Media theories - planning

In class we are currently studying theories such as the theory of narrative, the theory of structuralism and how intertextuality is used within these. Me and Ben discussed what we thought was the best theory to use for our music video. From our story board and chosen story to narrate through the video we decided that Structuralism and Narrative were the best to use.

Vladimir propp exhamined hundreds of fairy tale in the generic form 'the folk wondertale'. He identified eight character roles and three functions which move a story along such as including a punishment of the villain and the ban of an actor.
This is an example of the structuralism theory. He uses intertextuality (other characters such as red riding hood - she has been used before) but structures his films in his own way which brings out the 'structure' part as he is making it different and intresting. He has stated "Structure comes from culture as directors use the typicalness of film and structure it in their own way"

Tzvetan Todorov developed the theory of disrupted equilibrium with in narrative. An exampls is equilibrium " everyone is alive "
disequilibrium " everyone dies "
equilibrium " the case is solved "
So as my example shows, the 'disequilibrium' disrupts normality.

Another theory for narrative is roland barthes's theory. He believed that there are five action codes that enable an audience to make sense of a narrative.
Two examples me and Ben thought stood out to us, as we could use those codes:
Cultural and symbolic were the two we chose. Cultural shows how intertextuality can be used to show our attitudes to gender or racial stereotypes and Symbolic uses iconography so portray a theme such as image verses reality! - An example of this in our music video will be how we will show an image (of his past/the flashbacks) of his past and how he faces reality. It will show how the past images in his head effect him and how he canno't face reality till the end.

Diegisis:
Non - Diagetic narrative events take place off screen - before the movie/music video started, so it is everything we did not see but through the video we can assume clearly what happened. This is a good theory to use as through our video, we will need to show that there was an event that took place before all the drama in our video, that lead to what is contained in our story eg: the break up, it was obviously bad.