I’ve been enjoying watching Spider-Noir with Ley.

I was adamant that we should watch in black and white. Ley was willing to follow my lead. After finishing the first episode we spoke again about whether the show would look as good in color, and they said “No, it’s art.”

It’s not hard to find people who agree with this position online. I happen to think it’s the right one. I’d heard that the show was filmed with black and white in mind, and that seems obvious to me on watching it.

I wanted to be sure, though. I went through different scenes, rewatching them in color. I admit, the color version looks good too! Working in black and white obviously has a cost; I kind of like knowing that Robbie is wearing warm and punchy reddish hues in episode one, and I wouldn’t have known that without going back to check the color version.

But the black and white version sings. Yes, the color version looks good, but it’s a different kind of good—and I’d argue that the color version isn’t the right kind of good for this show. The team that made Spider-Noir knew what they were doing when they shot for black and white. 

That raises some questions though. Clearly, reality isn’t black and white. The filmmakers aren’t working with purely black and white source material. How then are they getting such incredible results?

Like Ley said, it’s art. It’s art, and a lesson in the importance of knowing one’s craft and intended genre. How can we apply that lesson beyond film?

First, let’s explore a few examples. What are some strengths of black and white that Spider-Noir uses best?

For me, I found Spider-Noir’s black and white version helped most in several areas:

The opening shot of Ben Reilly in episode one (after his voiceover introduction) is an excellent example of all of this. In black and white my attention is immediately drawn to his silhouette, the central figure of the shot. Other characters are easily visible, but Reilly is the only one with that crisp bright outline across his shoulders and head. In a prelude to the scene’s next beat, the woman next to him is the next-brightest, next-most-distinct figure… but she only has a little more light on her than the other background characters. As the shot reverses to a view of him from the front and he exhales a plume of cigarette smoke, he remains the brightest piece of the shot—I watch his shadowed features emerge from the cloud of smoke, his eyes lit with needles of light before his face is fully visible.

In the color version of this same shot, the composition still works; Reilly is the central figure, and the lens keeps him in focus while the background blurs slightly. But the lighting feels less powerful, as other characters in the same plane as Reilly now seem brighter, more able to grab my attention. There’s less to suggest that the woman beside him might deserve our attention, rather than the man sitting to his right. Worse, in the reverse shot, Reilly’s face no longer leaps as quickly from the background—his face’s brighter value is disguised somewhat by the background’s more comparable hue. His eyes are still powerful, but they no longer have the same advantage in a shot that feels brighter overall. Worse, by giving the shadows color, the shadows have lost some of their ability to fade into the background.

These patterns continue. The color version looks good, but the black and white version is better. The filmmakers skillfully use black and white to quickly pull our eye and evoke mood, also weaving in dutch angles for a few unsettling scenes. The slow pursuit sequence later in the episode demonstrates this masterfully with the white suit, silhouettes, shadows, and steam, and with the gorgeous overhead view of the alleyway slicing from one corner of the screen to the other in bold light and shadow. The color version does all the same things, but loses the crispness and clarity.

I’m not saying that all film should be black and white. Roger Ebert’s pan of Battlefield Earth and its overuse of dutch angles feels like an appropriate warning here. “The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why.”

The makers of Spider-Noir learned why.

How can we apply these lessons to storytelling and story games?

Storytellers, both those writing non-interactive fiction and those running interactive games, should remember that they have control over what information is shared and how it is shared. Storytellers can learn why and how to share that information. We can learn what effects those different approaches create.

Most storytellers and most games default to a straightforward approach: a linear path following a single perspective (or perhaps a perspective for each player character). This approach, going from A to B to C to D without any jumps or cuts or faffing about, is an arbitrary limitation. It might work well for some genres—like a simulationist game of dungeon-delving survival-horror—but it isn’t necessarily the best approach for every genre. We can use other approaches to create a specific feel or tone.

I wrote about how games create genre expectations ages ago. I’ve also elaborated on how optional rules systems influence genre expectations. Now, let’s take this a step further.

Despite the deep interaction between game rules and storytelling approaches, and the huge variation between games’ mechanics and genres, only a few of the dozens of games I’ve learned and played encourage storytellers to branch out and diversify their approaches to how, when, and why they share information with the players. Dogs in the Vineyard (DitV) and Blades in the Dark (BitD) are two of the clearest examples of this, in my experience, with Apocalypse World (AW) and subsequent Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) games taking honorable mentions. These games deliberately encourage the storyteller to change what makes it into the play experience and to share information with the players from outside the PCs’ perspectives. At times these games encourage using the storyteller’s ability to frame and divulge information like an omniscient narrator’s camera perspective in a TV show, or thriller, or horror movie.

BitD uses an approach built on the cinematic traditions of heist and crime movies and TV shows. BitD encourages storytellers to leap directly to the next exciting scene with no time wasted on anything boring in between—think of it as “from A to D,” with permission to hop back and cover B or C at a later time if some kind of flashback would be exciting or relevant. In practice, this means that when players say “let’s get some leads for our next job” the storyteller skips past “how do you find your contacts?” and any other steps straight to “you’re there, under the bridge as rain hammers down, and your contact stalks towards you out of the gloom. She’s grumbling to herself.”

This approach follows cinematic convention to save time and keep the story moving. If your players are already comfortable with the narrative structure of a heist movie like Ocean’s Eleven (the one with George Clooney), they’ll pick this up quickly. This approach fosters a more consistent feeling of excitement, as you ignore the slow process of tracking every intermediate step when you know the players’ next destination. It also requires that the players trust the storyteller won’t screw them over by skipping some important preparatory step, or trust that the storyteller will allow them to respond to any surprise with a flashback to the player characters solving that surprise ahead of time. BitD has rules for precisely those interactions.

Even if you are playing something other than BitD, or writing non-interactive fiction, you can still use this approach to speed up your story. While you might not jump ahead as radically as BitD encourages you to, with this technique in mind you can ignore a lot of unnecessary intervening scenes. This requires you to think ahead about what you and your players will find most exciting, and to accept and act on feedback when you edit out scenes that your players actually wanted. Flashbacks are trickier—using them well, and avoiding the unsatisfying feeling of deus ex machina, deserves a whole post of its own.

DitV takes things a step further by encouraging the storyteller to share information the player characters have no way of knowing. The text’s example has the narrator’s perspective revealing an ambush awaiting our heroes just before the trap springs shut. This works well for systems like DitV in which players assume limited narrative control without dictating outcomes during contests and conflicts. It also works well in non-interactive fiction with a narrator that isn’t directly tied to a specific character.

Using this approach in games other than DitV requires players who are happy to make distinctions between player and character knowledge. Alternatively, it requires very cooperative players who want to share some narrative responsibilities without putting their thumbs on the scales. You can also use this technique during teaser or stinger sections of your game; these are usually at the beginning or end of a session, or just before you take a play break. These teasers and stingers can establish the stakes of the next scene immediately before calling for PCs to interact with the fiction. These scenes can also be about characters other than the PCs, letting you establish a lethal threat without killing the characters your players care about most.

These are hardly the only techniques you can use. I encourage you to watch some of your favorite TV shows or movies and pay attention to where the camera is, who and what is on screen, what you can see, when you can see it, and why you can see it. Do the same thing with some of your favorite books or comics. Then, ask yourself how you’d do something like that as the storyteller, what effect that might have, and when you’d want to use it. Finally, experiment!

Don’t be Roger Christian directing Battlefield Earth. Learn why you tilt the camera.