- Apply theorists of narrative to one of your coursework productions.
For my foundation portfolio in my first year we had to create a film opening. We decided to choose the genre horror as we had a clear understanding of different narratives we could use. The narrative behind our horror film opening was a reoccurring nightmare.
In order to make our film opening interesting & to make our audience want to watch the rest of the film we decided to follow Todorovs Theory as within the opening we showed an equilibrium, a disruption of the equilibrium, followed by the recognition of the disruption which is the first 3 stages of Todorovs narrative structure. if we was to make the whole film we could continue with the structure by showing an attempt to repair the disruption and then finally a new equilibrium. In order to show the disruption of the equilibrium we used a number of fast straight cuts to show in between the main character sleeping to indicate the disruption. It was made clear to the audience which shots were part of the nightmare and which were of the main character sleeping as we used different lighting, different location and in the dream we had the 2 characters wearing old fashioned clothing to indicate that it was a different time period.
In order to construct the narrative that we wanted there were certain conventions that we had to follow, challenge & develop. We decided to follow majority of the horror conventions as we needed to make the narrative believable, these conventions were:
- dark lighting
- location with no surroundings
- fast cuts
- fade to blacks
- scary music/sound effects
- tense atmosphere
We also also challenged the stereotype of children within the narrative of our film opening as we portrayed them to be evil rather than their stereotype of sweet and innocent, this made the narrative of our film opening to be different from other existing horror openings and gave the audience something they wouldn't expect in a horror shoreline. Following this we developed the idea of the fear of the unknown throughout the narrative of our opening as normally the fear of the unknown would be shown by only reveling the evil character at the end of the film, however we developed this in our own way as we did show the audience the evil characters but within the whole of our opening there was very little information given about the nightmare (involving the evil characters) the main character was having, therefore it create fear within the narrative.
Throughout the whole of the opening we had to make sure that the narrative was interesting for the audience. We also wanted them to have questions about the opening, this is another reason why we provided little information within the opening as we needed to create unanswered questions within the narrative so they would have to watch the rest of the film in order to find out the answers, for example 'what's going to happen next', this is known as an enigma code. This links to Barthes theory as his two narrative codes drive the narrative forward to keep the viewers watching and engaged.
- The Hermeneutic Code- A plot of elements that raise questions that we want answered.
- The Proairetic Code- Actions in the plot which lead to other actions.
Without our opening we also followed the narrative theory of Propp, he came up with character types when analysing a series of Russian fairy tales. For example in different narratives you have have, the hero, villain, princess ect. We followed this by having the 2 villain characters within the nightmare and we portrayed them to be evil.
overall the narrative of our film opening is shown through the help of the theorist Todorov, Barthes & Propps.
