Mar 18 • General discussion
Pressure Psychology
We don't just invent visual language. We discover it.
When composing a series of shots, whether in a storyboard, a sequential comic, or a feature film, the spatial relationship between shapes has a profound psychological effect on your audience.
By mastering what we call "Pressure Psychology" (or the 6 Visual Pressures), you can make the viewer feel exactly what the character is feeling, regardless of whether you are working in gritty realism or high-fantasy animation.
You see it on screen all the time:
In the classic film Five Easy Pieces, Jack Nicholson’s character sits defeated in the foreground while the woman he wanted to marry walks away down a path, shrinking into the background. That staging is pure Detached Isolation.
Watch the shark and submarine sequence in Pixar's Finding Nemo. You will see masterclasses in Intimidation, Doom, and Narrow Escape play out in real-time just through the sizing and placement of shapes.
But these pressures aren't merely clever tricks invented by modern designers. They are direct representations of the physical world. That is what makes them so powerful.
Security is the little bird sitting on the back of a rhinoceros. That bird can chirp and taunt all it wants; if you want to get to it, you have to go through the rhino. It is the exact same psychology as building a castle on a high hill to force the enemy to fight an exhausting uphill battle while you watch them approach.
This visual language is hardwired into human history: Look at the ancient cave paintings in France, and you will find pictographs of hunters being trampled by beasts that perfectly match the Doom composition. Walk into the Minneapolis Institute of Art, look at the 2nd-century Greek floor mosaic of a tiger hunt, and you will see that exact same Doom composition again.
Why? Because that is what doom actually looks like from an observer's point of view.
The visual language of our Grand Tradition wasn't invented in a studio. Much like the laws of logic or mathematics, it was always there, waiting to be realized. We didn't invent the Grand Tradition; we revealed it.
And when we deploy these undeniable truths in our work, our stories stop just being seen, they start ringing true.
(See the attached image for a breakdown of the 6 Visual Pressures: Intimidation, Doom, Narrow Escape, Security, Detached Isolation, and Hot Pursuit).
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Pressure Psychology
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