What is needed to create a film? (Physical elements)
- Director
- Actors
- Camera and Microphones
- Set/Scene/Location
- Producer
- Money
- Editing software
- Screenwriter/ Script
- Cameraman
- Script
Narrative structures and internal elements :
- Chronological – Generally, films are structured in a straight line, linear narrative in which the events are sequenced in order of time.
- Flashbacks/ Foreshadowing
- Ellipsis
- Parallel Narrative
- EXPOSITION —> CLIMAX —> DENOUEMENT
- Protagonist and Antagonist
Freytag :
Exposition —> The background information on the characters and setting explained at the beginning of the story. Earlier events are alluded to.
Climax —> The point of highest intensity in a narrative. A story changing event takes place.
Denouement —> The final part of a play, film, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved.
Aristotle :
- Catharsis = Idea that we are freed by consuming something.
- Peripetia = A change in fortune
- Anagnorisis = A moment of dramatic revelation
Todrov:
Often, most stories can be easily broken down into a BEGINNING / MIDDLE / END.
Todrov breaks this into a 3-part structure:
- Equilibrium
- Disruption
- New equilibrium
Single character transformations are pursued: Traditional Todorovian stories place one lead hero at the centre of the narrative and secondary characters help them on their quest to the new equilibrium.
Frame stories: Stories told inside of stories, testing Todorov’s ideal structure.
- Developed therories on character when analyising Russian folk tales in his 1929 book ‘Morphology of the Folktale’
- Stock characters are used to structure stories, suggesting that the majority of stories use familiar character types to provide familiar narrative structures
- These stock characters are :
- Hero
- Helper
- Princess
- Villain
- Victim
- Dispatcher
- Father
- False Hero
(not my work)
Claude Levi Strauss (binary oppositions)
- This theory suggests that NARRATIVES (=myths) are STRUCTURED around BINARY OPPOSITIONS eg: good v evil; human v alien; young v old etc.
- narrative as a structure of key (oppositional) themes that underpin action and dialogue to develop a set of messages that the audience are able to decode and understand.
- This creates a dominant message (ideology) of a film/TV programme/advert/music video
- this way audiences are encouraged to make a judgements about characters, groups, places, history, society.
Levi-Strauss examined the nature of myths and legends in ancient and primitive cultures, from this analysis he suggested that myths were used to deal with the contradictions in experience, to explain the apparently inexplicable, and to justify the inevitable’ (Turner 2000:83)
- the way in which individual students / audience members decode specific texts, is also contingent on their own individual ideas, attitudes and beliefs
- texts can be seen to either support the dominant ideologies of a society, which would make it a reactionary text ,or to challenge, question or undermines the dominant ideologies of society, in which case it could be seen as a radical text.
Seymour Chatman –
there are 2 parts to a story, the important things and the embellishment, the important things are called kernels, these are the key moments in the plot.
Roland Barthes:
proairetic code- actions, movement, causation.
Hermenuetic code- dialogue,