An Aesthetic Form of Its Own (Notions of the Structure of a Visual Narrative)

It was commonplace in the 1960s to read here and there that ‘planning a narrative’ no longer made sense for a film director. This statement usually came from the young critics (French and their followers), perfectly inexperienced film lovers, and was in fact gratuitous and unfounded. Visual storytelling (film or video), because it involves a lot of people, a lot of technical means and very expensive materials. It's expensive. And it gets more expensive the longer it takes to put it into practice.

If a director sets out to make a documentary or a story without any planning of the narrative, he can't establish a work plan in advance (which consists of pre-organising all the work in the most economical and rational way). For example, you don't have to take the actors and technicians from the Algarve to Lisbon, or vice versa, every time the director remembers that he has to do another scene to fit in with the things previously recorded. The work plan makes it possible to establish that the actors, image technicians, sound technicians, electricians, etc. (only those needed according to the scenes planned), must be in the Algarve for x days, after which they will film in Lisbon for y days outdoors and z days in the studio. If nothing has been established about what is going to be done and if everyone moves according to the director's daily inspiration (or lack of inspiration), imagine what an extra production could cost!

Planning also serves to organise sequences (and scenes within sequences) in advance, so as to get a feel for the story and the rhythm of the narrative, discover the best ‘links’ for the different scenes, etc.

A speech can't be prepared without lining up topics, which can then be divided into paragraphs, so that the speech can finally be written or improvised. And a speech is a short story, a novel, a film or a video recording.

In fact, the narrative is divided into large blocks, called sequences, whose limits are located in a certain place or in some lapse of time.