Exploration of Visual Emotional Expression in the Context of Digital Media
2025-05-02
Visual communication has been comprehensively studied as a specialized field of art since the beginning of this century. Its main function is to convey information through visual expression, and the content, methods, and effects of communication are all within its research scope. Emotional communication is quite common in human society, and visual emotional expression is one of the important ways of emotional communication. In the market, vendors use red signs to attract customers, and in subway stations, dynamic screens play public service advertisements. These daily scenes reflect the importance of visual communication. Emotional expression in visual communication can help people understand and empathize with the emotional states of others. Digital media technology extends this communication by upgrading simple visual stimuli into deeper emotional experiences through dynamic colors, virtual scenes, and other means. In terms of visual expression, the expression of visual emotions can be divided into two forms: static and dynamic. Static images generate narrative through visual style, layout, color expression, and action behavior, allowing the audience to resonate emotionally in the imaginative space of causes and consequences. Digital media technology, through digital scenes, digital packaging, editing, and interaction, expresses the narrative nature of static images in an immersive way according to the creator's creative ideas and aesthetic emotions, greatly enhancing the infectiousness of the images. In the field of digital media, technology endows visual communication with richer forms of creation and expression. The development of technology also allows creators' imagination to be more intuitively displayed, and emotions to be more directly expressed. In general, static images are like frozen photos, requiring the audience to imagine the story before and after on their own; Dynamic visuals are like a continuously playing movie, taking the audience through emotional ups and downs. Visual emotional expression elements include many constituent factors, such as color tone, light and shadow effects, dynamic expressions, spatial structure, material texture, environmental atmosphere, and other organic combinations. For example, warm tones make people feel warm, while cool tones create a sense of mystery. These basic principles still apply in the digital age, but there are more ways to express them. Digital language adds factors such as virtuality, rendering, and motion on this basis, enhancing visual emotional expression. In the CG cutscenes of the 3D action game "Elden Ring", the Corrupt Lake scene uses viscous amber liquid and slowly spreading crimson mist, combined with the delayed water spray effect when the characters move, to concretize the "sense of despair" into an interactive visual experience. Players not only see terrifying scenes, but also feel the sense of powerlessness caused by delayed operations. This new experience is difficult to achieve through traditional media. Many visual scenes rely on digital art to enhance visual emotional expression, among which the more commonly used methods are environmental enhancement and technological enhancement. The improvement of emotional expression in digital environment art is essentially the transformation of abstract emotions into perceptible physical experiences through technological means. This transformation is not simply visual beautification, but the construction of a sophisticated emotional triggering system using digital technology, making the audience's eyes the "sensors" that receive emotional signals, and the brain automatically decodes them into strong emotional resonance. Taking the "Yellow Beam Dream" scene design of Handan Fantawild National Color Spring and Autumn Theme Park as an example, the technical team used three-layer spatial overlay technology to create emotional layers: the farthest layer is the real traditional wooden background, the middle layer is the holographic image projected by the holographic screen, and the front layer is the unreal landscape painting projection and physical props combined with light and shadow. When the plot develops to a specific time period, physical props and illusory scenes appear immediately with the help of light and projection technology, and digital special effects are used to visualize the atmosphere factors such as smoke, light, and air in nothingness to enhance visual appeal. Actors interact with them, and the direction of motion of virtual images and particles changes accordingly, as if a dream has been illuminated into reality, and the audience also generates strong visual stimulation for it. The mechanism of "virtual real interaction triggering virtual feedback" has turned the concept of "dream life" into a tangible emotional object visible to the naked eye - the audience can clearly see how behavior affects the virtual world, which strongly counteracts the sense of powerlessness caused by the final shattered dream, making the emotional impact intensity completely surpass traditional layouts. Taking the scene design of "Flying Song" in Zhengzhou Fantawild Happy World as an example, the circular theater combined with digital dome ball design gives the audience a strong shock. When the lights are dim, tens of thousands of digital balls dance in the air like magic. They sometimes gather into birds, sometimes scatter into stars, and circulate above the audience's heads in sync with the rhythm of music. The various arrangements and combinations of shapes "oppress" the visual experience of the audience in the field, and this strong stimulation instantly strengthens the emotions of the audience. The "Leap to the Limits" project utilizes modern digital wrapped domes and ground screens, along with movable seats, to completely immerse the audience in the virtual world and release their emotions. In these environments, digital technology is supporting this emotional transformation. The breakthrough of digital environmental art lies in its use of technology to deconstruct the process of emotional transmission. Traditional art relies on the audience's imagination to complete emotional logic, while digital technology designs each emotional trigger point as a visualized technological chain. When the audience delves into the digital environment, they can feel the illusion of dreams. This ability to deconstruct emotions into observable technological phenomena is the core of digital environment art to enhance emotional expression. Digital technology empowers artistic expression and strengthens visual emotional expression. Digital technology is helping us convey difficult to express emotions in a more delicate and creative way, making abstract emotions accessible. Taking video editing as an example, it has already broken through the basic function of linear splicing of images and evolved into an artistic language that can accurately schedule audience emotions. When creators want to create a nostalgic atmosphere, they can use the time remapping function in digital editing software to slow down the camera and use a yellowed filter to blend slowly like soaked rice paper, like opening a childhood album, creating a nostalgic texture for old photos; When depicting tense and suspenseful scenes, high-frequency image cutting combined with dynamic special effects is used to shake and blur the image, causing the audience to experience a physiological reaction of accelerated heartbeat. Today's transition technology is even more imaginative, using particle dissipation effects to depict the scattered memories, and using digital simulated crack transitions to allow the audience to intuitively feel the shattered moments inside the character. These transition details, which are full of digital technology, are actually quietly reconstructing people's emotional experiences through digital visual language. In terms of color control, digital technology gives artists precise control over adjusting emotions through color changes. Through emotional color analysis, creators can capture the emotional tendencies of colors in real-time, accurately and meticulously adjusting hue and brightness to influence emotions. Digital packaging technology is like a visible garment woven for abstract emotions, capable of transforming intangible inner fluctuations into concrete visual symbols. For example, anxiety emotions are designed as constantly growing sharp geometric shapes, forming a digital maze with a sense of oppression with the assistance of 3D modeling software, while the light of hope is designed as particles and concretized as glowing seedlings that break through the soil, allowing them to grow into a dazzling display of hope. The immersive lotus device built in the digital exhibition hall of the Xiangtangshan Grottoes is also a typical example of digital visual expression. They use the digital projection system of parametric design, so that the audience will trigger the blooming and falling of virtual lotus every step. It means "lotus grows step by step", which is consistent with the meaning of Buddhist lotus. This technology that transforms the biological growth process into digital art language presentation, combined with human sensory interaction, enables the audience to touch the beauty of illusion in real space. These technological breakthroughs are essentially building new bridges for emotional transmission. They can not only transform anxious heartbeats into data ripples on the screen, but also resonate with contemporary audiences through digital landscapes that evoke the emotions of literati from thousands of years ago. Just as film technology once brought still images to life, the development of contemporary digital art is creating new dimensions of emotional expression. It not only amplifies the sensitivity of human perception of emotions, but more importantly, enables hidden and inner emotional experiences to be shared and expressed across space through digital media. Technology is no longer a cold tool here, but an organic carrier for extending human emotions. The form of digital media expression is a continuation of the emotional expression of traditional art. Digital art continues the core logic of traditional art's "freehand expression with form" in the use of color and brushstrokes. Traditional Chinese painting emphasizes the "separation of ink into five colors" and conveys emotional levels through the contrast of ink and wash. Digital creators have transformed this concept into dynamic visual language, such as in the animated film "Deep Sea", where particle ink technology is used to simulate the trajectory of traditional pigment flow: when a character falls into despair, the surging ink in the picture engulfs the character like a wave, and the collision of ink blocks produces a flying white effect. This technological breakthrough does not sever tradition, but instead allows viewers to feel a stronger emotional tension from the flowing electronic color blocks than rice paper ink wash. Its core is not a simple imitation of physical materials, but the transformation of the philosophical implications of ink and brush into an interactive data language through algorithmic logic. Taking Chinese ink painting as an example, digital tools simulate the randomness of ink color blending through dynamic particle systems, retaining the aesthetic hierarchy of "ink is divided into five colors" and giving creators the freedom to adjust the water content of the pen tip in real time. When virtual strokes touch digital rice paper, the algorithm will trigger effects such as "ink accumulation" and "ink breaking" based on pressure data, and even restore the spatiotemporal traces of ink color in traditional painting through machine learning. This kind of numerical addition does not break away from tradition. Instead, in the conversion between pixels and strokes, it enables the dialogue between withered and swirling strokes at the algorithmic level, jointly interpreting the artistic essence of "strokes are the heart's trace". Digital art breaks the limitations of traditional art narrative and inherits the emotional triggering mechanism of "using scenery to generate emotions". Traditional scroll paintings guide viewers' emotions by moving and changing scenery, while digital art enhances this sense of immersion through three-dimensional space and interactive design. In the Flame Mountain scene of the game "Black Myth: Wukong", players manipulate their characters to move forward, and the scorching texture of the background rock wall changes from dark red to bright white as the painting's face temperature rises. At the same time, the sound of the guqin in the music is gradually replaced by the dense sound effects of the pipa's fingers. Digital storytelling integrates auditory and tactile senses into an immersive emotional container. This kind of inheritance is not simply a form of imitation, but a creative transformation that delves into aesthetic genes. Digital technology is using new syntax to continue writing ancient emotional codes. In a word, digital media technology provides more methods and technologies for the expression of visual emotion in terms of creative methods and forms of expression, which makes people have a stronger emotional resonance. This resonance is easier to be mobilized through the visual sense with the blessing of technology, which not only inherits all the key factors in traditional artistic expression to mobilize visual emotion, but also breaks the traditional boundaries and strengthens both narrative and performance. Special effects packaging, color storytelling, interactive experience, and virtual reality are all strongly mobilizing people's visual emotions. This is not only a tribute and inheritance of traditional visual emotional expression in the context of digital media, but also a need to pay attention to in future visual language
Edit:Lily Responsible editor:Rina
Source:cflac.org.cn
Special statement: if the pictures and texts reproduced or quoted on this site infringe your legitimate rights and interests, please contact this site, and this site will correct and delete them in time. For copyright issues and website cooperation, please contact through outlook new era email:lwxsd@liaowanghn.com