Applying Narrative Theories

todorov 

The movie which i have chosen to talk about is  Del Tucker vs Evil. This is a movie i have watched recently and i believe that it really gets across a narrative to the audience.

The way the film's story is told is hard to follow due to the fact that the directors made out that the evil were del and Tucker and the college students were evil and it made us have to figure out who it really was.

The narrative of the film goes through all 5 stages, which are equilibrium, disruption, recognition of disruption, attempt to repair the disruption and reinstatement of equilibrium. 

In the equilibrium stage we see the setting and the theme of the setting and we also figure out the genre of the movie in a small sense. We also hear what the characters are like and we think what the movie will be about.

The disruption starts when we see Del go over and talk to one of the college girls to have a friendly chat. This ends up being a problem due to the fact that the girls got scared and their male friend came and told Del to go away. This tells us that Del and Tucker are the evil.

In the recognition of the disruption stage the male friend builds tension between the college students and Del but Del did not mean no harm.

We recognise the attempt to repair the disruption stage because the college students want to capture their friend back from Del's holiday home. We can see them making a plan to go and attempt to get her back by killing Del and Tucker. We also see that Del and Tucker are attempting to get the girl back to their friends which signify that Del and Tucker are really not evil and the college kids are.

The final stage is reinstatement of equilibrium which is signified by Alice trying to get Del and Chad to talk to one another and sort out their problems. The problem is solved till Chad wants his revenge for Del and Alice falling in love with one another.

Propps

The characters in this film were easy to categorise using Propps theory because there was use of character typology and stereotypes because they behave in a certain way and it is also given away in the title of the movie. 

The hero was Del who was this big guy who is stereotypically seen as a hillbilly in the movie and they are seen as bad people but really and truly he was the Hero in the movie as he rescued and looked after Alice when she hit her head on the rock. I think that at the beginning of the movie this character would not appeal to the audience because he is seen as a bad person but later on he will appeal to the audience because we see his true personality.

The princess was Alice she is a college student who is really pretty and attractive. She is the princess is the movie as two of the groups try to fight for her back. the character would appeal to the audience because she does not know whats going on and they feel sympathy for her.

Another important character was Tucker because he is Del's best friend. This character was vital to the plot because without him giving the confidence to Del to speak to her, Del wouldn't have had the chance to meet her. 

Narrative game theories

The game i will be talking about is GTA5. The way the games story is told is easy to follow because it shows how one of the characters started from the bottom and reached to a higher status.

This game will not work with both theories but there are some stages which do work throughout the games for example Equilibrium. We see this throughout the game. It tells us about the location of the game and also introduces the characters to the gamers and the storyline setup!
Throughout the game there are a variety of missions you have to go through to earn money and gain respect.
Towards the end of the game you have an option to kill off 3 characters, but the story does not end there. There are many more mini stories that go on throughout the game afterwards.

Propps theory
The characters in this film were easy to categorise as it introduces you to them as soon as you start the game.

There was no hero, villain or princesses in this game as everyone is bad in their own way.

However there was a vital character throughout the game who was Franklin as he gets to choose who he kills at the end out of 3 characters
Both of the theories do not work properly in accordance to the game which means the theories work better with movies.

Stuart Halls Theory

Stuart Hall was one of the first academics to consider how audiences respond to media texts. He deeloped a theory that the meaning of a media text is negotiated between producer and consumer. He argued that there were three ways in which an audience can respond to a text:

Preferred reading is when the audiences respond to the product the way media producers want/expect them to.
When the meaning is negotiated the audience will partly agree with part of the product e.g film documentary, tv programme.
Sometimes an audience will not accept the producers representation, hall described this as oppositional reading.
The producers of early computer games were only able to produce simple graphics, so the visual representation wasn't very accurate. For example

This is the game pong it is supposed to be a representation of table tennis.
It may not look nothing like it but back then it was good.

Even so, these games makers wanted to include some sort of narrative with their games because people wanted something more advanced and started getting bored of playing the same things over and over.

They used titles and box art to suggest narrative themes and settings. 

This is the game ET that came from the movie itself.

This is the game heroes of neverwinter which has more of a narrative today and better graphics .

this approach to gameplay is a very good example of how producers and consumers negotiate their reading of narrative in media texts.

blog diary for pictures

At first we looked at a few online narrative pictures on youtube which people have posted.  We looked at 2 videos. One of them was of a man who grew his beard for a whole year and took a picture of himself everyday. It showed us as the audience the different stages throughout the year, not just on his beard but also his appearance. Another video we looked at was of a woman who posted a video of narrative pictures about her worst year ever. Whilst looking at this one it showed us the contrast of the woman's facial expressions.

After looking at these two videos we were set a task to go out ourselves and make our own version of these narrative pictures, pretty simple? Of course it is, but the only problem we had was the fact that we had to do it within a space of a week. At first my idea was to make a collage of different pictures of foods that i have eaten at from different restraunts. The reason why i chose this idea was because of the time limit we had and my brain was completely empty on other ideas! After i started on this i soon began to think it would be hard to put the message across for this and it may come across kind of boring .
As the week went by i was lost as to do what to do so i teamed up with one of my classmates, Saifur. He was also quite lost on ideas so together we put both of our original ideas into one piece. We decided to stick to the idea of food being displayed but we thought lets have a plate of food and in front of the camera and take a picture of the food after we have one bite of it so that gradually it looks like a narrative timeline of pictures. After doing this we decided it looked well so we thought we'd publish it on final cut pro. The only other thing left to do was to add music to it.

After looking at different genres of music we decided to choose one that we thought we'd never choose which was classical. We decided to put one of Beethovens sympthanys on the timeline. The reason we done this is because we thought it went with the timeline correctly and it was also something different for the audience.

I believe that actually constructing a narrative using visual images is not the hardest of things but i believe that actually thinking of an idea for a narrative is harder. The only reason being is that there are so many ideas to choose from.

Without digital technology i believe that it would of taken us much longer to do the project. I mean we got the idea from youtube at first and then we went off and used different sorts of equipment to capture the pictures some used Digital SLR  cameras and some including myself used their phones. Also without the software Final Cut Pro on the Mac computers it would have been a lot harder to get the message across, so visual images are key on these circumstances. 

Diary 5 G.M. blog diary

G.M. is a 8 and a half minute short film which we watched as a class together. At first we looked at the script and the script told us a lot about the movie before the actual script started. This film was a funded movie and it took a long time for the director to get the funding.

Before the script starts in the intro it tells us alot about the movie and who are involved in the movie. It also has a section about the 'film makers vision'.  The actors in the film have no speech, it is all just based on the acting. So the script jus gives us a sort of narrative of what each character is doing.

Once we looked through the script we then went on to watch the movie. The movie itself i believe had no stroyline to it. 

Diary 7 blog diary- what we did today

In todays lesson we first looked at two different pilot episodes. One from the series of friends and one from the series of family guy. In the friends pilot we saw the setting of the scene and it described to us all of the characters and their personalities. It also showed two characters who are friends Ross and Rachel who are currently going through problems in their lives. Ross just had a recent break up wit his girlfriend and Rachel who ditched her wedding. This is effective because it makes the audience want to know what happens during the rest of the series.

The next pilot that we watched was family guy. This pilot we thought dragged a bit and made it seem more of an actual episode. Although it did show us the main characters and the main settings there was no pilot feeling to it.

We also pitched our pilots and gave  a brief summary to the class about what happens in our pilots and also our movies and how we are going to go about doing so.

We then went to go and watched a different pitch online which was then made into a movie and it showed us how a simple short pitch could be made into something really effective.

We also watched a brief documentary about a writer who tells us about his ideas on writing and what he believes would make a great script

what is a pilot

A pilot is  like a short snippet of what the movie is going to be a bout including the setting, the mood and the sound effects required to grab the audiences attention and make them want to watch the movie. You will have to think about the genre and setting the mood so the audience can feel the setting of the mood .

Also you can say that it is a short 3 minute max scene from the film for the funders to see if it is going to be successful enough to be worth funding.

It has to have an eye opening scene which will make the movie seem really interesting. For example say if in your movie someone dies, you could show that so the audience want to watch the movie and think ' what happens? how did he get killed?' 

Diary 6- noise control blog diary

Noise Control

As a class we watched a short film called 'noise control'. First of all we looked at the script to have a look on how it was laid out in terms of organisation. At first we are told before the script even starts that there was a low budget for this film.

When the script starts it starts off with a long intro about what the film is about, the budget and where it was set. It gave us all the details before the actual script started. Once the script started, it gave us an insight about what the film topic is on. It gives us instructions on the script such as (o.s) which means off set. It gives us clear instructions and the script is easy to follow. In the script they use a lot of description about how they are going to speak for example after the character name it says ( frantically) so it shows that the actor is going to speak frantically. It also has terms in the script such as (beat) which we have not seen in a another script before. This means that the actor should pause a moment on screen before continuing to speak again.

As this was a low budget movie you can already tell that the movie is not going to be as great. In fact it wasn't. the actual documentary was trying to be a comedy about the filming crew themselves. It was set in a small village in Wales. Where they went into a families house and tried making a document about what the area sound is like.

Everytime they recorded an aeroplane sound will go by. In this case they had to use sound effects for the aeroplane going past. The lighting of the film in my opinion was not too great as it was a low budget it will be expected.

Overall i believe this movie was a failed short comedy movie.

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