Visual Gestalt
My training was in film at USC Cinema, back in the days when the department was housed in a converted Army barracks and some wag had scrawled the now-iconic inscription above the doorway: "Reality ends here."
That film school training provided a common thread, a mode of action, a pattern through different careers. The gestalt sum might be "visual communications":
- Screenwriting is about crafting the visual narrative - "a story told in pictures."
- Engineering is a field of visual communication - designs and ideas are communicated with diagrams;
- Ideologically, USC Cinema emphasized synthesis and visual gestalt: Eisensteinian montage as a narrative device.
And my early life in Westport when it was an artists and writers community, reinforced both the visual and verbal.
