Changes to the plot
The daughter is taken from the mother by the father, in the trailer we will show the girl being taken then the mother's search for her.
THEORY
Viktor Shlovsky
Fabula - Story behind what is seen on the screen
Syuzhet - only events we have seen or heard within the field of vision
Genre;
"The kind/type of media text."
Roland Barthes (1975) - That experiences in life relate to genre perception. Experiences include media texts seen before, things which have not usually experienced in real life such as stand-off involving guns. The text is then placed into a genre in view of previous experience. It is made sense of by turning it into another text, which we would also understand intertextually. It is used by the viewer to decode it and relate it to a genre, and by the producer to encode it so that that the viewer can decode it, relate it to a genre and understand it.
Our trailer is aimed for the audience to place it in the horror genre based of films seen about kidnapping before, such as Taken and Flightplan. It also relates to news stories involving kidnapping.
John Fiske (1987) - Experiences in real life relate to genre perception. Experiences such as news stories and personal experiences allow the viewer to decode it and understand it.
Our trailer aims for the audience to decode it using news stories involving crimes.
Jaques Derrida (1981) - 'a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without... a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text'
Our trailer does belong to a genre, horror.
Narrative;
The theory to our film trailer is the narrative theory of Vladmir Propp.
His theroy was involving structuralism, that every tale consisted of 31 spheres of action;
ABSENTATION
INTERDICTION
VIOLATION of INTERDICTION
RECONNAISSANCE
DELIVERY
TRICKERY
COMPLICITY
VILLAINY and LACK
MEDIATION
BEGINNING COUNTER-ACTION
DEPARTURE
FIRST FUNCTION OF THE DONOR
HERO'S REACTION
RECEIPT OF A MAGICAL AGENT
GUIDANCE
STRUGGLE
BRANDING
VICTORY
LIQUIDATION
RETURN
PURSUIT
RESCUE
UNRECOGNIZED ARRIVAL
UNFOUNDED CLAIMS
DIFFICULT TASK
SOLUTION
RECOGNITION
EXPOSURE
TRANSFIGURATION
PUNISHMENT
WEDDING
The two which we are using are;
1. VILLAINY and LACK: Villain causes harm/injury to family member (by abduction, theft of magical agent, spoiling crops, plunders in other forms, causes a disappearance, expels someone, casts spell on someone, substitutes child etc, comits murder, imprisons/detains someone, threatens forced marriage, provides nightly torments); Alternatively, a member of family lacks something or desires something (magical potion etc). There are two parts to this stage, either or both of which may appear in the story. In the first stage, the villain causes some kind of harm, for example carrying away a victim or the desired magical object (which must be then be retrieved). In the second stage, a sense of lack is identified, for example in the hero's family or within a community, whereby something is identified as lost or something becomes desirable for some reason, for example a magical object that will save people in some way. 'Lack' is a deep psychoanalytic principle which we first experience when we realize our individual separation from the world. Lack leads to desire and deep longing and we look to heroes to satisfy this aching emptiness.
2. STRUGGLE: Hero and villain join in direct combat;
Now these are the fairlytale versions of what would happen in our trailer, here is our adaptations.
1. VILLAINY and LACK: In this case the Villiainy is committed, and the girl is taken from the house. The second stage is not far behind, with the mother realsing the girl is gone, this is when she begins to search for her.
'Lack' is a deep psychoanalytic principle which we first experience when we realize our individual separation from the world. Lack leads to desire and deep longing and we look to heroes to satisfy this aching emptiness.
2. STRUGGLE: Here the struggle is not physical as such, it is more of a pschological struggle to follow the "clues" given by the abductor.
The film trailer will not have an ending unlike the theory of Tzvetan Todorov.
His theory was the narrative theory of equilibrium.
- There is an evident equilibrium - Only shown in the actual film, it is too lengthy for the trailer
- This equilibrium is disrupted by someone or an action - The father takes the child.
- This disruption is acknowledged - The Mother can't find the child.
- There is an attempt to restore the equilibrium - The Mother begins to look for the child.
- The state of calm and equilibrium is restored. This one at the end will not be shown in our film trailer because it would completely ruin the idea of trying to entice the viewer into seeing the film, if you show them the end they won't want to go and see the film because they will know what happened.
Claude Levi-Strauss' theory of binary oppositions, that for each character there is an opposite, to put it simply the hero and villain. This also plays a part in our plot with the father as the villain and eventually the mother becoming the hero, but in the trailer the mother is only seen as a slight hero with her fighting to get the child back but not actually found her yet.
Roland Barthes' Enigma codes also play parts in this film trailer, "portrays a mystery to draw an audience in, pose questions and, as such, become intrigued in the piece. For instance, a murder mystery will often not reveal the identity of the murderer until the end of the story, which poses the question "Who is the murderer?" ". This is exactly how we intend to portray our film trailer using 2 of Barthes' 5 codes.
1. The Hermeneutic Code refers to any part of the story that is not fully explained (in this case most of it as it is a teaser trailer and there is not time to be explaining all of the ins and outs of the story) and hence becomes a mystery to the viewer making them want to go and see the actual film.
The full truth is often avoided, for example in:
Snares: deliberately avoiding the truth - Possibly leading the viewer to thinking the girl had been killed or something like that when infact she is still alive and well.
Equivocations: partial or incomplete answers - Such as finding a teddy bear the girl goes nowhere without.
Jammings: openly acknowledge that there is no answer to a problem - Such as when hope is lost after the Mother has looked everywhere she can think of.
The purpose of this is typically to keep the audience guessing, until the final scenes when all is revealed and all loose ends are tied off and closure is achieved, which will not occur in our film trailer.
2. The Proairetic Code builds tension, referring to any other action or event that indicates something else is going to happen, and which gets the reader guessing what will happen next.
The Hermeneutic and Proairetic Codes work as a pair to develop the story's tensions and keep the reader interested. Barthes described them as:
"...dependent on ... two sequential codes: the revelation of truth and the coordination of the actions represented: there is the same constraint in the gradual order of melody and in the equally gradual order of the narrative sequence."
Edward Brannigan's theory of narrative involves the conventional story telling pattern of a media text, mainly film. It is much like Todorov's theory.
1. Introduction and setting of the scene - the opening couple of shots
2. Explaination of affairs
3. Initiating the event - The realisation that the child is missing
4. Emotional response or stating of goal by protagonist - Looking for the child
5. Complicating actions - the following isn't contained in a film trailer
6. Outcome
7. Reactions to out
Representation;
"The ways in which ideas, objects, people, groups and life forms are depicted by the mass media."
"Also a method used by the media to create meanings."
There are two different approaches to representation, political and philisophical.
Charlotte Perkins' theory of sterotypes will be used in our trailer.
1. Some stereotypes are positive - the mother being the "good guy"
2. They are not always that minority groups are less powerful - women are less powerful than men
3. They can be held about one's own group
4. They are not rigid and unchanging - the child being found by the mother making her strong, possibly the fabula.
5. They are not always false - such as the women being weak and not being able to find her child in the trailer, shown in the syuzhet.
In the representation of media there tend to be different gazes. Most widely recognised is the male gaze.
Male gaze- (Laura Mulvey 1975) a feminist reference to the way men look at women, the male being active (the bearer of the look) and the female passive (the image).
Spectator's gaze- the reader of the text.
Intra-diegetic gaze- a character gazes upon an object or another character in the text.
The look of the camera-film producer's gaze.
Extra-diegetic gaze- a textual character consciously addresses (looks at) the viewer, for example, a direct address within a TV drama.
Audience;
When marketing media the audience plays a huge part in how successful a text it, therefore there have been many theories and concepts involving the audience and how to attract the right one. When anticipating the target audience there are many things considered; age, gender, location, socio-economic group, profession, etc. By dividing the audience into social categories, the correct audience for the text can be identified and then targetted appropriately.
Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs - discussions or actions when dealing with or trying to influence an audience
Hypodermic needle/silver bullet - "texts function as a one-directional communication process", and that "audiences play no role interacting with the media texts concerned".
Modelling/copcat theory - the idea that watching a media text is linked to negative behaviour, a theory mostly retained by the press.
Stuart Hall's encoding and decoding theory. The idea that the producers encode the text for the viewer to decode, so that they are understand and percieve the text in their own way. This leads to polysemic texts, which means that they can be read differently by different people, depending on their background and previous experiences. It focus' on how the text is perceived rather than the text itself, the audience is the key to how the text is perceived, therefore every text which has no reader, has no specific meaning.
