1: Audience Expectations, with 'The Dark Knight'
Opening scene from The Dark Knight (2008)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Film
Film
Yesterday was thinking about artists deciding their audience, today is more about how to let your ideal audience know quickly that your work is for them. Granted, with visual arts like painting, this angle is more useful for things like marketing or presentation of a *body* of work, since otherwise each painting/drawing/whatever pretty much stands or falls on its own as soon as a viewer sees it anyway.
But for anything a little longer-form, from a painting series (my current concern) to a graphic novel to a book or a piece of music or a film, it becomes really important to give your audience immediate insight into what the fuller work is going to be about. This can not only hook viewers who fall into your ideal audience type, but also ups the odds that a given viewer will like the whole thing once they've finished, since expectations are so crucial to enjoyment. (Imagine going into an action movie thinking it was supposed to be horror, or into a period drama thinking it was supposed to be romance. Even if you otherwise like action and drama, you can get really frustrated waiting for the 'expected' parts that never show up, and rather than engaging with the story as shown, you leave thinking 'that wasn't scary' or 'they barely spent any time together!' Another reason I usually recommend learning something about the genre or context of a story/artwork before diving into it, so as to give each one a fighting chance to be appreciated as itself.)
So as an example, above we have the opening scene from 'The Dark Knight', the second movie in Nolan's Batman trilogy. Within the first few seconds, and then over the first few minutes, look at all the clues we get as to the movie's tone, direction and concerns, as well as the surprises and conflicts the director uses to help hook the viewer into the story. As a few examples, there's the very title, the silent flames over the Batman logo (re-establishing this film's place in a trilogy along with setting the tone immediately), the opening shot grounded in a recognizable Chicago (vs the previous movie's more vaguely-metropolitan setting, suggesting this one will dig into more realism), and then as soon as we have characters going it's off to the races with clues and cues flying thick and fast.
I'd encourage you to look at any of your favorite longer-form artworks (again, music, film, books, etc.), and revisit just the intro to scan for the cues it's using to tell you you're part of its audience. Hell, do this with works you hate, or the ones that bore you — what are the specific visual/audio/narrative triggers that make you turn on the work? Is it something the work is doing, or something it's not doing? How long does it take to make up your mind up about whether you like something, and what's the basis of that decision?
But for anything a little longer-form, from a painting series (my current concern) to a graphic novel to a book or a piece of music or a film, it becomes really important to give your audience immediate insight into what the fuller work is going to be about. This can not only hook viewers who fall into your ideal audience type, but also ups the odds that a given viewer will like the whole thing once they've finished, since expectations are so crucial to enjoyment. (Imagine going into an action movie thinking it was supposed to be horror, or into a period drama thinking it was supposed to be romance. Even if you otherwise like action and drama, you can get really frustrated waiting for the 'expected' parts that never show up, and rather than engaging with the story as shown, you leave thinking 'that wasn't scary' or 'they barely spent any time together!' Another reason I usually recommend learning something about the genre or context of a story/artwork before diving into it, so as to give each one a fighting chance to be appreciated as itself.)
So as an example, above we have the opening scene from 'The Dark Knight', the second movie in Nolan's Batman trilogy. Within the first few seconds, and then over the first few minutes, look at all the clues we get as to the movie's tone, direction and concerns, as well as the surprises and conflicts the director uses to help hook the viewer into the story. As a few examples, there's the very title, the silent flames over the Batman logo (re-establishing this film's place in a trilogy along with setting the tone immediately), the opening shot grounded in a recognizable Chicago (vs the previous movie's more vaguely-metropolitan setting, suggesting this one will dig into more realism), and then as soon as we have characters going it's off to the races with clues and cues flying thick and fast.
I'd encourage you to look at any of your favorite longer-form artworks (again, music, film, books, etc.), and revisit just the intro to scan for the cues it's using to tell you you're part of its audience. Hell, do this with works you hate, or the ones that bore you — what are the specific visual/audio/narrative triggers that make you turn on the work? Is it something the work is doing, or something it's not doing? How long does it take to make up your mind up about whether you like something, and what's the basis of that decision?
Here's a bonus video showing more examples from film with a little analysis: