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Page Breaks And Gaps Essay

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Page Breaks and Gaps
On pages eighteen to nineteen there is a page break wherein Teddy is suddenly stitched back together again. This surely raises many questions for the viewer in regards to who stitched Teddy back together again and why, creating speculation and allowing viewers to determine their own version of what happened in the page break (Sipe, 2011). This all leads to an open-ended speculation of the final few pages, wherein we see Happy carrying buckets of lucky items and Teddy stitched back together again. Will Happy still be lucky? Was he lucky for that time because of the buckets of clovers and coins? The viewer can be the judge of that. Meanwhile, page five introduces an example of where images fill the gaps in the verbal …show more content…

This then creates “irony and/or ambiguity” (Bang, 2001, pg. 25) due to the different natures when comparing the verbal text and images. Also present is counterpoint in space and time, used in the verbal text to show the passage of time throughout the picturebook – ‘But then one day’ (page 5), ‘A few days after’ (page 12), and ‘So now’ (page 19). I would have liked to included in these pages “pictures [which] can explore and play with [spatial dimensions] in limitless ways” (Bang, pg. 26) but was unsure how to achieve this within the images.

Image/Text Relations and Characterisation
My picturebook’s main type of image-text relations is symmetrical in which the words and images provide the same story to the viewer – “there are few details that have no correspondence in the verbal text, but all details are essential” (Nikolajeva & Scott, 2001, pg. 13). This means that dual coding is present throughout, an image/text relation I attempted to stay away from but found difficult to have the image not represent the words being read and vice versa. The reason I did not want to utilise dual coding is because it renders the image or text redundant – the story is already told through either one so the other serves no purpose. If I had more time I would’ve changed this into another image/text relation such as complementary so that the verbal text and images would fill in any gaps left over and would create a much more interesting or exciting

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