Narrative theory (Miss Georgiou)

Within media there are three theories that exist. The men that created these theories are Propp, Todorov and Aristotle. Each came up with an idea of what they feel are most important with in a film in order to make it sucessful and connect to the audeince effectively.

The first of the theories is Propp's. His follows the idea of a fairy tale in order to create a sucessful film and said that the main importance was the character roles involved. He said that many characters had to be involved within the film for the film to be effective and relate to a wider audience as each character brings out eachother and end up working together to defeat the one character who didnt fit in with the story and peace within the films narrative. However in a thriller to create more suspense it is often that even when in a large group, to be targeted the victim is targeted alone to make them seem weaker and more vulnerable so our film goes against Propp's theory.

The second theory was Todorov's. He believed that the narrative was the most important and used the ideas of an equiblibriums involved within each one. He believed that the story began with a normal everyday scenario, something happened in the middle to make the scenario out of the ordinary before being resolved by the end of the film, returning the film to normal.

Finally the third was the theory of Aristotle. He emphasised the importance of themes within films as he stated that empathy and the emotions felt by an audience determined the sucess rate of a film.

My group, after creating our storyboard decided that the theory most effective to our storyline was Aristotles's. This is as the sucess rate of a thriller film is measured on the shock, suprise and suspense within. This idea is the same within our film as although we need a good narrative to make people engaged and interested within our film due to our film ending with an enigma we liked the sense of mystery within our thriller rather than a clear solveable narrative. We mostly relied on the shock of our thriller through the twist in the storyline and the realistic story of our central charcater to relate to the audience before introducing the poltergeist to create a mutual sense of empathy.