is an image-taking method that can be achieved by splitting the line or the line that is substantively split;
Saliency refers to the difference that an element can attract the attention of the observer, which can be expressed as whether it is placed in the foreground or background, relative size, tonal contrast, difference in vividness, etc.
In this poster, five protagonists are lined up and occupy most of the screen, while against a background of dark blue tones, protagonists of different colors are more likely to attract the attention of the audience.
The title "Mind Group" at the top is "Mind Group", which appears in the form of an outline of the mind and is displayed in large print, and it is also an important message, and the message is of higher value, indicating that the film is related to the mind.
At the bottom, it is the effect, evaluation, and release time of this movie, because the text is relatively small, so its prominence is relatively poor, so its amount of information is relatively small;
However, after using red, enlarged, and bold fonts, it is also very informative, and it is also an important part of the core information that can provide readers.
And the message placed on the side, as the most important message, in the lower left corner of the message, there is a QR code similar to the shape of a brain, which looks small.
The English name is in the lower right corner of the movie, which is simple and easy to remember; At the top of the movie, it is the word of mouth of the movie, which is also a good advertisement.
The apocalyptic significance of "Mind Agents"
Since October 6, 2015, "Mind Agents" has received super high scores and good word of mouth. What is the important meaning of a foreign film achieving such an excellent box office, this article will discuss and explain from three perspectives.
A cartoon movie, it personifies, visualizes, and concretizes the state of human life, showing us what the human brain is doing in a variety of strange but concise and clear ways, and it expresses abstract technology in the form of a concrete image.
With rich psychological knowledge and meticulous investigation as the theme, the film perfectly blends psychological and visual language to present the growth process of a person full of joy and sadness. This is perhaps the only and rare great work in the history of cinema that treats the spiritual activity of human beings as a main thread.
In the beginning, animation was mainly meant to bring fun to the audience, such as Disney's early princess series. But "Mind Agents" is full of spirit and philosophy;
The characters have gradually developed towards rich aspects such as family and friendship, changing the funny and coquettish style of the past to becoming a condiment.
It conveys the philosophy of life and positive energy to the audience in an interesting way, and transmits a wealth of scientific knowledge to the audience, and in the process of viewing, the audience at all levels can both see, get, and think, thus generating ideological value.
Directed by Peter Doggett, the film took 5 years to finalize, and the film covers many psychological aspects such as emotions, dreams, subconscious, fantasies, amnesia, etc.
To find out exactly what this idea means, they consulted a number of psychologists, including Dachel, a well-known psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
Cortner can see from this point that "in the process of constructing and developing the film discipline, the characteristics of film itself as a product of industrial production should be fully considered;
While paying great attention to the study of art ontology, we should also actively create some favorable environment for it to continuously improve it, so as to improve the consciousness and pre-emption of interdisciplinary research between film studies and other disciplines, so as to promote the development of film disciplines. ”
epilogue
From the three perspectives of expressive meaning, interactive meaning and constitutive meaning, using the relevant principles of systematic functional linguistics and visual linguistics, some tentative discussions and explanations were made on the poster of "Mind Agents", and some tentative explanations were made for the inspiration contained in it.
Through the study of the three modes of image, text and color, the author believes that "only the synergy of multiple modes can convey the theme and plot of the film to the audience and attract the attention of the audience." ”
This poster integrates text, pictures and colors, vividly conveys the main content of the movie, and plays a good role in promotion.
Bibliography:
Qian Zhizhong, "Strengthening Interdisciplinary Research, Broadening Disciplinary Horizons: One by One: About the Construction of Film Disciplines"
Li Zhanzi, "Social Semiotic Analysis of Multimodal Discourse"
Zhang Tongde, Ge Xuan, "Film Poster "My Name is Khan" Multimodal Analysis of Film Literature