Narrative

Narrative means by which a story within a film is structured and organised to create a given media.

How does narrative help the viewer?
Narratives usually have an exposition, which is an opening scene of a film and presents the main character (protagonist) and their situations or predicament. In the exposition, the narrative may also hint at a back story to that character which will shape the characters behaviour and the events that befall upon them.



How does this opening of 'Amelie' give the audience a sense of poulain?
This opening scene shows this young girl - Amelie - with no friends, and fighting for the love of her father, a obsessive doctor, and her mother, a control freak. It shoes her very alone, as she secludes into her imagination.

Types of narratives:
* Ellipsis
* Parallel narratives: The world isn't just one narrative.
* Flash backs /forwards.

*Russian theorist - Todorov -
1.) Equilibrium
2.) Disequilibrium
3.) New equilibrium
Problems:
Too basic
The ending isn't always good

Alternatively, films could fit into a different structure:
1.) Exposition
2.) Development
3.) Complication
4.) Climax
5.) Resolution

Perspective
* First person
* Third person
* Omnipotent - all knowing
* Objective/subjective view
* Direct address
* Voice over

Genre

Why do you think audiences, producers, and distributors need to know what genre their film is?

To clarify a market to target it towards

Generic conventions of a horror:

Common fear

Gorr

Suspense

Make you feel vunerable

The key elements that you should be looking to fall under come under the following headings:

Iconography - A gangster film usually involves smoky bars, jazz music, and guns.

Style - Low key lighting, urban location, element of suspicion and crime.

Narrative - Todorov - Equilibrium, disequilibrium, equilibrium.

Characters

Themes

Setting

Audience response - Sensation, emotional, empathy, shock, adreniline.

Target audience

Media Concept 2 - Media Language

Semiotics -
Denotation - What's there
Connotation - What is behind it

Signs and symbols are like words, they have no physical bearing or relation to what they actually represent. It is us who create the meaning.

Ideology - A dominant set of ideas which present themselves as fact and truth.

Roland Barthes looked at how ideologies and myths become so embedded in our culture that we no longer realisethat they exist, and are not fact. Barthes coined the term semiotics: the study of signs and symbols, what they mean and how we, readers, make meaning.



Denotation - Skull and bones.
Connotations - Pirate sign. Poison, Military, Spanish cemetry.

Interpellation - Louis Althissers idea that media products lead us to make false recognition of ourselves so that we get lost in the idea of ourselves that will never actually be possible.

Can this theory be applied in today's theory? Yes it can because the media influences our views about ourselfs.

What types of media are good examples of using this theory? Magazine and advertising campains use photoshopped images to give out this idea of the 'perfect look' which everyday women cannot achieve so it effects their confidence.

Ideology - An ideology can be thought to be the perfect vision. A set of ideas, visions, and aims that direct one's goal, expectations, and actions.

Media Concept 1 - Audience

Who is your target audience?
How will you make your product appealing to your target audience?
How would you like your your audience to respond to your trailer?

Theory - Stuart Hall
-Every text is encoded with a particular meaning
-Every text is an emplied meaning
-Every text is a preferred meaning

Basically saying that everyone has their own interpretation of a text, a trailer or anything.
Every text is polysemic - it has a multiple of readings. But hall stated that every text has a preferred meaning aswell.

Why do audiences read texts differently?
Because it depends who the film is aimed at, whether they have stuck to conventions or gone against them, and kept them gripped throughout.

The Effects Debate - How much are you influenced by the media?
What other things influence you?

Active - Two way flow of information
Passive - Audience consuming the media

The uses and gratifications model describes the different ways in which audiences and viewers use and respond to the media. There are 4 different types of gratifications or satisfactions that a viewer may get from the media.
Community - created through discussion about the product and/or sense of community or belonging created between the viewer and the product.
Escape - The audience might choose to live their life through the product, and escape from the trials of everday life.
Relation - They might be a sense of relation to a certain character, and what they are going through.

Eastenders offers uses and gratifications to the auidence because it is on four days a week so runs constantly, everyday characters and situations that the audience can relate to.