Narrative Theory
Narrative is the way a story is
formed and organized to project that particular story. In relation to
narrative, I am going to discuss my A2 media portfolio and how I used narrative
theories and structures to create both film treatment and trailer.
I would describe my film trailer
to be ambiguous as it is a series of different events that don’t fit together
but will ultimately all intersect. It flashes between the actions of a murder,
a robbery, drug use and meet ups that display how there is more than one story
line being played out. The trailer itself is also blurred; this requires for
the audience to understand the basic concepts of gangster films and for them to
decide and discuss their own ideas of to how the story will conclude etc.
The soviet montage theory or
Eisenstein’s montage theory can be linked to my trailer as it consists of
piecing together separate sections with the illusion that they belong together.
The metric montage is about cutting to the next shot no matter what is
happening within the frame, no matter if it matches or not. It is used to
extract any emotional response the audience.
Due to a montage of action my trailer doesn’t fully follow Propp’s
theory, as it is hard to distinguish what roles certain characters signify.
There is an obvious villain, as the start of the sequence there is a murder so
the audience can clearly distinguish between the murderer and victim….
Todorov is a theorist who
concluded that every narrative has a basic step-by-step structure. It starts of
with everything being calm and relaxed, this is the state of equilibrium, it
then moves onto disequilibrium where everything has be disrupted, then it’s the
realization where all turns chaotic, the character(s) tries to restore the
problem and lastly there is a new equilibrium. My trailer goes against
Todorov’s theory as it begins in disequilibrium with a murder scene.