The Dancing Sausage Web Journal

I just finished analyzing screenshots from Final Fantasy VIII for a class I’m taking. We were supposed to be analyzing a 20-second TV clip to try to figure out what the director was trying to accomplish with angles and cuts, but since I’m doing some thinking about video games this semester I got the teacher to let me try this instead. I feel like a klutz reading visual elements — I’m eager for those of y’all with more experience in it (Mack? are you out there?) to suggest alternate readings.

Little observations this excercise brought up: one, camera angle in video games is much more constrained by function than it is in a movie; and two, some visual arrangements in video games would be nonsensical if they appeared in movies, so while film and video game literacies may overlap they probably don’t consist of all the same elements (obviously). More here. now I have to go to bed because I feel like death warmed over.