In my last post I marked a turning point. The question of this semester is no longer how to master one medium, but what each medium actually does to a message. This post explains the plan and the goal behind it.
The goal is simple to say and hard to answer. I want to find out what kind of information each visual language suits best. When a story is told through illustration, what does it gain and what does it lose? When the same story is told through photographic imagery, what changes? I do not expect a single winner. My expectation, written down here before any testing, is that each language will be useful in different situations. I also know that illustration and photography are both enormous worlds. A technical line drawing and an expressive painting are both illustrations, but they behave completely differently, and the same is true for photography. So I will not compare the two worlds. I will compare one defined style from each: a flat, reduced illustrative style on one side, and a clean photorealistic style on the other. Whatever I find will only be true for these two styles, and I want to be honest about that limit from the start.
The plan looks like this. I will take three very simple, everyday stories. Stories so banal that nobody has to think about the content itself. This is intentional. When the content is trivial, the only thing left to react to is the image. Each story will be told twice, once in each style. The two versions will then go to two separate groups through an online questionnaire, and I will compare how each group understood the story and how they felt about it. Which stories I will use, and how the questionnaire works, will come in the next posts.
One decision needed the most thought: how to produce the images. My first idea was to draw the illustrations myself and to photograph the photographic versions myself. But the more I thought about it, the more problems appeared. My drawing skills and my photography skills are not on the same level, so the comparison would partly measure me instead of the medium. Photography also needs a person, a place, and time that I do not have this semester. And keeping three stories visually consistent across two media, alone, within a few weeks, is not realistic. So I decided to generate both versions with AI. This keeps the production conditions identical. Same maker, same tool, same amount of effort. The only variable left is the visual language itself. To be precise, this also means the photographic versions are not photographs. They are photorealistic images, and I will call them that. The decision also continues a thought from my first semester research on AI and storyboarding: the role of the designer is shifting from the one who draws to the one who directs, selects, and judges. This semester I will practice exactly that role.
So this is the plan. Three banal stories, two visual languages, two groups, one questionnaire. The next post will define the exact research questions I am trying to answer.
