Just as a script writer is concerned with story structure or a musician with musical structure, a picture maker must be concerned with visual structure. Every picture or series of pictures can be broken down into a group of basic visual components. It is through the control of these components that a picture maker communicates moods, emotions and gives visual structure and unity to the finished production. This class teaches the student how to understand and use the basic visual components in the planning and production of any type of visual project from storyboarding, scene planning, directing, cinematography, or production design. Lectures relate visual structure to story structure and show how the two work together.

The five-week course defines each visual component, demonstrates how to use it and how it communicates to an audience, applies the visual component to a text or script and shows how to control it on a screen. The class uses hundreds of examples taken from feature films.