Every night, our sleeping dreams are made of images, and in our conscious mind's eye we think in images every day. Our need to express stories in pictures is ancient, instinctive and poetic. Images and metaphors arise spontaneously, intact and whole, from the deepest parts of our psyche.
They allow us to communicate with each other symbolically, so that we can grasp the meaning of a complex idea in a single moment. Electronic media offers many options for capturing and displaying symbolic imagery.
IMAGES: We gather our ability to image as kids, when we imagine wizards and witches, monsters and fairies. More extreme associations come about when we become subject to highly emotional states; like grief, hunger, isolation, anger, etc.
These images arise all the time, our 'inner' child's reaction to our emotional state, a response to our day-to-day experience of the 'outside' world. Memory forces us to cluster images in our minds, and some memories cause exactly the same response in different people. In psychology, Jungian Theory calls this 'Gestalt Consciousness'.
An author can complete a great short story at one sitting, in a frenzied state of urgency, completing it in an afternoon. A single metaphorical image can deliver such emotional passion that the writer can describe in vivid words the exact response any of us would feel under the same circumstance. All the horror novelists do this, conjuring particular images that are so packed with Gestalt emotion that we must respond to them.
Some psychiatrists say they can understand us by analyzing our dreams. Dreams are 'imaging' at its very best, but it is a purely personal experience, using a private subconscious vocabulary. The best multimedia writers understand they must dream with their inner child while sitting at their computer terminals, connecting with software, sounds, 3D objects and video footage.
Without the incredible power of METAPHOR, the product of all of our modern technology will remain mediocre.
METAPHORS: Any writer or artist who can't capture the pictorial essence of the message or icon must think metaphorically. Literary metaphors are powerful because they are compact. A metaphor is a contrasting comparison between things and memories (objects, ideas, processes, feelings, or anything else we use language to describe) from different classes; e.g.
"Heart of Stone", describes a cold distant tough person.
"You are the sunshine of my life”, says a lot about love.
A product name like “Mustang” or "Plymouth Sundance" captures the sense of a fast or expensive car.
A METAPHOR can be done with an ACTION, a VERB or VERB PHRASE:
"He was lucky to slip through their fingers."
"That was a tight squeeze."
A metaphor becomes SIMILE by including the LIKE or AS, e.g.
"She ran like the wind..."
"…as mad as a cut snake…"
“…as dead as a Dodo."
Metaphors 'encapsulate' meaning, making our expression and experiences vivid and memorable. When writing a screenplay, the easiest 'capsules' to describe are charged with emotion; e.g. what you were doing when someone you loved was lost, the circumstance of your first kiss, first broken heart. These examples are easy to symbolize for the audience, because we recall them quickly by clustering the images the same way we always have done before.
This familiarity can be manipulated in storytelling to make an audience believe anything, and then to subvert that meaning with unpredictable juxtapositions. Remember we continually filter our current experience through previously seen images; in the form of our own memories, and the memories of others, by seeing images recorded by them.
Why is it that a really successful Hollywood movie or TV show goes over equally well with an audience in England, Norway, India, China, Brazil or Argentina? Because to differing degrees our experiences are all similar, and it is this dichotomy that the writer must tactfully exploit.
Metaphor, Simile, Analogy, Allegory and Parable; figures of speech, used in conversation, classification and grammar. They are tried and true principles and ready to bend rules, the basic tools on the storytelling menu that you can mould to manipulate and enhance human emotion.
As an interactive writer or designer you must invent the perfect set of metaphorical symbols, not just for your storyline, your service or product, but you must connect it effectively to other enhancing pictures, sounds, animations and sometimes entire databases.
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