STOP WHALING -- You Tube

New types of texts require different conceptualisations and a different way of thinking. A fluent reader makes meaning from a written text, yet the responses are evoked by the effect of visual codes such as colour, framing, line, angle, perspective and vectors, in other words the 'visual grammar' (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996).

'STOP WHALING’ uses the voice of whales to construct the whole video theme. Majestic whales swim underwater and singing their haunting songs like screaming. It aims to awaken all people that they are going to be extinct if we do not care about them. The effect of visual codes helps to motivate emotions and feelings of the audience in order to bring out more resonance and sympathy from the video.

In interpreting meanings from images it is not necessary to 'decode the words' as with print, but to be able to 'break the visual codes' in a different way. This involves interpreting a different coding system. People should identify where the image-maker is using colour, position, angle, shape and so on to construct meaning. The way people interpret any new text, whether words or images, will then produce new interpretations, new responses, and new meanings (Walsh, 2006).

References:

Video source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsLjqdviIyA

Kress.G & Van Leeuwen. T, 1998, The critical analysis of newspaper layout, ‘Approaches to media discourse’, Blackwell, Oxford, Chapter 7, pp. 186-219

Walsh. M, 2006, The ‘textual shift’: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts, ‘Reading visual and multimodal texts: how is reading different?’, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, Australia, Vol. 29, pp. 24-37