Week six's lessons focused on using visual literacy. At first, I thought that I would most definitely be visually illiterate, but it turns out I wasn't because visual literacy is basically the assumption that an image can be "read." It's understanding that you can learn or take something away from seeing a picture.
What really stayed with me after this lesson though is the Dove video. It showed how one company took a plain looking woman, gave her great hair and make up, took her picture and then used a program like Photoshop to make her look like a super model. they elongated her neck, arched her eyebrows higher, and gave her fuller lips. The end result didn't hardly resemble the woman whose picture was taken. The Dove video and the Extreme(Photoshop) Makeover video made me realize that we may be reading images wrong,or at least differently from how their original images would be read.
Learning how to use Photoshop is applicable to the advertising branch of my field of study. Knowing how to make a picture look better and understanding that people viewing an ad are actually "reading" it has made me more conscience of the work I produce. Using visual literacy effectively can improve advertisements and storyboards by leaps and bounds.
The following short film is an example of visual literacy which really made visual literacy clear to me. In the picture we can see that the animals are all going towards something, and it seem that the "something" is good because the expressions on the anaimals' faces look excited. The viewer can gather all of this without any writing. That, my friends, is visual literacy. Turns out we aren't visual illiterates after all.
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