A Research On The Visual Expression Of City Promotional Film

30years of reform and opening-up, China’s urbanization process hasachieved remarkable achievement. Under the strong support of the economicconstruction, cities such as Shanghai and New York, London and Beijing,in a sense tend to be more similar. Domestic cities, due to the similarcultural background, contradictions to be amplified,a similar problem ismore serious. National12th five-year plan gave a high attention to thecity development from the national strategic level strategic development.In this background, asthe carriers of city’s culture,history, spiritand natural, city image got a kind of rapid development. Usually, we calledthe film as City promotional film which displayingthe "city image".Regardless of the performance methods, its main demands are let theaudience form the impression of the city’s image. The impression comesfrom the city image’s visual expression system which tells stories by theuse of visual image and their combination. Abstract concepts such as thecity spirit, is materialized as some symbols. It makes City promotionalfilm became the ideal model of semiology research.First of all, this paper studies the city image’s visual expressionsystem’s symbols essence and function characteristics. The visual objectsof city image reflect the nature of symbols because of itsform, structureand contents. The city image’s visual expression system was built bydifferent levels of visual image. It not only has good simulation,informative, fulldisplay details, freedom combination of space and time,but also has their own characteristics in visual cognition, content andsymbol structure.Secondly, this article will research how to form thevisual expressionsystemfrom the perspective of symbolic coding. By combining examples, wewill not only summarize the category and the basic form of the visualsymbols, but also studyhow to produce the symbols andhow do they fittogether.Thirdly, after the coding phase, the filmwill into the circulationand meets with the audience.At the same time, viewing process occurs andthe audiences start tovisual decode. Through the process of decoding, thesignificance of visual expression system is formed.Finally, on the basis of system analysis, we concludedsome issuesintheselection of visual symbol, modeling and audience divided. We alsoprovide some solutions.