Narrative essay

Apply the concept of narrative to one of your media productions.

For my AS coursework I created a film opening. I looked at other conventions and use of narrative. My film opening was called ‘because of them’ it was a period drama, the use of the two characters in different generations was important to our narrative to that we could show side by side comparisons of the two women’s lives and how they were different. Because we showed the two generations this meant that our narrative was non-linear throughout as we swapped and changed the era that was shown on screen.

We looked at Strauss theory of binary opposites and used editing to clear portray our narrative and our two characters in relation to this theory. We used a black and white edit to show the older generation of our suffragette character, this was in contrast to our modern day character who we kept in colour. These colour contrasts added to the contrast and differences between the generations of our characters. Although our narrative is non-linear and jumps between times we used continuity editing as anything unnatural would not have fit our genre and would have impacted the audience making it confusing, the use of continuity editing enabled us to keep our audience engaged. Our editing allowed us to use and show Strauss theory of binary opposites between our two characters, the time they lived in and their beliefs on women voting.

We used sound to heighten the genre and keep the focus on what was happening on screen, we used a song overlay of music which we serotyped to our genre period-drama.  We used minimal dialogue as we wanted to establish the scene in our opening rather than focusing on a script.

We used mise- en- scene to reinforce our genre., our settings included a large house, and large acreage this is something with we stereotyped to a historical drama. We used a museum to film which gave the appearance of a large house this was a advantage a the arrangement of props made the house appear historical such as a grandfather clock, a large stair case, and wooden chairs all which we used in our aesthetics of our film opening.

Barthes was another theorist we looked at who influenced the creation of our film opening. We used narrative enigma to keep our audience wanting to watch more, this was shown by our modern day character realising that her ancestors were suffragettes and that it’s important for women to vote, our opening ends with her realising this leaving the audience wondering what will happen next. We also used semantic code; the idea that a narrative has more than one meaning. At first our film opening may just appear as a period drama but by the end of a film would leave an audience impacted realising the importance of women voting and encourage modern day women to use their vote which other women fought so hard to get them. Our narrative unravels to show that our ancestors play an important role in our lives today even if we don’t realise it this uses bathes cultural code questioning the audience’s cultural knowledge of how we came to have the rights we do today.

Our narrative is clearly portrayed to our audience this is most clearly shown through our use of mise- en- scene and our editing. Our narrative was successfully created by following ideas of theorist and conventions to create a film opening with reaches our goal of highlighting the importance of women voting.