Applying Narrative Theory To Our Video

For our video, we are going to let our narrative develop the personalitys of our characters. As the guys in the band are constantly trying and failing to impress the girl, the audience is lead to sympathsize with them and root for them, in the same way they would in an underdog situation. The idea for the female character is not that she will be a hate figure, but more so that the audience can understand her initial relutance to the guys.

The narrative itself is set in a "day in the life" style, as it is all done in the space of a day. The progression of time in the day will be shown by a repeated shot of a clock that first features as waking up the lead singer of the band in the morning. Each time it is shown it will have a slightly later time on it. It is a sujective narrative, as we have different characters trying to impress the girl in different ways, as different times. The video is also a bit of highlight of the lead singers star persona, as in Andrew Goodwins theory, as he is the one who eventually gets the girl. It could also be argued as relating to John Stewarts theory, as it could be seen as an aspirational life-style, impressing and getting the girl.

The mise-en-scene will be full of bright colours, and the outside shots will be in theory filmed in good sunlight. Obviously that means our lighting for indoor scenes will need to be bright as well. This reflects in both the narrative and the song itself, which are upbeat and feel-good. As far as the lyrics of the song goes, we generally ignored them but for a few particular lines, for example "Well baby I surrender to the strawberry ice-cream" is accompanied by the sequence as one of the male characters trys to offer the girl an ice-cream, and she just walks off. By doing things like this, it means our video will be illustrative, according to Andrew Goodwins theory, as we are providing a literal representation of the lyrics.

Going back to AS theory, we can apply Propps theory of character roles to our video. We have our "hero" (leader singer), our "helpers" (the rest of the band), and the "princess" (the female character). This shows we have a 'stock' set of characters in our video. Also we can loosely apply Todorov's theory, as we have an equilbrium (band on their own), a disequilbrium (trying to win over the female character), and finally a new equilbrium (the band with the female character).