Take Me Out

After watching this weeks episode of Take Me Out, I noticed that there was a man at the end that also dressed as a woman. The fact that all the women turned their lights off when they saw this transformation shows that maybe society still does not accept this especially in terms of dating. This is what our narrative is about for our music video, but with ours the boy keeps this identity secret from his girlfriend which again represents the fact that he is hiding from society and is afraid of showing his true identity.

Change of Narrative

We have decided to change our narrative due to the male actor that we needed for it, not turning up. So because of this we have made some adjustments to our narrative which is now about a transvestite getting ready to meet his girlfriend. We are going to keep this a surprise until the end, so to achieve this we need to show extreme close ups of the male putting on make up and getting dressed. We might do shots of the back of him too. He is going to be in a relationship with a girl even though he still dresses up as a girl. We thought this would be good to reflect the fact that people should not judge relationships.

For the performance part of the video we are going to have Michaela lip syncing in a dress with a white background. Then to contrast this we might have her dressed in jeans and a baggy jumper with a black background. This is because we want to hint our narrative to the audience so by having her dressed more girly for one bit and then dressed down and looking more like a boy in the next bit, this will hint to the audience what is going on, even if the audience does not get it. We also want to include the boy's transformation to a girl by showing him walking towards the camera and gradually changing. This will be done with editing which is similar to the Tia Maria advert below:

Narrative Theory

These are some definitions of Narrative Theory that I found on this website:http://www.mediaknowall.com/as_alevel/alevkeyconcepts/alevelkeycon.php?pageID=narrative


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.

Narrative Conventions:
When unpacking a narrative in order to find its meaning, there are a series of codes and conventions that need to be considered. When we look at a narrative we examine the conventions of:

• Genre
  
• Character
  
• Form
  
• Time
  and use knowledge of these conventions to help us interpret the text. In particular, Time is something that we understand as a convention - narratives do not take place in real time but may telescope out (the slow motion shot which replays a winning goal) or in (an 80 year life can be condensed into a two hour biopic). Therefore we consider "the time of the thing told and the time of the telling." (Christian Metz Notes Towards A Phenomenology of Narrative).

Roland Barthes describes a text as
"a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can read, they are indeterminable...the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language..." (S/Z - 1974 translation).

What he is basically saying is that a text is like a tangled ball of threads which needs unravelling so we can separate out the colours. Once we start to unravel a text, we encounter an absolute plurality of potential meanings. We can start by looking at a narrative in one way, from one viewpoint, bringing to bear one set of previous experience, and create one meaning for that text. You can continue by unravelling the narrative from a different angle, by pulling a different thread if you like, and create an entirely different meaning. And so on. An infinite number of times. If you wanted to.

Narrative Structures:
There are many ways of breaking down narrative structure. You may hear a movie described as a "classic Hollywood narrative", meaning it has three acts. News stories have their own structure. A lot of work has been done by literary theorists to develop ways of deconstructing a narrative.

Tvzetan Todorov - suggests narrative is simply equilibrium, disequilibrium, new equilibrium
Vladimir Propp - characters and actions (31 functions of character types)
Claude Levi-Strauss - constant creation of conflict/opposition propels narrative. Narrative can only end on a resolution of conflict. Opposition can be visual (light/darkness, movement/stillness) or conceptual (love/hate, control/panic), and to do with soundtrack. Binary oppositions.