1B narrative

Apply the concept of narrative to one of your productions.

Intro

• Narrative - what is it
• Brief overview of you film opening (name, plot, genre)

Todorov- every film has an equilibrum - disruption ad restration of equilibrum

We challenged Todorov in our film opening 

We disregarded Todorov's theory as it did not fit with our film genre.

Levi Strauss - binary oppositons 

Used to create meaning used to show differences 
- sober/drunk
- Old/ young

conform/subvert

Propp - stock characters
- usually males being in charge 

- we subverted this theory by having a female bad guy 


Barthes
- Enigma coding - creating some mystery the audience is interested and want to watch more
- We used enigma coding.

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Narrative is the way the different elements in a story are organised to make a meaningful story.  In year 12 we created a film opening called 'Untamed' the genre we chose was a teen drama, the plot was about a teenage girl called Aubrey coming home drunk which leads to her and mother having a heated argument and Aubrey running away.

In addition a theorist we subverted from was Propp's theory of stock characters.  A way in which we did this was that the two main characters do not conform to the stereotypes that they are usually conformed to.  For example Aubrey is not a your common teenage girl as she does not act feminine, she wears unflattering clothes and she is one to voice her views and will not be restricted.  Also her mother, Carol, takes on the authoritative role, she is seen as unkind and stern rather than the cliché comforting mother.  It was important to oppose theses stereotypes as in our film opening we really wanted Aubrey and Carol to be viewed as two really strong female characters to appeal to our audience.  

We challenged Todorov's theory in Untamed as we did not conform to having an equilibrium in our film opening.  We subverted from this theory as our film opening did not include an equilibrium, we did not want to include this at it did not fit the genre of our film which was family conflict.  However a theorist that we did incorporate was Levis Strauss, his theory was binary opposites, this means that all narratives have to be driven forward by a conflict that was caused by a series of opposing forces.  For example in Untamed the two main character for instance Aubrey was drunk and young whereas her mother, Carol, was sober and old.  This was imperative as we felt we need to show the audience the conflict of characters who are binary opposites.

Another theorist that we did include was Barthes theory, his idea was that in a narrative story there is enigma coding which basically means there is a mystery created in the storyline, this keeps the audience interested and wanting to watch more.  We conformed to this in our film opening, 'Untamed', in the last scene Aubrey runs away from home, it is left on a cliff-hanger the audience does not know what will happen next.  

In conclusion we found that the most useful theorist was Levi Strauss and  the least useful was Todorov.  We subverted and conformed to some of theorists to which we thought would fit our film opening narrative best.