Poster Analysis #1: The Jungle Book

In a previous life I wrote a lot of film reviews. It made little money but it was a labor of love and, hey, who doesn't love movies? I still love cinema but I don't get anywhere near enough time these days to keep up with its latest ebbs and flows. 

 

I can still indulge in my fascination with film posters though because the internet is awash in them!

One of the benefits of the internet is that it democratised information. Things became accessible to a broader range of people and this continues to grow broader, meaning that if you have the inclination to design your own film poster you can do this and then potentially share it with millions upon millions of other people. This also works for the big guys too, with any marketed material now proliferated throughout the internet.

Over the next month I've decided to tackle Nanowrimo for the third time (third time's the charm, right?) so I'll have little time to write blog posts. I thought I might keep things ticking along by looking at a few posters.

There are several striking things about the above poster that tie into the study of visual literacy in the English classroom. Let's break it down element by element.

Light and Shade: The borders of the poster are cast in shadow, creating silhouette-like effects for the figures in the foreground. This 'vignetting' of the image pulls the viewer's focus into the middle, where the source of light is, which brings us to...

Salience: The salient (main) feature of an image is usually its central figure, or a large piece of writing. This is almost always a matter of perspective - what each viewer sees as having salience may differ, as does the creator's vision of what will be salient. It's worth thinking of a poster as an exercise in persuasion - it's a product design to persuade the viewer to be interested. I would argue that the salient part of this image is one of it's smallest visual features - the flame in Mowgli's hand, which may be making a thematic point. A lot of the elements work together to draw our eye to this point. But, as mentioned, this is a matter of perspective. 

Colour: Colour often functions as a form of symbolism. We attach colours to certain connotations or associations, dependent on our cultural background. For example, in Western cultures the colour white is used to symbolise purity and peace (as seen in the wearing of a white dress at a wedding, or the waving of a white flag). In Ancient Egypt, however, white was the colour for death, and among the Bedouin peoples white represents fertility and happiness. In the case of The Jungle Book, the colours are organic, orange/yellow to represent the light brought by Mowgli, and blue/green to demonstrate the nature-based setting of the jungle.

Colour wheels demonstrate colour oppositions and help designers select colours that will contrast well with one another.

 

Colour also functions, from a design standpoint, in concert with other colours for aesthetic impact. A cursory understanding of colour theory will help students comprehend why certain colour palettes are used when creating images for film. The poster for The Jungle Book takes a muted approach to the often overused blue/orange contrast (look up blue/orange film posters to see just how often these two colours get used together). Part of the reason for this is that it demonstrates a juxtaposition between a 'cool' colour and a 'warm' one, which can assist with attracting the eye. 

Camera Angle / Shot Size: The camera is placed somewhere between eye level and slightly lower, and captures an extreme long shot of Mowgli in his environment. The angle and shot size work together to place an emphasis on the setting (the jungle) and Mowgli's role in leading a vanguard of sorts into this realm (making him the viewer's identification point in this poster/film). The size of Mowgli in comparison to the environment also suggests a certain power in the setting - that Mowgli is dwarfed against these ruins suggests that they are something to be reckoned with, something that will feature significantly in the film.

Mise en scene: This French term literally translates as 'setting the stage' and refers to the design of things within the shot. A director needs to consider mise en scene when arranging what the audience sees in each shot and how they see it. In this case, we have an 'over-the-shoulder' shot of sorts that places the viewer on the shoulder of the animals as they look up towards Mowgli. The image itself is neatly split into background-midground-foreground by the architecture, creating a three-dimensional effect looking into the environment, which dovetails nicely into the film's promotion as a '3D' experience. 

Focus: The camera is focused predominantly on the foreground and, at a pinch, the midground too. The large statue-head in the background is unfocused - perhaps inviting curiosity from the viewer, a sense of something being held back out of reach, something that would bear further investigation if the viewer agrees to watch the film. 

Vectors: Images often utilise lines (imagined or real) to draw the viewer's eye to where the designer wants them to look first. There aren't clear, strong examples of this in The Jungle Book's poster, but the contours of the animals in the foreground - the big cat, the wolf, the monkeys, and even the snake, all seem to point towards Mowgli in the middle. This isn't a coincidence; he's the main character. This is part of how we know he's intended to be interpreted as the main character.

Font: There's a slightly cursive, scimitar-like quality to the key parts of the lettering that is reminiscent of colonial India. The pock-marked texturing of the letters also correlates with the texture of the ruins in the image, suggesting the worn and aged surface of stone structures deep within the jungle. 

Gaze: Gaze is often characterised in terms of how the viewer engages with media. In the English classroom this can refer to where a central character is looking in an image - do the eyes make contact with the camera (and therefore the audience)? Do they look off-centre at something else? What do these acts symbolise in relation to the content of the text? In the case of The Jungle Book, we are given no eyes to observe. Instead, Mowgli's gaze is elsewhere. The gaze of the animals is elsewhere. Where do these eyes look? What role is the audience being cast into by this act? These things coincide to place emphasis on the setting and it's three-dimensional quality. It's an invitation to adventure.

Generic Conventions: Allowing the viewer to identify genre is a big part of a film's effort to promote itself. In this case, The Jungle Book suggests the genres of adventure and fantasy through its inclusion of animals, architecture suggestive of ancient civilisation, the boy's heroic and curious stance, and the previously-mentioned evocations of the font and the gaze of the characters. The image also showcases the computer-generated scenery and animal-characters that feature in the film - elements made possible by 21st century technology. This is a wave of technological innovation that has played into Disney's relatively recent effects-driven wave of adapting their classic animated oeuvre into live action, a trend that could be seen as a 2010s-2020s sub-genre unto itself (see their effects-heavy live action remakes of: Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Mulan, Dumbo).

Promotional Choices: The choice to only portray these characters from behind could also be interpreted as a deliberate 'holding back' of detail. Disney knows that these are popular characters and that a big drawcard for modern audiences will be seeing what Shere Khan, Baloo, Bagheera, King Louie, etc., all look like in this expensive, modern adaptation. The property itself - a story produced by Disney from a well-known book and a well-known animated film - means that there is little need to rely on A-list actors to attract viewers. Hence, we don't see any actors in the poster, and the names are relatively small. There is also no need for a tagline - it's The Jungle Book, most people already know approximately what it is, so Disney knows that their best approach is to instead focus on their recreation of this beloved story and the way that modern cutting-edge special effects are being used to bring it to life.

Questions for Students

Students will need to think about some of the bigger questions tied to the purpose of a film poster.

1. What message is this poster trying to convey about the film?
2. How does this poster want the audience to think about the film?
3. What are the filmmakers relying on to to help 'sell' the film?

In order to get them there, you could ask a range of questions related to the above visual literacy elements. Think about:

1. How has colour been used to attract the viewer's attention?
2. How has colour been used to represent the film's themes?
3. Comment on the body language and gaze of the characters, and how the viewer interacts with these.
4. What is the salient part of the image?
5. Draw the vectors and indicate where they lead the eye, and why.
   
6. Describe the mise en scene and angle/size of the shot.
7. What genre is being suggested and how?
8. Explain why the film does not have a tagline.

And then, after all of the above has been completed, ask students to consider whether they think the poster worked in getting their attention and why this was the case. If they did not like the poster, they will need to justify how they would redesign it.

Paperman and Assessment FOR Learning

One of my favourite things about the new Australian curriculum is the clarification of assessment into the categories 'as', 'of', and 'for'. It takes the summative/formative dichotomy that extra step further and puts the emphasis back onto the process of learning rather than just the end point.

I know, right, I'm an exciting guy. 

For each of my classes I try to build in some informal diagnostic assessment (assessment for learning) that lets me know where each of my students are at. There are a few reasons for doing this:

1. Know Your Students. It helps me get to know my students - if I can't see how they respond to certain kinds of activities then I won't be of much help to them as the topic progresses.    
2. Structured Teaching. As an individual, I respond well to structure, so having a process that puts students through a standardised task appeals to me.
3. Teaching and Learning Cycle. Pre-test, diagnostic task, or assessment for learning - whatever you want to call it - this stage of the Teaching and Learning Cycle allows me to collect data that can be used as a starting point for each term. It also informs my reporting; writing reports is always easier when I have a bunch of figures in front of me that I can line up against my personal impression of each student. The more figures I have, the closer I'll get to accurately representing their true ability.
4. Differentiation. The push at most schools right now is for differentiated curriculum, something that has grown as a response to the mixed ability classroom and as a way to support teachers in catering for the widest possible array of learners. A great way to establish loose streams of 'Adjusted', 'Core' and 'Extension' students within the classroom is to use a diagnostic test at the start of a unit. 
5. Student Response. Presenting work as an informal assessment seems to make the kids sit up a little straighter in class. What I mean is, students take this work a little more seriously than most student-centered work I put down in front of them. In addition, I always try to make it clear why they're doing each informal assessment by linking it to skills that they will need for upcoming formal assessment tasks.

An effective assessment for learning should connect to what I'm looking to assess towards the end of the same unit. What I plan to assess should inform every part of the unit (backwards mapping yo!), so this is always my starting point. In this case the plan is to have students write an exposition piece in which they persuade their audience. The argument they have to make is: why Tim Winton's Blueback should win the 'Novel of the Year' award.

I actually jumped into this blog post with a specific activity and resource in mind, so now that I've gotten all the context out of the way I can do what I came here to do: talk about Paperman.

Paperman is a fantastic and dialogue-free award-winning animated film by Disney. I use it as a diagnostic text that can help me quickly check on the students' analytical and persuasive writing skills before we do Blueback for the rest of the term.

First, we watch the film. As there's no dialogue and it only goes for five minutes, I think you'll be hard-pressed to find many kids who can't get into it. While watching, the students can start collecting some ideas about their impressions of the film by filling in this sheet: Thinking About Paperman. Have them watch the film at least twice and model at least one idea on the board so they can see the sort of things they can write. You can even got a step further and have the whole class contribute opinions and make a big class example on the board so students can fill their sheets up nice and full.

The next step is, in the next lesson, have your students sit the diagnostic test. This should roughly take half a lesson. Give your students as long as they want though, if a Year 7 student has it in them to spend the whole lesson writing their responses up, then give them that time. This is their chance to show what they're capable of. I even let some students take the sheet home and complete it there if they're that way inclined - I know I can't always focus in a noisy room of about 30 people, so if a student wants to do well by completing the task in a quieter environment then who am I to stand in their way?

Here's the diagnostic test: "Here I am!" It breaks down as follows.

Section 1 is a series of True or False questions that test general comprehension. It's important to allow a section that doesn't require much in the way of writing because if we want to assess comprehension then we shouldn't let a student's inability to write get in the way of that. Writing and comprehending are two completely separate skills. Sometimes we have to make sure that we're assessing one thing at a time. Plus it never hurts to let students succeed in English without having to be great writers, especially at a Year 7 level when we want to encourage engagement with English as much as possible and set them up for a long-term journey.

Section 2 tests vocabulary through the use of a 'best fit' cloze passage. The word bank includes more than one correct answer for each missing word, however, students are asked to pick the best word to complete each statement. This lets the teacher see how far the students' vocabulary extends.

Section 3 is where the actual mechanics of writing are looked at. This means articulating ideas, showing an ability to elaborate on ideas, structuring writing into paragraphs, writing for an audience, and showing an ability to evaluate. Very few students will be able to achieve full marks in this section, and the criteria has been intentionally 'amped' up so that we can avoid the students 'topping out'*. It needs to be difficult because if we're not looking for that tiny percentage of students who can do these really sophisticated and unexpected things, then we're never going to find those students in the first place.

Here's the marking criteria/answers: "Hello there!"

One more thing before I finish up; if you do decide to use this diagnostic assessment and collect some data it's worth keeping in mind that this information is just for you, the teacher, rather than for the students and their parents. I don't hand the papers back with the results because I don't think it's particularly useful for the students. It's not the sort of assessment that students have a chance to study for so it wouldn't be fair to give marks back to them. Plus it could be potentially demoralising to give students access to marks accrued in a test that has been deliberately 'stretched out' to accommodate the largest possible range of student ability. If any students ask for their marks (and very few do, because I don't use the word 'assessment' when I talk to them about this task) then I would simply tell them that the information was just for me and that the marks don't count towards their reports.

*By 'topping out' I mean that I don't want every student meeting the criteria too easily and getting full marks. If this happened then it would mean that I'm not extending my measurements far enough to see where their abilities end. This is another good reason why the students shouldn't be given their marks back: only the most gifted will achieve 'A-range' results.