Visual Language

A Common Visual Language for Media Creation

Workflows are complex with many details that need to be shown or hidden based on the audience. Humans are visual creatures and diagrams can be a very efficient way to communicate complex information, so diagrams are an important way to communicate about workflows. But, as with spoken or written languages, the use of a common language made up of quickly understood words greatly improves communication.

Workflow diagrams try to explain to the viewer the elements of a workflow and how the Tasks, Participants and Assets are related to each other. However, until now no standards have been created to explain how best to draw a content creation workflow diagram, so we have all suffered with vastly different diagrams drawn over the years forcing the audience to ask questions of the presenter – what are you trying to show here? How are these elements related? What do the lines mean?​

​The MovieLabs Visual Language for Media Creation was designed to provide a common communication system so that we can all draw diagrams consistently in a language which can be understood by all. The Visual Language project has been borne out of our own MovieLabs projects as we communicated (or miscommunicated) with our studio members and is now being embraced by service vendors, software developers and tools companies.

The Visual Language defines standard shapes to represent components of a workflow:

Additional Resources