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Hannah Dell Narrative theories throughout my production

Narrative is the media term for storytelling and the way the different elements in a story are organised to make a meaningful story. Some of these elements can be facts as in a documentary, or characters and action as in a drama. Narrative or telling stories is our way of making sense of the world around us and trying to put some meaning into the world. Narrative theory shows how there are five narrative structures; open and closed ended, interactive multi-strand, POV and Enigma. My music video adheres to this specific theory as it follows the point of view of the artist through a typical weekend to portray how she was just as normal as her fans, experiencing everyday situations. We conveyed this narrative through over the shoulder point of view shots and shot reverse shot patterns as if the person filming was involved in the conversation. We decided to portray this particular pov narrative to involve the audience more in our video and to feel as if they are experiencing the same thing. We also included a multi-strand narrative where the artist was in different locations throughout the video. In some shots the artist would show her journey through Camden town, oxford street and other exciting locations around London as well as the party scene that was also filmed through a point of view shot. The multi-strand narrative allowed me to keep the audience interested as they constantly had different images and storylines to focus on throughout the video. The narrative involved in my video, could be thought of as an enigma as it is partially hidden and a little mysterious to the audience. The narrative subverts to the theories of Todorov that includes the Equilibrium, disequilibrium and then the restored equilibrium at the end of the storyline and relates more to the lyrics, as the actions and characters in the video match the lyrics to the song. It also doesnt follow Vladimir Propps narrative structure of the 8 character roles, involving characters such as the villain, hero and princess etc that all help the narrative to flow throughout the film. This could confuse the audience as my video does not include these characters as it wouldnt make sense to the song, however most up to date and current music videos do not follow a narrative structure such as Todorovs or Propps if they are dance, pop or R&B as they are more focused on the image of the artist and how they can portray them in the best possible light. Claude Levi Strauss came up with the two theories of syntagmatic relations and paradigmatic relations. Syntagmatic relations meaning how events line up in the narrative structure to develop the plot and paradigmatic relations meaning those events and features that belong to the theme, especially within genre based texts. My music video is based more on genre than narrative in which it follows the conventions of the specific genre it is involved in. The specific genre was dance/pop so automatically a dance scene was put into process to be involved in our music video and the conventions of pop show that the lyrics should match the actions in

Hannah Dell the video to improve understanding. Therefore my narrative adheres to Levi Strauss theory as the events throughout the narrative belong to theme and genre of the video.

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