The storyline for our film is about a teenage boy who after the death of his best friend has to find a way of re finding happiness
Rick Altman states that film can be categorised into genre in three different ways: semantic, syntactic and pragmatic. The semantic codes (atmans "building blocks') Which clearly indicate our film genre are (state a specific camera shot, editing tech, prop, setting, costume, sound) This clearlyindecates our genre as it has been used in other movies such as.....
I can apply Altmans syntactic some to my movie as our film shares many key narrative characteristics with other films in the genre of.... For example, our protagonist..... This also happens in.... when....
Finally I believe that our title best fits atmans pragmatic approach. WeWe chose to name our film..... which clearly indicates to an audience that our film shares similar codes and conventions to movies such as .....
Steve Neal's stance on genre is that it is important for filmmakers in terms of how to attract audiences. He states that at "genres are instances of repetition and difference" maintaining that films only attract audiences by pushing the boards of the genre. An example of this would be the horror genre where recent movies have parodied the original codes and conventions of horror films - e.g.. Scream. We have repeated certain genre codes of.... films by including elements such as..... However, we have also pushed the boundaries by.....
Deborah Knight argues that genres offer “emotional pleasures such as empathy and escapism” for audiences. Our film was deliberately crafted to make the audience feel….towards…. We did this by……This provides the viewer with what Knight terms “the additional pleasure of prolonged anticipation”.
Barthes also discussed a film in terms of action codes which are clearly linked to the film's genre. In our film we included.....
We also included what Barthes
describes as Referential codes (symbols which have meanings in our culture and
society which have further connotations for the viewer) by including shots
of…….
We also included what Barthes
describes as Referential codes (symbols which have meanings in our culture and
society which have further connotations for the viewer) by including shots
of…….
Vladimir Propp is a theorist
who discusses narrative purely in terms of character and actions. Despite his research being about fairy tales,
his work is helpful in decoding our sequence.
The protagonist in our film clearly meets Propp’s definition of a hero
in that he….(mention other characters if they meet his definitions of helpers,
villains etc). Furthermore, Propp came
to the conclusion that all narratives can be boiled down to a number of
functions initiated by these characters.
Our film follows the function of….. in that our protagonist does…..
Todorov’s theories of
narrative discuss texts in terms of the arc of a storyline. His theory split stories into 5 clear steps:
equilibrium, disruption of equilibrium, the recognition of the disruption, the
repair of it and then the new equilibrium.
Our title sequence plays with these codes in the following way:
Finally Claude Levi-Strauss
defines narrative as requiring the constant creation of conflict and
opposition. He summarised this in terms
of visual opposition (such as light versus darkness) or conceptual (eg. Love
versus hate, control versus panic). We
included a number of binary oppositions in our opening sequence, such as…
Tom - you need to finish this so that you have a strong essay to revise before the final exam.
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