Story is everything!
A narrative consists of cause and effect, it is the logical progression of events that contribute to a film and make it worth watching. Causality is key to telling a story. Character A eats radioactive material (somehow), then has superpowers, then decides to save the world, then finds evil. Really basic, but you get the point. All narratives have to progress, progression makes the film interesting, if nothing happens to the characters, the plot will come to a fizzle and the audience will lose interest.
There are three aspects that contribute to any story.
- Character development
- Plot
- Resolution
First characters need to be established. The film needs to tell the audience who this character is, what they do, reasons to like them or not. The film needs to make the audience react in a certain way to a character. For instance, at the beginning of Harry Potter, you are intrigued and fascinated by who this small boy is and why he is so important. It makes the audience empathise with Harry, making the audience want to find out more about him throughout the film. Establishing characters is important in order to make the audience feel absorbed into the film, allowing them to follow what is happening.
The plot does not necessarily have to be in chronological sequence, but it has to make sense. Plots don’t have to lay out everything for the audience, but they can’t be so vague that the film loses any meaning as well as the attention of the audience. Similarly, a resolution does not have to be a good end. Ending on a happy ending can be great, but it can be cliche. It’s often more entertaining to push the limits of what the audience can handle, rather than playing it safe.
There was also an interesting concept discussed in this weeks blog that talks about how there is no such thing as an original idea. It got me thinking about this short film that talks about how ‘Everything is a Remix’. It talks about the way that we all take ideas from somewhere else and make it our own, we put our own spin on old tales or implement small ideas that we may pluck out from a larger piece of work. It got me thinking about trying to come up with new ideas. Often we get so caught up, thinking that we have to come up with some original idea that no one has seen or heard of before. But thats the thing, it’s ok to implement another persons ideas as long as you make them your own. You shouldn’t have the mindset that you need to come up with an idea that is completely unheard of, it’s ok to mix and match, put different things together that interest you. It’s this art of ‘remixing’ the allows new ideas to flourish and be turned into fresh concepts or material that hasn’t been seen. To ‘remix’ is to put your own spin on something, to make it your own, you are not simply copying ideas, rather you are being motivated by them.
Although ‘non-narratives’ are seen to contain no story, it is evident that most things have some kind of story or message behind them. For example, in the short film, ‘We have decided not to die’, it may seem like there is a lack of cohesion and therefore, no story can be obtained from such experimental material. However, when you break down all the elements of this film you see that there is a cyclical and thematic similarity between the images and characters, suggesting that there is a connection and journey between all three characters in the film. In the film there is a common theme of ‘escape’, escaping a situation such as jumping away to miss a car crash, or crashing through the window to escape from reality. These situations provide both a literal understanding to the phrase, ‘We have decided not to die’, but also a symbolic one that perhaps suggests liberty and freedom. It proposes that this ‘freedom’ can be found from going against the wishes of others, finding yourself and being free from the constraints that hold us back from the things we love. Perhaps this is me reading to deeply into what may have been simply an experimental film, but you can see that although it may not always be clear at first, most things always present some kind of story.
This discussion reflects the need to focus more on the story rather than equipment or fancy visuals. Amazing visuals cannot always substitute a poorly written storyline. If the story is not there, then the audience will not engage with the film and overall the film will not be able to connect with an audience. Therefore, it is important to remember that when creating films, Story is everything.
