Assignment 2E - Singing and Frolicking

For the final part of Assignment 2 we had to go back to the three pictures we chose but this time add a single word to any one of the images. This was too see if it helped people interpreter the same story in the same way. The word I used was "singing'" with the image of the bird. It was after I had asked people to do this that they were all pretty much the same stories.

1. One day a bird was singing as a girl was jumping about in a hay stack.

2. There was a girl who was jumping playing in a hay stack, jumping and running about then stopped to listen to the bird in the tree sing to her.

3. The girl who was jumping about a haystack heard a little bird singing as it flew in the sky.

4. The girl who was playing in the middle of a bunch of hay stacks was jumping and skipping and singing with the birds.

I decided to add a second word, "frolicking" to the image of the girl.

5. There was a girl jumping and frolicking in a haystack and listened to the bird sing.

6. The girl in the hay stack was jumping and frolicking when she saw a singing bird.

7. The singing bird saw a young little girl frolicking about the hay stacks in the field.

I then had to go back and read the "Rhetoric of the Image" by Roland Barthes again and see if any of many thoughts and understanding of it had improves. I can actually say I am no entirely sure. When I read it before I carried out the experiments I had a general understanding of what it was about, but after carrying out the experiment it is more difficult to connect everything with the same story.

I find that when connecting 3 random images, then a fourth then adding text was a bit different from what Barthes was saying. He for one was using an advertisement that was clear what it was about, all the items on it formed the advert immediately, without the logo or anything else you clearly saw it was products made for an Italian meal. With the random images we were having to make up the scene. But I do understand what we were supposed to do, but for me personally found it to be different from the essay.

I do know that as designers we are supposed to use words and images, on their on and together to express well any task we have been given. And also the way in which we do this, such as if we use different fonts then the image it is with can completely change. How we change something visually with text can change the meaning and understanding of it all.