Apply the concept of narrative to your media product.

Narrative is the 'story' in a piece of media. Bordwell and Thomson said that narrative was "a chain of events in a cause and effect relationship occurring in time.". Our film opening was a historical drama called 'Because of Them'. 'Because of Them' flips back and forth in time, showing the life of a suffragette and a woman from the modern day. Our narrative involves our modern day character learning about the suffragette's life and learning to appreciate the rights that she has. The main events occur in the past and get found out by the person in the future.

Todorov believes that the narrative of a film begins with an equilibrium, there was then a disruption to the equilibrium, before equilibrium was restored again or a new equilibrium is formed. We did not reach the disruption stage of the narrative in our opening. However, if we were to make the entire film, then we would conform to Todorov's narrative theory. This is because our film involves going back and forth in time and we felt that this could get confusing for the audience. Therefore, having a simple narrative like Todorov suggests would make the film easier for audiences to understand. 

On the other hand, Levi-Strauss developed the theory of binary oppositions. This is a theory that we decided to conform to. We did this to emphasise the difference between past and present (which are binary oppositions themselves). For example we had black and white footage in the past and colour footage in the present. Another opposition we had was men and women and the men in the past had more power than the women, so there was also the opposition of power and weakness. This binary opposition was vital to our narrative because we were focussing on women's rights. 

Propp developed the idea of 'stock characters' and he claims that all films have certain characters in their narrative. For example, a hero, villain, helper and damsel. We decided to challenge this because we wanted our main characters to be in control of the narrative and we did not want lots of other characters. We also subverted this because we decided to have female protagonists rather than males. This was something that we did deliberately and was very important to our film because we wanted to focus on feminism and women's suffrage. 

Finally, Bathes developed the theory of enigma codes. We conformed to this theory because we did not reveal too much information in the opening of the film. We ensured that the audience did not know exactly what was going on but knew enough to develop an interest in what's happening. We had some big questions that the audiences would ask as well as small ones. For example, 'Who is the woman in the photograph?' or 'Why are some shots in black and white and some in colour?'. These are all questions that keep the audience interested and make them want to continue watching.