Question 1d – Narratological analysis of music video

I chose to incorporate Todorov’s three act structure into my narrative. I wanted to create the
fictional part of my story as a simple, equilibrium-disequilibrium-new equilibrium structured
narrative as this is the simplest form of story to understand. By creating a simple and easy to cohere
to narrative, I felt I was able to manipulate this narratological stereotype and start to branch off
from it. The initial disequilibrium was the hopelessness of the character finding love, the
disequilibrium was played put through the giving of the flower and the discovery of the photo,
unsettling this hopelessness and finally the new equilibrium was the new heir of hope that came
from bumping into the past lover. The music video itself features this as a narreme, which is used to
describe the unit or structure of the narrative. The idea of hopelessness of finding love was the
predominate theme of the fictional side of my music video and this was what created the three-act
structure that is developed through the music video. However, I chose to encapsulate this narrative
within a wider narrative. The narrative of the live performers, while the fictional side of the narrative
is a closed structured storyline, was created to be an open structured narrative where we don’t see
the consequences nor the build-up. Essentially, we are seeing the inciting moment of the story. The
group have planned to create a music video and a song, and then after creating it have chosen to
distribute it, however we only see the story in
it’s creative phase where they have produced
the final version of the entire project; while we
can infer this we never see this. I chose to show
this through the amateur aesthetic of the piece
as to suggest that these youths have pre
planned and created the entire thing alone,
and I also chose to use the final shot of the lead
singer looking back onto the set, depicting the
relief of finally brining all of their ideas
together and creating something.

I like to believe that my video has three hierarchical layers to it. First, the least important and most
basic layer being the build up of a relationship between the lead male and the female; this acted as a
narrative device to reveal the second layer. The second layer being the synchronisation of the two
parts of the same person. This is pushed forth by the conflict of finding this girl and we see a journey
move forward of one person relining his thoughts onto the same path and the positivity that comes
from a congruent thought pattern. Finally, both of these layers give context to the narrative of the
band members. This layer is the most important aspect of the music video, while it may not be
instantly perceived that way, the initial layers of the narrative are a product of what these young
people have created, and this creativity is what acts as the largest but subtle narreme of the story.
The ultimate narrative is an open structure narrative showing what young people can create-
therefore it houses the first two layers. It would thus appear that my music video has three strong
narremes- love and desire, completion within the synchronisation of the character’s mind, and this
overall theme of creativity, all of which forming a domino effect; the love of the girl brings together
the mind of the main boy which concludes the story that the band has created.

Within the fictional narrative, this idea of hopelessness mirrored by a hopefulness links into the
ideas of Jack Derrida, a French philosopher, who popularised the theory of deconstruction. He
suggested that we as consumers understand something because of what it isn’t. What later came
from this theory was Claude Levi-Strauss’ theory of binary opposition, because by understanding
what something isn’t we start to look at pairs of opposites within binaries, therefore breeding the
theory of binary opposition. I looked at developing a binary opposition with the ideas of hope and
futility. Audiences understand the lack of hope because of its opposite and they can furthermore
follow the journey from a lack of hope to a hopeful ending, because of the simplicity within that
move. This journey of a change in binaries is also depicted through the journey of the two different
characters that prove to be the same person.

The division of the two characters represents the ideas of hopelessness because of the divergence of
the two parts of one character. This unrest for the character as individuals is then protested by the
coming together of the two tracks that his mind is taking- while we see the friction to start with,
their correspondence together, once meeting the girl that is in the photo, represents that this
person’s mind itself has moved from being out of sync to then working in harmony. This links to the
lyrics of the song where we see this friction and negativity from both the two segments of this one
person as individuals but the synergy of the two form this positive and hopeful outcome, again
directly representing the binary opposition of positive and negative. Anagnorisis was a term that
Aristotle coined, which he describes as ‘A change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or
hate between the person’s destined by the poet for the good or bad fortune.’ This can be used to
describe the unknowing nature of having a split story to start with; we see two different versions of
the same person, which was visualised by the use of, (or lack of) glasses, performing two different
routines. The ignorance of their relevance to each other is matched by the change to an acquainted
understanding of their relationship allowing for the themes of friction in one’s thoughts and the final
fortune of their lack of hope to develop into a hopeful situation backs up this idea. However, this
sudden change also crosses over to the ideas of peripeteia- this describes the notion of a sudden
change of fortune and the sudden presence of the girl which changes the character’s fortune is very
relevant to this description.

I also used specific narrative devices to move along the story and pre-
empt the nature of the ending. I chose to use a very cliché story line of
a boy feeling lost and lonely to then meeting a girl and feeling
complete, therefore I felt it appropriate to use cliché tokens within my
video. I felt that I was able to use a cliché story because of the nature of
the video- the focus wasn’t on the relationship between the boy and
the girl. The use of a photo creates a clear and cohesive link to the girl,
acting as an object that reveals an already established relationship
between the characters of the lead male and the female. Mirroring this
concept, I also used the flowers as a narrative device to reinforce this
point. The flowers contained a person’s initials and when the picture
and the flowers come together with again another narrative device,
which is the phone call at the end, all three help give context to the
ending. The picture is directly associable with the girl and the initials are
in reference to the greeting that the girl, Amy uses in the phone call-
‘Yes this is Amy Maine’. The use of flowers and a photo of a girl has
strong connotations of love and togetherness and Henry Jenkins
suggests that audiences, as textual poachers, will take meanings based on their own experiences
with other texts, which reinforces the images created by these narrative devices.

Although I wanted to house one narrative within another, I also wanted to blur the lines between
the two narratives slightly by having crossovers between the apparent fictional world and the real
world. I specifically did this at the point where the lead starts singing, and his singing is continued by
the character in the fictional world that the story is set. I do this
again at the point where the character is in the taxi- (01:11
(screenshot to left) the singer has a conversation with the
character which again distorts an audiences’ perception of reality
and fiction within my video. By disrupting this it also starts to
disrupt Todorov’s three act structure, but still allows it to survive
within the realms of my story.

One of my biggest inspirations in the narratological development of my music video was a theatre
practitioner named Bertolt Brecht. He used various techniques that worked to distance an audience
from the sympathetic side of the story. One way he did this was by telling the end of the story at the
start of a production. A study from the
University of California (pictured left) suggests
that an audience enjoy a text more if they
already know the ending of a story. However,
Brecht’s reasoning was that an audience
aren’t as emotionally shocked when they are
faced with a sudden change in the plot. I
aimed to create a focus on the overall
narreme of my narrative, and by following
Brecht’s techniques I was able to disassociate
an audience from the emotional side of love
and mind synchronisation and allow them to
think more about the real aspects of my film
and take away the overall themes of youth creativity. One technique I chose to use was this idea of
revealing the ending before it happened. This was why I chose to use a cliché style story as an
audience could already guess the ending and didn’t feel as connected to that side of the story. I also
chose to show the band members that played the characters prior to them appearing in the fictional
story. They were dressed in the same costume which initially suggested that they were going to
appear in the story somewhere. This pre-empting of the characters means an audience aren’t
surprised when a new character enters the story. This also links into my use of multirole. This being a
prominent technique of Brecht’s to distance an audience from building relationships with specific
characters, I chose to use it in a similar fashion to disallow an audience build relationships with the
fictional characters and instead see them as what I initially presented them as- real people in a band.

The idea of housing a narrative within another narrative was also shown with the containment of the
music video. The cyclical nature of the video, with the exit from the shed being the opening of the
video and the entrance back into the shed being the finale of the music video, has connotations of a
jack in the box or something similar that represents the nature of taking something out to enjoy It
and then putting it back when it’s finished. This containment makes an audience feel more reassured
and homely as it almost gives the audience the power to control the music video, as well as emitting
nostalgic feelings of youth and playfulness. It also starts to create this china doll paradox, where we
see a story housed within a story that is contained within a small space.