A2 Media Studies Question 1B - Narrative

What is Narrative? - the way in which a story is told in both fictional and fictional media texts.

Film research and planning - there always seems to be a group of people left behind in the apocalypse or even a leader e.g. in oru film we had a main character in which this was shown through the voiceover and mise-en-scene.

- Expections in this genre include the end of the world setting, dark empty places, close-ups, wide shots and quick cut editing.

Treatment - was written in a 3 act structure and a closure was expected.

- based in 2013 with three main characters being the focus throughout.

- a virus effects the population, with the main characters discovering a person without realising they have the virus.

- they all begin to conspire against each other in order to save themselves.

- paranoia leads one of the group to kill the other infected members of the group.

- they ransack a home to find food in order to survive, as well as finding a camp, they begin a new life together.

Four main theorists -  Todorov, Propp, Barthes and Levi Straus.

Todorov - a state of equilibrium - presents the audience with the themes and the settings of the narrative e.g. a virus has occurred at a college, the narrative is dirven by the main characters drive to restore the world before the apocalypse.

- a disruption of the equilibrium - relationships with characters develop, problem established to audience. - e.g. it is now clear that an apocalypse has occurred, the voiceover explains this, shots include the 3 main characters walking and searching.

- a recognition that there has been a disruption - the problem has been clearly identified. e.g. the characters identify that there has been a disruption to the world so they decide to find other survivors in order to restore the world.

- an attempt to repair the disruption - e.g. in our trailer they all go on a journey to find other survivors as well as gatheint essential supplies (basically they begin their journey).

- reinstatement of the equilibrium - e.g. even though this isnt shown in the trailer, our three characters find a camp full of survivors and begin a new life.

- Todorov fits quite nicely due to the genre and the structure of our trailer.

- during the construction of our trailer we thought about what scenes we wanted to use to show the narrative of the trailer, we decided to have a lot of scenes involving the characters e.g. long shot of them walking across a park as well as a handheld which added to the music and the build up.

- also had scenes where the main character was alone to show his experience as well as complimenting his account of the disaster in which the voiceover played a part to this.

- some of the key elements in our trailer included the characters running away from a threat. as well as the voiceover adding to the narrative.we used typical locations which relate to the genre e.g. empty public places.

- we decided not to completly reflect on the virus and the zombies as we felt the voiceover explained and gave a hint of it, also we didnt want to give too much away as we knew we would have a suitable audience due to the positive reviews we included.

- one of the narrative devices we used was the main characters POV, this was achieved by having a handheld shot of him and the group running away from a threat.