Q1.b. Narrative

Discuss how you used narrative in one of your coursework productions to create meaning for the audience (25 marks)

At AS, I created a short film opening which included a film opening and a film poster. My film opening came under the teen drama genre as this was suitable for the themes and narrative within my short film. We found this out by researching film opening that we categorised under the same genre as ours. We looked at a real life text such as the film ‘Restless (2011) whereby a terminally ill teenage girl falls for a boy who likes to attend funerals and their encounters with the ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot from WWII. My production was very much a linear production as the order of narrative was clear and followed a chronological order.

In my opening 2 minutes of my AS production, Amnesia, my main character starts a journey to the neurological unit at the specialist hospital in London with a voice over explaining previous conversations had with the doctors about the un-named illness. On her journey, she tries to bring memories back by looking through old scrapbooks of previous events within her life. The camera fades into a picture of a memory and it comes to life.

With reference to Todorov, who is well known for his theory of chain events in the narrative, my short film opening distinctly follows his theory. The chain of events involve, equilibrium, disruption, possible solutions, climax and resolution. In my AS production my character starts out with her usual repetitive journey to the hospital via the train, which represents her equilibrium. However, at this point, the character is established and everything looks normal, but what we don’t know is that the scrapbook full of memories disrupts her memory and brings back certain trips and memories. In the end, she has her memory back, being the resolution as she is a changed person from before and can finally remember everything.

Levi Strauss argued that all narratives could be reduced down to binary opposites. Throughout my production, I used binary opposites and showed contrast within my opening scene. When establishing the setting and background of the character, the initial emotions were sad and upset as she was a sufferer of this awful illness, through which we portrayed through using higher angled shots to give the effect of looking down on people which connotes sadness and being inferior. Then in the shots we used towards the end of our opening scene, the character was happy and enjoying life with her friend, pre diagnosis without any cares. We also showed binary opposites in my AS production through using another character to represent the illness in the main character which contrasted against the second character who was perfectly healthy and didn’t suffer with Amnesia.

Propp suggested that every narrative has eight different character types to which they should include in order to make sense. Every narrative has a hero and we followed this to a certain degree, yet we only had 2 characters throughout our entire opening scene, though the aim was to introduce more characters later on in the film. The heroin in our film is the main character and her journey to overcome amnesia and retrieve her memories. As she is successful in doing so, she fits Propp’s theory. Another fit to Propps theory is the second character in our opening scene, she acts as ‘the helper’ as she helps to retrieve her memories by reliving them and creating them in the first place, without the memories she would have no way of getting them back.

We used Barthes' theory in order to create enigma codes within our music video. Roland Barthes suggested the idea of enigma codes in any film opening or music video is significant. We used this to create an enigma coding for the audience to see. For example, we had shots of the characters feet, legs and torso because this type of coding and representation would give the video a mysterious effect throughout the beginning, middle and end, making the audience think about what is going to happen continually and why. We used many different shots but particularly several wide shots when establishing the locations which were all mostly urban as this was stereotypical to a rap genre music video.