Apply theories of narrative to one of you coursework productions

NARRATIVE ESSAY

Apply theories of narrative to one of you coursework productions

The coursework production I have decided to apply my narrative theory to is my AS thriller opening sequence as it was a narrative video and had a structured story line to suit the thriller genre.

The narrative for my thriller opening set up the story of a young couple who have been separated due to the fact she has gone missing and her husband does not know anything about her disappearance. This follows in close connection to one of Kate Domaille 8 narrative types, the Orpheus which is the loss of something personal. This ties in with the thriller as the husband does not yet know the fate of his wife.

There are some aspects of Pam Cooks theory that I can apply to my thriller. I can apply her idea of narrative closure as the thriller does have a sense of closure from the beginning as we know the kidnapper will be found out as he is friends with the husband so the story has an obvious outcome from the start. The camerawork help suggest this by never revealing the kidnaper clearly enough until the end of the opening where we see him meet the husband character.  We can also see a realistic world aspect within the opening as we decided to keep the piece looking as realistic as we could. We decided to set the kidnapping and the meeting in two normal places, one at a house and the meeting along the water front. By keeping the piece looking  realistic we were able to keep the reveal a surprise which lead on to the narrative closure. All this also meant we could use cause and effect as there must be a reason as to why the couples friend would want to kidnap the wife and this is the effect of that. This shows that everything does have a consequence in one way or another.

Another theory that can be attached to my as thrilleris Levi – Strauss who used the idea of binary opposites.  We decided not to side the audience with one character more than the other through the use of the camera work as we wanted to add more depth to the story and not make a clear point of view to begin with and planned that this would be later decided for the audience as the movie progressed. The binary opposites we decided to use were good vs evil mainly. The use of the binary opposites set up the thriller structure and without the use of good vs evil we wound not have had a narrative to follow.

Another theory we followed in our thriller was Tzvetan Todorov. He understoof that the there needs to be some sort of structure whether it being a classic Hollywood narrative or a meta narrative. In our thriller we knew we would have to follow the classic Hollywood narrative and the idea of their being a equilibrium and a disequilibrium. We needed to do this in order to ensure our work actually fitted in to the structure of a thriller film. We decided to show the equilibrium of our married couple characters through flashbacks documenting important moments in their life (when he returned from the war).  We started the thriller showing the disequilibrium of the kidnap in order to grab the viewers attention and to ensure that we fitted into the thriller narrative by having a mystery feel.

We also used many of Vladimir Propps character types in our work. We used many of the typical character types such as the hero (husband) and the princess (the wife). The kidnapper/friend character portrays different types of propps characters he portrays the villain and the helper as he plays two contrasting roles. As a viewer we decided to show both his sides from the start and allow the audience to see our main characters in the story early on.  We felt this helped with the suspense within our thriller ad meant that we also broke the normal structures found in a thriller narrative.