Analyse one of your coursework productions in relation to narrative

In this essay I will be looking at narrative in relation to one of the media products that I have previously created. Tim O Sullivan said that all media tells a story, or includes a narrative that is there for the audience to interpret. I will look at it in comparison to the Music Video I created as part of my A2 Portfolio. The song that I selected was Save The World (Tonight) by Dance group Swedish House Mafia. I will look at 5 theorists who have opinions on narrative and then relate these to my product.

Todorov said that most media products generally go through the same cycle – equilibrium, disruption, recognition of disruption, action against it and then back to an equilibrium. In our music video we followed a cycle that was similar to this, with our main character starting the story in a college, listening to a lecture. It then goes onto to him aspiring to be a superhero, this would be the disruption, then cutting to him putting on a costume with distinct superhero conventions, with this being the recognition of the disruption. The story then moves on to him acting like a superhero, with him saving a woman being mugged and a man about to be ran over. This would be the action against a disruption and then at the end of the video it shows him back in college revising, meaning that the equilibrium has been restored. We decided to use this after watching a video by Jason Derulo and his song What If, where he starts by moving into a new house, and is looking at a photograph, and then going through a whole host of emotions and ends up back at the same house, looking at the same photograph.

Levi-Strauss said that media products usually include binary oppositions. This could be good vs. bad, man vs. woman or love vs. hate. You see this in many genres of music video, from dance, which was our genre, through to rock e.g. ‘Damned If I Do Ya’ by All Time Low, showing that him and his girlfriend are portrayed as the bad guys, while his parents and band mates are the good guys, fighting on a reality show. In our music video we had binary oppositions, showing that the main character was part of the ‘good’ side and when he was fighting the criminal was part of the ‘bad’ side. This was the easily recognisable part of the video and the binary opposites that most people will see, but binary oppositions could be seen with him being disillusioned with school and him and the teachers being opposites.

Propp had similar ideas, but portrayed these in a different way. He said that all media products must have ‘stock characters’, which will be people in the narrative that people will recognise due to them being a mainstay in these products. In certain genres you see certain characters, like in dance music you would expect to see a main character, which is central to the music video, for example, and in a pop video you’d expect to have a narrative including an antagonist, protagonist and possibly someone who needs to be rescued. For example in TGIF by Katy Perry, the protagonist is the geeky guy at the part, the antagonist is the member of the football team and the person needing to be rescued is Katy Perry’s character in the video. In our music video we had all three of these things, with the antagonist being either the criminal who tries to attack the woman, or the man who is driving without looking and nearly hitting that man crossing the road. The protagonist would be the ‘superhero’ in our video, as he ends up saving the two people who are in danger. It also has someone needing to be rescued, mentioned above, the woman being attacked, or the man who would have been ran over.

Andrew Goodwin said that narrative is complex, and that it usually includes some sort of intertextual reference, either to another genre or to another piece of real media. A good example of a video that does that is Blink 182 and their video for All The Small Things, where they parody the video of Backstreet Boys ‘I Want It That Way’. They are able to do this because it means that their target audience will already have some understanding, due to them seeing that the conventions that they’ve used are becoming more blurred and that there is humour being used in these videos. Our video didn’t use any intertextuality of other real media products, but did use parts of other genres, for example when we were in the recording studio, the instruments that we used were more suited to a rock video than a dance one, meaning that we were able to challenge the normal conventions of these videos.

Sven Carlsson said that a music video can be put into two groups, either performance or conceptual. This would mean that in certain genres, like Heavy Metal, you would expect to see almost all of the video with the band in it, and seeing very little narrative, whereas in a dance video you would expect to see a lot of narrative (conceptual) and very little actual performance. An example of a video that is almost all conceptual is Levels by Avicii, where the whole video is based around a man in an office who starts dancing erratically. The opposite end of the spectrum is in a video like Weightless by All Time Low, which has a small bit of narrative at the beginning and a small part at the end, but the rest is of the band playing, with snippets of crowd footage and other related shots. In our video we had a lot of narrative and only small parts of performance, with that coming in the recording studio. With our video being conceptual we were able to create a deeper meaning than we could if we were doing it the other way, with it being more performance based.