Narrative Theories Research

Narrative is the telling of a story, which is important because it tells the audience what exactly is going on throughout the story, a narrative can be found describing fictional or non-fictional events. In media terms, narrative is the coherence/organisation given to a series of facts. The human mind needs narrative to make sense of things. We connect events and make interpretations based on those connections. In everything we seek a beginning, a middle and an end. We understand and construct meaning using our experience of reality and of previous texts. Each text becomes part of the previous and the next through its relationship with the audience.
To find more about this check here; http://www.mediaknowall.com/as_alevel/alevkeyconcepts/alevelkeycon.php?pageID=narrative

There are three different parts of the first narrative theory these are; equilibrium, disequilibrium and a new state of equilibrium. These are the stages that a character go through, the first equilibrium is what the character or characters start off as, the next disequilibrium is what drastically goes wrong for the character to begin to start changing his ways and the third theory a new state of equilibrium is how the character has changed. For example a film like 'Transporter 2' the character begins as a basic chauffeur working for a rich family and he is treated like the family by the mother and child, the second part then kicks in where the child that he is chaperoning for is kidnapped under his watch, this starts to bring in emotions in to the character which then allows the last part to kick in which is the new state of equilibrium, the character because of the kidnapping now becomes a unstoppable force hunting for the kidnappers, this is a complete change of character. After the new state of equilibrium the character may sometimes return back to how they used to be, however sometimes it is a large change and it now becomes their type of personality and the third part becomes the first part.

When creating an opening scene for a film I believe that the first theory must be used this tells us what the characters personality is like at the beginning of the film, this gives us a brief description or narrative about whether the character is a hero or a villain. The best theory is equilibrium because it is good for an opening where as the other theories tend to kick in over short period of time through out the movie, this brings us to the storyline of the film as it is usually determined by these theories.

Bibliography
Information for the first paragraph from http://www.mediaknowall.com/

Filmography
Transporter 2      (2005)     Director: Louis Leterrier