Within this essay I am going to discuss how we applied
narrative theories to our final production in the advanced portfolio. The video
my group and I looked at was Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’.
Knowing that the video fell under the indie genre category
but not quite knowing the conventions of the genre, we were first tasked with
looking into existing media texts to understand how narrative was conveyed onto
audiences, so we could have a grasp of what to expect ourselves. One of the
videos we looked at was The Strokes ‘Someday’. The video was about living life
in the moment, it was based around the bands everyday life, which ended up
being centred heavily around a club where they would drink and smoke a lot. The
use of cigarettes, drinking and gambling were all used represent this theme. As
a group we liked the thought of using symbolic codes and enigmas to help drive
the narrative. For example, as our video was very much centred about overcoming
loss we had shot our video is an isolated location to show how after Laura’s
passing how alone Will really was.
Having looked at Barthes’ symbolic code, which suggests that there is a
great deal of symbolism within narrative text, we were then inspired to include
these moments of ‘symbolism’ within out own video. We also juxtaposed the scene
of the candle in Will’s room with the shot of the clothes on the floor to
symbolise the intimacy between the couple without using any explicit content.
In addition, we looked at Andrew Godwin’s theory that music videos are simply
extensions of the lyrics. We put theory into action within the scene where Will
is playing Laura a song and she interrupts him for her own personal gain. At
the same time the lyrics play ‘but you don’t really care for music do ya?’ this
was a key narrative moment as it showed how she did not care for Will’s talent
or commitment she was just using him for her own enjoyment.
Being around at a time where conventions are constantly
being challenged, we thought this was a good narrative prompt as it flipped the
stereotypical gender roles within a heterosexual relationship as normally the
male is the sexually driven counterpart but here the female is the culprit.
This rejects Levi Strauss’ theory of binary opposites one how males and females
socialise within relationship as women are usually quite moral in their actions
and the males are the outgoing. This challenged the conventional stereotypes of
relationships but conformed to the more recent music videos e.g. The Kooks
‘Naïve’ where the female sleeps with every guy in the club and ED Sheeran’s ‘A
Team’ music video where the video is based around a hooker. In challenging the
conventions within indie narratives, we have created a negative reputation of females
as they are now sexually impulsive.
Where narrative structure is concerned we made sure we
adhered to Todorov’s narrative theory where there is an equilibrium –
disequilibrium – equilibrium (but things are not the same). This was a
stylistic choice as we thought it would be easier for our audience to follow a
set storyline. The choice to follow this structure also helped us conform to
the conventions of a folk music narrative (a subgenre within the indie genre)
as folk music videos usually tell very simple narratives that are easy for
audiences to follow. Within narrative theory there are 5 codes introduced by
Barthes. These are the enigma, action, semantic and symbolic codes. To keep our
audience interested we wanted to make sure we had used the enigma code. For
example, there is a scene where Laura is our getting drunk on her own and it
begs the question for the audience as to ‘what she will do next?’ and ‘how will
with affect Will?’. We showed our friends the video we had produced, and they
liked the way the narrative portrayed the woman in the more dominant role as it
helped push forward the change in conventions. This links to the hypodermic
needle theory as the audience has established the link between the way in which
the narrative played out and gender stereotypes.
To conclude, I believe that in our advanced portfolio we
were able to create a music video that stuck to the traditional narrative
conventions to appeal to our audience whilst using narrative codes to apply
layers of meaning to the video and that these symbolisms were easily decodable
for the audience. Overall, I am pleased at how creative we have been able to be
as a group when producing the video and this could not have been possible
without our extensive knowledge of narrative theories and media texts.
