Narrative: Teaser Trailer

Tzvetan Todorov proposed the idea that a narrative has 5 distinct transformations through which the story proceeds: These are:

1. The state of equilibrium - all is in order

2. A disruption (disequilibrium) of the ordered state by an event

3. A recognition that a disruption has taken place

4. An attempt to repair the damage of the disruption

5. A return to some kind of equilibrium

It seems that my teaser trailer is almost a perfect example of this media theory, it starts with no problems, the disruption is when the two lads are caught, the recognition is when they realise they've been caught, the attempt to repair the disruption is when the car doors lock and they try to escape. And finally it settles down when they are trapped and the stranger phones the police.

Vladimir Propp

Propp extended the Russian Formalist approach to the study of narrative structure. In the Formalist approach, sentence structures were broken down into analyzable elements, or morphemes, and Propp used this method by analogy to analyze Russian fairy tales. By breaking down a large number of Russian folk tales into their smallest narrative units, or narratemes, Propp was able to arrive at a typology of narrative structures.

He concluded that all the characters could be resolved into 8 broad character types in the 100 tales he analyzed:

1. The villain — struggles against the hero.
2. The dispatcher —character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off.
3. The (magical) helper — helps the hero in the quest.
4. The princess or prize — the hero deserves her throughout the story but is unable to marry her because of an unfair evil, usually because of the villain. the hero's journey is often ended when he marries the princess, thereby beating the villain.
5. her father — gives the task to the hero, identifies the false hero, marries the hero, often sought for during the narrative. Propp noted that functionally, the princess and the father can not be clearly distinguished.
6. The donor —prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical object.
7. The hero or victim/seeker hero — reacts to the donor, weds the princess.
8. False hero — takes credit for the hero’s actions or tries to marry the princess.

These roles could sometimes be distributed among various characters, as the hero kills the villain dragon, and the dragon's sisters take on the villainous role of chasing him. Conversely, one character could engage in acts as more than one role, as a father could send his son on the quest and give him a sword, acting as both dispatcher and donor.

Along with this, Propp discovered that After the initial situation is depicted, the tale takes a sequence of 31 functions. Here you can see a list of these functions.

I feel that just in my short teaser trailer, it is very easy to outline which character is which, e.g. The Hero and villain are the man stopping the lads (hero), and the lads themselves are the villains. The only difference in my film is that it is comedy/spoof so it plays deliberately on these conventions and sometimes even exaggerates them to give more comedic value to the piece.