Analyse one of your coursework productions in relation to narrative.

I chose to analyse my A2 level music video for this question. My brief at A2 was to create a music promo package with focus on the music video. My video was for the song "No sleep Tonight" by Enter Shikari. The genre for this video was Rock with a hybrid sub-genre of Post Hardcore, Trance-core and Metal-core.

The narrative for my video was based around a man who works for some type of oil company. He wakes up, gets dressed and goes to work, through the day he starts to hallucinate and become stressed, he sees the lead singer from our band (although that is not important to the narrative) in his hallucinations. He heads home after being briefly scared by the man he keeps seeing. As the video progresses he drinks heavily and eventually stumbles out into his garden and collapses, the video then ends. Our narrative does not have a solid storyline or a conclusive ending but holds messages for certain audiences.

 It does however stick to a structure voiced by Russian theorist Todorov. Todorov says that the traditional Hollywood structure of texts consists of an equilibrium, a disruption, an act against the disequilibrium and then ends with another equilibrium. If we apply this theory to my video we can see it meets most of the criteria. At the start of the film the character gets ready and heads to work. This pint could be seen as the equilibrium as there isn't much wrong. While at work the character types, files and answers the phone, these are general things the audience will understand as being part of a job. The character then starts seeing a man and becomes unstable and stressed. This was shown through camera movements (such as steadicam) and fast editing. In Todorov's theory this would be the disruption, causing a state of disequilibrium. According to this theory there should next be an action taken to try and resolve the problem however in our video there isn't one shown clearly. If we looked into it more deeply i could argue that the character drinking alcohol could be an attempt to solve the situation as it was his way of dealing with it, but that wouldn't be clear to the audience. The final stage of this theory is the resolution, or a return to the state of equilibrium. Again this isn't shown clearly in our video as the character dies (implied), but as with previous stages it could be argued that the death of the character is the final step as it partially solves his problem and reinstates the equilibrium. This point links with the theory of Andrew Goodwin, saying that narratives are complex and are open to different interpretations by people form different groups or who have different understandings of society for example the point i made about the oil broker being the villain, this would likely only be picked up on by someone who supports that point.

A theory i found interesting to relate to my media text was that of Claude Lèvi-Strauss. This theorist suggested that narratives have clear opposites, often good and bad, or a protagonist and antagonist. I found this interesting because my video did not have a clear protagonist and antagonist as both characters involved were almost neutral to the audience, but opposing each other. At the end of the video we see the lead band member covering the camera implying that the death of the main character was partially his doing, this could be seen as a negative action making him the antagonist however as he is the main band member and is seen throughout the music video lip synching and performing it would be hard for the audience to see him as an antagonist. Equally we did not see the main character (the businessman) do anything wrong to provoke negative feelings towards him in the video so it would be hard to see him as an antagonist however there is one point where we show an over the shoulder shot of the character's computer with statistics relating to oil on the screen. Due to recent events and the general opinion of lower and middle class groups, those who deal with oil or work as oil brokers are identified as the bad or "villain" characters. This could vaguely show that character as the "bad guy", which is the subtle message i wanted to create when filming my video.

Another theory that does apply to our video is Goodwin's theory that media texts create a star persona. Our video opens with our star (the lead singer from our band) lip synching to our chosen track. Throughout the video we use our star in various performances including him as an actor in the narrative, this helps to create our star persona making him an icon in the video.