EVALUATION 6 - Narrative

How did we establish the narrative in our trailer and what is established in the other two productions? How do they work together to sell our product?

The narrative is the way the different elements in a story are organised to make a meaningful story. Narration is how the story is told, how the information is presented to viewers, for example visual style and point of view the story is told from.  There are four different structures of narrative, of which are Linear/chronological, Non-linear, and cyclical or can have single/multiple viewpoints.  Our trailer adopts the linear/chronological structure where the events that occur are ordered and follow to create the story; however this chronological structure has been broken apart with the use of titles in order to create the trailer composition.  

In our trailer, we have specifically used an omniscient narration, where we see events from multiple viewpoints. This can add suspense and appeal to audiences as they are made aware of events/information that other characters may not be.

We further looked into Claude Levi-Strauss’ theory of binary oppositions. He studied how the world is arranged in terms of oppositional forces and values. He was also interested in the order of how things happened, but more focused on the arrangement of their oppositional themes in a media text. In our trailer ‘Dawn’, we portray the representation of binary oppositions through the two characters and their contrasting ages. The specific depiction of these two characters is the good that is shown through the young girl and the evil that we see through the elderly women. The good and evil show a clear opposition between the two characters and this would conform to theorist Claude Levi-Strauss There is also binary oppositions in their ages where they are juxtaposing one another. Both characters are at opposite ends of the spectrum; with the girl being a young child and portrayed as innocent and vulnerable, in contrast to the elderly women who is being depicted as evil and eerie.

Through ending our trailer with the girl going through a possessed episode, we are able to relate to the theory of the enigma code, proposed by Roland Barthes. The enigma code refers to any element of the story that is not fully explained and hence becomes a mystery to the reader. For audiences, they have viewed an unexplained event and this would therefore encourage them to want to watch on to find out what and how it happened. In relation to this specific event and the character, we also used Vladimir Propp’s theory to help us decide on the kind of representation to use and the role that the characters were playing in our trailer. He suggested that characters took on the role of narrative ‘spheres of action’ or functions. He came up with eight key characters types in a narrative; a few of which we have implemented into our trailer. With this specific event, we are able to relate to the false hero. The description of this is that they appear to be good but are revealed, at the narratives end, to have been bad. It is often the case that characters fulfil more than one sphere character type. In our trailer, the young girl starts out to be innocent and vulnerable when she is found in a difficult situation in her own home. Throughout this build-up to the point where she eventually sees the antagonist, she is portrayed as a scared, innocent young child; however by the end of the trailer, she is shown to be possessed and quite violent with her actions when slamming down her head on the table. Therefore conforming to the false hero where she ends to be revealed badly.

Our ancillary texts work well together to sell our products and a key feature that we thought this most applied to was the use of the slogan on our poster which was 'Your fears are what you create'. This slogan was significantly effective in selling our product as it essentially produced a brand identity; a feature which audiences remember our film but and identify/associate us with. Another way in which we though our ancillary texts contributed to the selling of our product was through using the images of our antagonist. The effect of this is that the elderly women is a key character in the trailer and therefore audiences will know/recognise her character when it comes to actually watching the film. Lastly, the appealing use of font is effective in selling our product as it is prominent on the background making it stand out to audiences and for audiences to recognise. The bold font and capitalisation of letters makes it more noticeable for audiences to remember; and therefore selling the product well if audiences will purchase it and further go to watch the film/trailer.