In my foundation portfolio in my first year i created a film opening. When choosing the film genre, we decided to chose horror as we had wider knowledge of the different narratives in which we could have. Eventually we decided to have the base of our narrative around a reoccurring nightmare.
A key factor in which we had to keep in mind when developing our narrative was to keep the audiences attention. Therefore we decided to follow Todorov's theory by including a equilibrium, a disruption of the equilibrium and a recognition of the distruption. These are the first three stages of his theory. We were only able to included three stages as we were only creating the opening however if we was to have created the whole film we would have carried on to show the repair of the equilibrium and then a new equilibrium.
The way in which we portrayed the distruption of the equilibrium was the use of short straight cuts which showed the distress of the main character. At the beginning, the main character can be seen to be sleeping at night due to the use of dark lighting. However her sleep is then distrupted by her nightmare which shows two young girls from a early period. By including the reoccurring nightmare, the narrative was more complex as it meant changing from different time periods almost like flashbacks.
Another key factor involving the narrative is leaving the audience with questions which would then make them want to continue and watch the whole film. This is called an enigma code which was introduced by Barthes. We created a enigma code by giving the audience little information about the characters however showing the short straight cuts which do not necessarily connect.
Also to ensure that we had established characters, we followed some of the types of characters shown in Propp's theory of fairy tales including a hero and villain etc. We followed this in a way in which we had two villain portraying the sign of evil throughout the opening.
Overall the narrative of our film opening was developed and created from the help of theories from Propp, Todorov and Barthes.
