Narrative Essay

A narrative is a spoken or written account of connected events. A narrative tells a story. The narrative of our film opening was of a teenage girl going missing and her friends search for her. We created the narrative through a montage of clips of the friends together and then skipping to a plea for the missing girl to come home. We also incorporated shots of photos of the friends being burnt to add more mystery to our narrative.

Within our narrative we created we implemented a few conventions created by different theorists such as Strouse, Propp, Barthes and Todorov. These four theorists have different ideas of narratives and how narratives work. Strouse’s theory focuses on binary opposites (good vs. evil, rich vs. poor). We were able to involve this convention within the narrative for our film opening. Within the film opening there are multiple clips of three teenage girls having fun, messing around at arcades, going to school. They portray a close knit trio of friends and the audience are able to pick up on their happiness and care free atmosphere. But the clip switches between photographs of the friends being set on fire and then shows two of the girls filming a ‘come home’ plea. It is made clear that one of the girls has gone missing. This sudden seriousness of the film creates the binary opposites. It begins with a happy care free attitude but rapidly changes to serious, mature potentially scary atmosphere. It shows the friends broken up, which is a contrast to the closeness that was portrayed at the beginning.

This switching of the opposites can link to Todorov’s theory of narrative structure. Todorov’s theory is that all narratives start with equilibrium. Further on in the narrative there is a disruption to the equilibrium and then the narrative finishes with restoration of the equilibrium. The start of the film opening highlights the equilibrium of the narrative – the girls all together having fun as close friends. The disruption of this is one of them going missing. Since we have only created a film opening we can not expand on this disruption and we can not finish the structure by restoring it.

Another theorist that is relevant in our film opening narrative is Propp. Propp states that within every narrative there are the same characters: the hero, the villain, the damsel in distress, etc. Again this theory can be seen in our film opening, with the three characters presented. Dissimilar to the idea of having one hero in a narrative, our narrative contains two heroes – the two girls searching for their missing friend. The damsel in distress character is the missing girl. But the introduction of our narrative does leave the audience with questions such as “Why has the girl gone missing?”, “Are those two girls really heroes? or do they have something to do with her disappearance?”. This questioning of the narrative and the characters presented lead onto Barthes theory of enigma codes. Enigma codes are a key feature in any narrative as they keep the audience guessing and engaged in the narrative. In our film opening there are multiple clips of someone burning photographs of the three friends. This destructive act brings mystery to the audience because they want to know why the photographs of the friends are being burnt and who is burning them?

Overall, narrative is extremely important to a production and the theories and conventions that can be used within a narrative improve it significantly as they not only bring a safe well thought out structure, but they can also bring twists and add mystery to the narrative which keeps the audience engaged, which is why we used them in our film opening because we want our film opening to be a success.