Narrative Question 1.

Apply theories of narrative to one of your productions.

The production that I am going to talk about is my AS Level film opening, Fixation, that I created last year as part of my coursework. During our opening sequence, the first character that we see is Eileen, one of our main characters. We conform to Barthes' theory of Codes, as we include no dialogue to create the atmosphere in our sequence. The narrative is told by the enigma code, action code and symbolic code. Even though there is no dialogue throughout our whole opening sequence, the story is still being told and the audience can understand the narrative just by the actions that are shown on the screen. The parallel music sets the mood which makes the audience acknowledge the difference between two characters. We see Eileen adding things to a board, and we see lots of information about someone who we have not yet seen or do not know who he is. This then leaves us an enigma code, How does she know him? What does she want from him? Where did she gather all this information from? which immediately leaves the audience wanting to know more. The symbolic code portrays Eileen as a dark, evil character and this is shown through her costume. She is wearing black, and black is a connotation of evil, therefore the audience will put two and two together and instantly know she is the villain within this film. The pathetic fallacy also creates a setting to make the audience feel a certain way about the evil character.
This then supports Propp's theory, as we have set characters which shows typical conventions of any film. However, we subvert to Propp's theory as our characters are not the typical expectations that people would expect. He stated that the character in distress who needs help is usually a women, however we have reversed this so the woman is the villain, and the protagonist is male. However as the plot goes on, we also establish that there is a villain within a villain in our story, as Eileen is suffering from a mental health issue due to what happened to her son. This then gives our film a unique selling point and an unusual plot due to this not being very popular in the film industry. Our dispatcher is Eileen's husband, an older man, which conforms to typical stereotypes of heroes, a strong man.  This then links to Todorov's theory of equilibrium, as there is several obstacles that each character has to overcome and they take the audience on this journey with them. Within our film, you will come across several things that characters go through, like Eileen loses her son, then her husband, then she takes James, so James has to try and escape and then get over his trauma. The regular plot twists will keep the audience interested and want them to continue to watch the film. 
Levi Strauss' theory of binary opposition conforms to our opening sequence. We have our evil character Eileen, who is dressed in all black and this contrasts with our protagonist James, who is dressed colourfully therefore the audience can distinguish the difference between each role in the film. James is also shown with lots of people around him, but Eileen is shot on her own, this shows that James is popular and Eileen is lonely. James is partying which shows he is happy, whereas Eileen's posture and attitude tells us she is very lonely due to her being very solo throughout the sequence.