So in this lectorial, the focus seemed to be on structure of stories. I wasn’t to unfamiliar with this, having rigorously overanalyzed it last year, but I was interested in finding out if there were things I could learn from this. Dan spoke about narrative and causality and used humorous examples in the slides, reducing the characters on screen to broken down English.

It got me thinking, why is it that someone not being able to speak English proficiently makes everyone laugh? Perhaps its because we expect better of western-conceived characters such as Winnie the Pooh and what not. It also kind of looked stupid, which is probably also somewhat of a factor. I don’t know. Just a side thought.

We did an interesting exercise as well where we were asked to break down narratives of a story of our choice in small groups. This I thought was particularly interesting as it felt as if every narrative our group could think of progressed in a similar way. I think that says something about the appeal of popular movies; we kind of expect them to go in a separate direction to that of the classic structure, but it ends up the same in a way.

This structure explains why the short film Dan showed us afterwards, called “We Have Chosen Not To Die”, was so unnerving to all attending the lecture. It was one of those classic “artsy”-type films that basically has been scripted to go out to try to do things completely differently to that of classic popular film structure. If I’m honest, I don’t think the film resonated with me. It never got to any sort of climax and seemed to just exist and not really get better despite the time structure that the film was constructed on (although minimally). I’m all for making alternative content, I try to do it all the time. But this was really wack to me. A friend of mine who sat next to me said, when discussing the film, “I’m a creative sort of guy, but I’m definitely not that sort of artsy. It doesn’t work like that for me.”

I have to agree with him on that one.