Framing

No, not an instruction on how to frame your art work. But a technique used in communications and also in storytelling.

But I will use the art work frame to explain framing.

Framing is telling a part of the story or certain details of a story to get your opinion told. Like holding a 10 x 10 frame in front of The Nightwatch. You will only see a part of the picture, just a face, shoes, the little dog, but not the entire picture.

All stories are of course framed. Because you can't tell everything that is happening to everybody through the entire story. So when we leave Tom Bombadil behind in The Fellowship of the Ring, we don't know what is happening to him after that. He falls out of the frame and doesn't matter to the story anymore.

Framing in other media like news can be very misleading.
I'm going to use the next image as an example.

The middle image in colour is the entire picture, a man in war time, getting some water.

The cut out on the left side is an entire different picture. A man being held under fire.

And the cut out on the right side another completely different image. A soldier giving a poor man something to drink.

One picture, but with the frame you put over it, three completely different stories.