Earlier this week Rose and I met at the Library to discuss the assignment and see how many of the 24 steps we could get through. As it turned out, we became even more confused leaving than when we entered. While we were able to find am area to focus on (social media and its influence on younger generations) that coincides with our topic of “audience”, we were still unclear on a lot of aspects that we supposed to complete within the first few weeks, like the annotative bibliography.
In the workshop, we were, thankfully, given further explanation as to some of the aspects. For the annotative bibliography, we were given an exercise due next week that required us find 5 separate sources relating to our topic and focus and effectively evaluate them. We needed to evaluate those 5 sources with an overall word count of 1200 words (approx. 240 words per source). This seems to me to be pointless and overwhelming to the students (like myself) who have already found the assignment itself confusing and also have other assignments to complete as well.
In the lectorial we watched the first scene from the “Princess Bride”. The reason for this was to showcase “narrative”. Narrative and stories surrounds us, and puts us through infancy all the way to being old. Stories are everything, and everything is a story. “Narrative is any kind of re-telling of events”. The cause and effect in everything is needed for all story-telling, in character development, plot, and resolution.
Character development takes time – having them just suddenly show up won’t get the audience to know or appreciate them. Frank Underwood in “House of Cards”, gets snubbed for Secretary of State, which is what motivates him for his quest to power. Television is an amazing and interesting way to see how characters develop over an entire season or series. Causality helps a character emerge from the blank canvas and become fully formed.
The Plot is a chronological sequence of an event in the narrative – it is the skeleton of the story, usually relates around action. A person carries out actions and those actions force a character or characters to do things, and eventually we get a….Resolution. This is the natural ending to the plot and narrative. In “Hamlet”, the resolution is made by plot and character reactions (greed, ambition, revenge, etc).
“The stuff of story is alive but intangible” – Robert McKee, “Story”, p. 135. Aristotle’s poetics was the first known attempt at critiquing and analyzing plays, breaking them down into themes and plots. Eventually, we all discovered that all tales and narratives and stories all come from the same root 7 stories.
We then split into pairs to discuss a story we both knew and to map the story according to emotional highs/lows, and another map according to character prominence. We chose “Star Wars”. We noticed how many films seemed to follow a general format and we often expect basic things from most movies e.g. war film if someone pulls out a picture of a loved one(s) then they will die. Some films like to play directly with these expectations by doing something different, but still, no story is truly original.
A non-narrative (no story at all) is debated as to even its existence. One film is just 45 minutes of zooms, and another film is just 8 hours of slow-motion footage of the empire state building. The character “Don Quixote” within his own book doesn’t like the narrative he was given by the author and tries to make his own. We were then shown a short film called “We have decided not to die”, which is several clips of people dying, then reversing their deaths, and then avoiding them. We were then split into pairs to talk about parts that would make us think its a narrative and parts that make us think its a non-narrative.
Narrative:
- Broken up into different parts and they were clearly labled
- It seemed that they were different stories of preventing/avoiding death
- Has a sequential process
Non-Narrative:
- Repetition
- Fast-forwardness
- Lack of cohesion
- Slow motion
This lectorial was interesting, yet I am still worried that they are still not explaining the complicated assignment.