Verbal features, drafting and conventions
The verbal half of the standard
- The title says verbal and visual features, so a wordless text does not meet the standard. This is half of what is assessed and it routinely gets a tenth of the effort.
- The Level 3 verbal list is dialogue, quotations, hyperlinks and music. The last two exist only in certain forms — another reason the form decision comes first.
- Every word is expensive, because the space is fixed and a viewer reads a panel for seconds. Anything essential that lives only in body text will not be read.
- Dialogue and quotations. An attributed voice carries authority a slogan cannot, and attribution needs a role and a context, not just a name. Never attribute an invented quotation to a real person.
- Hyperlinks are verbal because choosing which word is clickable is a writing decision. A link under the council said the courts drain adequately signals a contestable claim; one under the council signals only that there is a council. A link that reveals a contradiction does the work of a page-turn.
- Music sets register faster than anything else, and over-determines it faster too. The sound-off test: play it muted — what survives is what you made. The decisions are the entrances and exits; silence arriving is louder than music arriving.
Four relationships between word and image
- Redundant — the words name what the image shows, wasting half the text.
- Complementary — the words supply what the image cannot: a fact, a name, a date. The workhorse, because no image can show elapsed time.
- Tension — the words and the image pull against each other, and the viewer resolves the gap themselves, so the meaning is produced by them rather than delivered to them.
- Sequential — new at Level 3, and the developmental one. The relationship itself changes across the text: captions flat and dated for three frames, then a fourth in the same register that flatness no longer neutralises.
- Consistency of style is not consistency of function. Keep the typeface, position and register identical; let what the words are doing change. This is the most direct route to develops in a visual medium, and very few students use it.
Drafting: the plan is the assessable part
- This is an internal, so the drafts are the evidence that the text was constructed rather than found, so keep the thumbnails. A polished frame is a commitment — once four frames are finished, students defend a bad order rather than reshoot.
- Thumbnail the entire text before making any single frame, at postage-stamp size. At that size you cannot see craft, which is the point: what you can see is order, hierarchy and whether anything changes.
- For a navigable text, thumbnail the map — every screen a box, every link an arrow. A path you cannot draw is a path you have not designed. For a moving-image text, thumbnail a shot list with durations.
- Run the first-and-last and reorder tests on the thumbnails, not the artwork.
The rework order
| Order | Stage | The question |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Development | Does the last unit differ in kind from the first? |
| 2 | Sequence | Is this the best order? Try moving the last frame to the front |
| 3 | Hierarchy | Inside each frame, what is seen first — and is it what you intended? |
| 4 | Word and image | Redundant, complementary, in tension, or changing? |
| 5 | Cut | Remove one element from every frame |
| 6 | Conventions | Last, and cold |
- Each stage invalidates the ones below it, so fixing hierarchy before sequence throws that work away. Stage 5 is not optional, because every element was added at full attention and none was weighed against the others — set the cut before you look.
- Cutting cannot supply a change, repair an order, or rescue a redundant caption. Cut elements, not information, and know that over-cutting is real: its symptoms are an unreadable opening unit, a constant element no longer recognisable, and a text that finishes before it lands.
- Conventions are a gate, and the exposure here is extreme: a spelling error at 60 point is the most visible error in the subject. The high-cost ones are homophones in display type, apostrophes in plurals, macron errors in Māori words and place names, and capitalisation that varies between frames sitting side by side.
- Proofread with a method: retype every word into a plain document (the design hides errors by making words look intentional), read backwards for spelling, check every proper noun against a source, and do it cold.
Worked Example
Worked Example
A nearly finished text, described specifically for this page. Apply the rework order.
Answer:
1 — development. Panel 1: the bus is gone. Panel 3: the bus is gone, do something. The second is the first with an instruction attached. The dawn-and-dusk pairing was chosen for symmetry; use it as the change instead — make the road the constant element and shoot the same stretch at 7:10, 7:50 and 8:30, the times a family now leaves, arrives and gets back.
2 — sequence. The order is now fixed by time, and moving panel 3 to the front collapses the set.
3 — hierarchy. Thumbnailed, each panel is a grey band with a black bar on top: the display type is the only thing with contrast. Drop it to 40 point, low in the frame.
4 — word and image.
| Panel | Relationship | Repair |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Redundant and editorial | 7:10. The bus used to be here. |
| 2 | Shouted, and 11-point body text will not be read | 7:50. Forty minutes in, and this is the halfway point. |
| 3 | An instruction the set has not earned | 8:30. She started getting ready at ten past six. |
Panel 3's repair is the important one. One time and one fact in the register of the other two, so the register has stopped being neutral by the third panel — the sequential relationship, replacing a demand with a conclusion the viewer reaches.
5 — cut, decided before looking: the dawn colour grade, seven body lines, three social icons.
6 — conventions, cold. Retyped into plain text, ITS in panel 2 turns out to need an apostrophe. In 70-point capitals it had survived four reviews.