What are the differences between a teaser trailer and a theatrical trailer?

TEASER TRAILER




We can see that in this trailer nothing of the plot is given away, it firstly shows footage from the first movie and how it was a such a phenomanon that a sequel was demanded, and this clip also shows reaction from the audience, which theatrical trailers don't.
Also, another feature of this trailer is that it doesn't give a date as to when it will hit box offices it just tells you what the name is and where you can go to research it. I think this trailer can get away with it because of the sheer amount of hype that came after the first one was released. In teaser trailers the plot is nearly never told, it relys on the audience to piece together what may or is happening.




THEATRICAL TRAILER



In this trailer, we see a substaitial amount more than the teaser trailer, it gives away plenty of the plot to show a basic idea of what the film is about and to introduce us to the main protaganist and supposed villians.
Also, the idea that this is a theatrical trailer means that the time that the trailer is to be shown must be longer than a teaser trailer so that the audience can dip thier toes in and know enough to want to see it.
Also, at the end we see the intertitles "This Year The Battles Comes To Earth" at the end spaced out in frames, this could be used as the films tagline and also uses a pragmatic on what genre of film this is (if you didn't get it from the films visuals", it also ends giving us the name of the film "THOR". Thor is known mainly for being the Norse God of lightining but this Thor has been adapted by Marvel many years ago so Marvel film buffs and fans will alreday know what the film will be about, but for the lesser audience who don't they have to gove away enough drama and action to make them interested which is very common in all theatrical trailers.

The Spare Room Movie Poster Original Image

This is the image I used and edited for my movie poster, on Photoshop I pixelated the image more so that more of the red,blue and green lines were visible as if the quality of the video camera or the T.V the still came from was of poor standards.

Empire Magazine Original Image

I used this image for My Empire Magazine front cover, the only uses of editing I put in this ismage are that I flipped the image and darkened the sky. 

The Spare Room Movie Poster and Empire Magazine Front Cover Original Draft

I feel I became quite close with what I wanted to achieve with my ancillary tasks so I wouldn't change

the ending result and I was very confident with my first drafts.

Empire Magazine The Dark Knight Front Cover

Empire Batman, a photo by JoshBatch2009 on Flickr.

Empire Magazine Captain America

Empire Magazine Captain America, a photo by JoshBatch2009 on Flickr.

Total Film Inception

Total Film Inception, a photo by JoshBatch2009 on Flickr.

Planning Material

Location of shoot:  Hopton


Props needed for shoot:  Lewis's House, Kelly's Car, Power Tools, Fake Blood, Pitchfork, Harry's handy-cam.


People needed: Me, Harry, Lewis and Kelly.
We can always have one person out of the 4 on camera as the maximum amount of people we will have in a shot will be 3.


Shooting Schedule:  Monday from 1pm til 4pm. Wednesday morning (Me, Harry and Kelly) driving shots.

How Are Women Represented In Horror?



Consumer?



Domestic?

Familial?



Sexual?



"The final girl is a thriller and horror film (particularly slasher film) trope that specifically refers to the last woman or girl alive to confront the killer, ostensibly the one left to tell the story. The final girl has been observed in dozens of films, including Halloween^[1], Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Hellraiser, Alien and Scream. The term was coined ^[2] by Carol J. Cloverin her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.^[3] Clover suggests that in these films, the viewer begins by sharing the perspective of the killer, but experiences a shift in identification to the final girl partway through the film." --Wikipedia, 07/04/2011

We watched three horror films over the course of this term, they were:

1. Halloween (1978-Dir. John Carpenter)
2. The Shining (1980-Dir. Stanley Kubrick)
3. Eden Lake (2008-Dir. James Watkins)

We can see in the three films how the "final girl" is portrayed.

In The Shining and Halloween both the final girls are androgynous, as in the sense that they are not girly girls who will keep an eye on their appearance but will often cover up most of their body. In The Shining Wendy wears a long sleeved turtle-neck jumper and a very long skirt with tights, Laurie wears high waisted trousers and a monotone jumper, so we can see that neither of them vocalise's their sexuality to the audience.

However, in Eden Lake Jenny is put into a more voyeuristic view for the audience. She often is shown wearing her bikini whilst sun bathing, we are even put into the eyes of Brett staring at Jennies breasts through some binoculars but within her realising that she is being seen in this way she covers herself up so we are then made to feel perverse.

Whereas in Halloween Annie, Lynda and Judith are not cautious of who they are being seen by and in result of this are killed, Lynda is killed after she has had sex with her boyfriend because from the distraction of sex she is not aware of Mike Myers presence. Annie is killed after parading round in a shirt and underwear which Mike Myers was attracted to because of how he killed his sister Judith. Laurie however does not die in this film, she is baby sitting her neighbors so she takes on a familial role, she moves the narrative forward with curiosity, and out of all the women in the film she seems to be the most virginal and doesn't explore sexuality.

It is often come across that horror takes a conservative view on sex out of wed-lock, that if you have sex you WILL die, so whenever a androgynous female is presented you can usually tell that she will be the final girl.

In The Shining the first scene we see with Wendy involves her sitting in the kitchen at home looking after her son Danny, so immediately she takes on a domestic and familial role which she carries out for the rest of the film.
Now a counter argument for Wendy being the final girl is that she is very weak and frail and will be picked off first, but that is used to throw off the male audience as that is the predominant audience of horrors.
Even at the inn Wendy is doing all of the cooking, cleaning and keeping the inn in check and it is evident that she doesn't know how to defend herself properly because in the scene where Jack is threatening Wendy on the stairs she wields a baseball bat and lunges it at Jack. In no way in this film does she put herself in a vouyeristic situation as she covers herself up and doesn't show any sexual urges toward Jack. 


In Eden Lake, we see quite the opposite with Jennie almost throughout the entirety of the film, even when she is running away from Brett's group she wears a low cut dress and she is running and wet, but we do see a small part of familialism in the movie as Greg's plan in the film is to propose to Jennie and she does agree when he is near death so this is also another time when she shows a family role, we also see it when she clutches the boy that she killed and starts crying, she seems to be holding him like a son.


The interesting thing is that Jennie (we assume) dies from the family of the young boys whereas the more androgynous virginal females (Laurie and Wendy) who took on a family role in the entire film survive.

Why Having A Blog Is Easier...

I find it better to have our coursework be done online on a blog, for several reasons.

1. It is easier to see where you left off, with the draft saver and you can see what you did last.
2. It is much more appealing with the use of embedding videos, changing the colour of the text and uploading JPEGs.
3. It feels more personal and unique so then the teacher and examinator don't seem to be reading the same thing numerous times.
4. The use of multiple technology is skillbuilding and gives you accsess to a more open approach.

The Spare Room Official Trailer

This is what all this blogging and weeks of intensive work has led up too.
ENJOY.

Ancillary Task: Film Magazine

Ancillary Task: Movie Poster

How Did You Use New Media Technologies In The Construction and Research, Planning and Evaluation Stages?

Technology a photo by JoshBatch2009 on Flickr.

The Technology I used to make, edit and finalize 'The Spare Room'

For our pre-production, we made a horror movie survey on Survey Monkey that we then posted on popular social networking sites such as Tumblr and Facebook, this was so we could get our survey out to a wider audience, our target audience so we could capture and record what they wanted to see and what made horror movies click to them.

For filming we used the Sony recording cameras that are available in college, these had built in microphones so we were able to record all the diegetic sound and also to record the voiceovers for our shots and intertitles and just selected the audio tracks on Final Cut Pro.

For our soundtrack me and Harry used a Roland VS-2480 mixing desk with a Blackstar amp to record guitar and bass, the microphones we used to capture the acoustic, electric and bass guitar were an SM57 Dynamic Microphone and a AKG NT2a as these have a cardiod polar pattern so they only pick up the sounds from the front and reject any background noise that we didn't want. I have been a Music Technology student for both AS and A2 so I knew how to work the desk and how to record and capture the needed WAV files.

To make our finished product we cut, pasted and edited our project on Final Cut Pro and AudioLab on an Apple Mac as these programmes were the best for us to use as we could use finer techniques to edit and put any added filters, intertitles, effects and transistions into our movie trailer.

For our anicllary products I used Adobe Photoshop CS5 to make the template and put in the images to make the final look of my magazine, for the images on my movie poster and the film strip images I used the RetroCamera app on my iPhone 3GS as these were free and I could do them at home and the choices of camera already edited the photos for me.



Click image to see Flickr analysis.

What Have You Learnt From Your Audience Feedback?

I have learnt from the audience feedback questionnaires that we made on Survey Monkey and posted via Facebook and Tumblr that the most popular sub-genre was psychological and that the monster that scared people the most were other wordly monsters, we found this useful for our production, however I found that the most iconic villains are the slashers, the ones that said nothing and tortured their victims e.g:

• Micheal Myers
• Leatherface
• Jason Voorhees

So, we decided to go ahead with the idea of a slasher, a film that would really make people cringe and put them on edge, the underdog of a film. 4 people out of 25 liked torture films, which was the lowest results but films that aren't popular with the public at the time are often the most landmarked for instance Jaws, Halloween, 28 Days Later and The Exorcist are good examples.

I also learnt that predominantly most horror film watchers are male so we had to have some gutsy footage that would interest a male audience, because most of the males liked to see footage that would make them squeamish because it would be the sign of a good horror film so that is why we included the drill and hand clip in our trailer, this worked very well in the sense of the conventions of a trailer because the suspense builds into a traumatic scene and the drops the suspense quickly, it drops just before the drill hits the hand but the clip dargs out slowly so that you see enough. The main thing that the whole group learnt is that nothing other than a good trailer would make our target audience (teenage males with girlfriends or in a group) go and watch the film, so we wanted to give enough away of the plot and plenty of the action to keep the audience interested and keep the trailer memorable.

   


In the feedback from our peers we were given plenty of postive feeback and negative feedback for things that we could work on towards our final edit of our trailer.

POSITIVE

• Our quick cuts were very effective and worked well with the distorted sounds.
• Our camera angles and shot were very effective with what mood we were trying to convey.
• The build-up leading towards to main plot worked well.
• The drill scene was effective in the sense of throwing you in and out of suspense.
• The shot of the feet dragging was shot well.
• The music became improved and sounded much more like a conventional British Horror film.
• The flashy intertitles and the fading to "nowhere" and "stranger" was a very good idea.

NEGATIVE

• Our original music sounded too much like 28 Days Later.
• We originally had a shot of a figure appearing into view when the car breaks down, it wasn't needed as it had no clear relation to the plot.
• The dialogue in the car scene was inaudiable and jumbled, which we then re-recorded.

We corrected these in due time with the negatives now turning into positives.

How Effective Is The Combination of Your Main Product and Ancillary Texts?

                          

I think that my ancillary products link very well with my main product as the images relate to what is seen in the trailer.

The Empire Magazine's main image relates to the ending frames of Lewis dragging the pitchfork, the image correlates with the trailer, as a before shot as if to ask "what has he been doing, as we see Kellie escape and then it jumps to Lewis dragging the fork away from the house, also the audience will recognise that person to the ending of the film so they will know it is to do with The Spare Room before reading the title.Empire (being the well selling magazine that it is) often focuses now on having the main image the main eye grabber, with only a couple of letters showing fom thier title with a recognisable font their readers will recognise that it is Empire.

The movie poster works well also because it has the tagline "Never Trust A Stranger" which is the key intertitle in our trailer, so it's obvious what film this is advertising even if The Spare Room text was not visible, also in the trailer there are key moments where it goes to a handheld camera and the image has added film grain pixelation and the REC in the top right corner so again it relates back to the movie trailer. So overall I think that they relate very well, the only way I think that they could relate more is to have a still from the film as the poster and on the film magazine cover have either mine or Kelly's face so that the main character is easily recognisable.

In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop or Challenge Froms and Conventions of Real Media Products?

                                                                 

As you can see we have taken some typical conventions of horror and used them in our trailer. The top left shot involved an extreme close-up (ECU) with an added red filter, the connotations are blood, danger and anger. The idea that something demonic and dark is happening. 

Also, with the camera work we had point of view (POV) shots we we are put into the eyes of a monster and also the victim, our two example that we used are the final two on the right hand side. With the monster we had it so that the camera was slow and shaky so we could identify that we are the monster, and to identify that we are put into the eyes of a victim we had a low angle shot shot looking up as the monster seems to loom over you. Also we included a pre tortue shot of a drill going into a hand and we compared this to a shot that is used in the Hostel movie trailer, what we have done is also used a a typical convention of horror trailers, we show the pre-torture shot and it builds tension, because of having the shot so close you would see every gory detail but we then cut to a shot of my face tensing in pain as if the drill was going into the hand but you don't see it but you cab still imagine the drill going in.

Also, on the right hand side we have another POV shot from a "monster" not that we know it is a monster first, the audience is just put into the eye of an onlooker and made to see the people in a voyueristic manner, which again is typical of a horror film.

Some typical conventions of movie trailers that we used are the use of intertitles and a soundtrack with a possible motif. Our intertitles are bold, tall and stand our clearly against the dark background to attract the attention of the audience, we had them fade to reveal the key word much like The Last House On The Left. Much unlike the earlier years of horror movie trailers we didn't have a running voiceover as we feel this distracted the audience from the real drama of what was being portrayed in the visuals. We only had recorded sound clips when intertitles were playing because that speech was key to the plot of the film so it re-inforced emphasis of what the text was saying which is typical of all movie trailers in general as they also help tell the story and give the audience questions

The Spare Room is a teaser trailer, but probably not typical in its length or how much of the plot it gives away. A good example of a teaser trailer is the trailer for Paranormal Activity 2 (click the following link to watch the trailer)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SSc3bmdd8o

This gives nothing away except for the fact that there will be a sequel to the best selling first movie and lasts only one minute and nine seconds in length whereas ours is one minute and 55 seconds and gives away the idea what the plot is, like most British Horror films, that is the genre of horror we wanted to stick too.

          

the-uninvited-movie-poster

the-uninvited-movie-poster
Originally uploaded by JoshBatch2009

Click image to see Flickr analysis.

last-house-on-left

last-house-on-left
Originally uploaded by JoshBatch2009

Click image to see analysis in Flickr.

A-Nightmare-on-Elm-Street-2010-Poster

A-Nightmare-on-Elm-Street-2010-Poster
Originally uploaded by JoshBatch2009

Click image to see analysis in Flickr.

Storyboards

These are pictures of our intial storyboard ideas, shot to shot in numerical order for our Horror trailer. We put in the camera shot, the digetic and non-diegetic sounds in and the duration of the shot in boxes to the right of the drawn out idea of what we want to the shot to look like.

Role of the Distributor

UK Distributors obtain the films they release by:

·         A third party sale, the middle man from producers to the retailers.

·         A continuous flow of new content from a parent studio

·         A studio with a distributor that negotiates an output on covering the slate of titles.

When making/planning and/or organising a new film the distributor will look for something new, something that captivates them and they need to find a suitable and individual idea or hook in this plan for them to use.

Usually, a good idea is to keep the films’ local, British films for a U.K audience and U.K tales and stories.  One other thing that distributors look for is deliverance. Would the characters’ link to the audience, would the story grip he audience in the intended manner?

If the distributor doesn’t feel the film is right, then there is a very strong chance that the film won’t go any further, not even into the photography stage, preferably before production. They are to sign a contract or a formal agreement specifying the rights that they hold to the respect of the title, the rights to release into British cinemas and to promote it in all media forms.

When planning to release a film to the general public, a detailed understanding of the target audience (age, group, gender, area that they live, social networks, lifestyles and media consumption in that area). Another factor to take into understanding is rating.

“All classification decisions are based on the BBFC’s published and regularly updated Guidelines. The Guidelines are the product of extensive public consultation, research and the accumulated experience of the BBFC over many years. They reflect current views on film, DVD and video game regulation”. This is a quote from the BBFC website explaining that a lot of work goes into classifying a media product. So, the pre-production team may not be able to target the audience that they wanted to sometimes if the content is too much or frequent language.

There is a huge risk with making a film to broadcast in cinemas around the U.K. They need to check out rival companies bringing out films around the same date, do the other films have production values. Are there well-known actors? Is it directed by a big name director? Is it a spin-off from a famous television programme of book? Is their target audience vaster? If the films are released at same time they have to keep their fingers crossed and take chances.

Distribution planà Who? What? Where? When? Howà Strategies to motivate audienceàCreative-Media-Publicity-Promotions-Online-Partnerships.

To get and record audience feedback, distributors usually hold test screenings around the U.K, where they bring members of the general public to sit and write down what they like and don’t like about the film. At the end of a film the audience fill out questionnaires. After all, the most important factor for a film not to flop is the audience. So knowing what the audience do and don’t want to see will always put them ahead of the game.


http://www.launchingfilms.tv/marketing.php?video=2&autostart=1  <-----Click link to go to www.launchingfilms.com and to watch a video on film marketing.

Film posters are a huge way to get the public’s appetite for films going. Posters will have to appeal to the mass public by something that has the biggest star value to the film. Something that will capture the audience. Posters and Television are 70% of the advertising that used to get a film going. To get itself out there. Of course, it won’t be the only film with a big production value. Even if they have a new breakthrough of actors they will have to check the competition because other films may have bigger stars. A bigger budget which goes towards CGI and a more professional looking poster. Around £170 million is put into television and poster advertising alone.

A great example of a working film poster with production value. We all know that this is Woody from the Toy Story films and the fact that he is leaning on the letter 3 means that there will be a 3RD film which will get the general public talking, since Toy Story 2 came out in 1999 and was a popular movie to gross in the box office.

A good way to get the film out there is to hold a film premiere and bring all the stars of the film to the cinema. They are categorized as glamorous, expensive to hold and exclusive. Distributors hold these to get the red carpet interviews for prime time TV and photos for all the celebrity gossip magazines. Distributors will often put the sales form tickets to charity, which from this makes the ticket sales go up because it is all going to a good cause which then makes the film stand out because of its work.

Appealing to a younger audience is important for distributors for films, because the main audience that enter cinemas are 13-25. So spin off merchandise is very important, and it can be ANYTHING. Obvious items include:

·         DVD/Bluray

·         CD Soundtrack

·         T-Shirts

·         Toys for children

·         Video Games (Usually lower age rated films)

Some distributors often make their merchandise very unique, so that they have a selling point that no other film has. For example. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The limited edition DVD case smelt like chocolate. Also, Star Trek released air horns that whenever you pressed them down they would play the original Star Trek theme. Weird, but unique.

McDonalds and The Disney Store are great examples of synergy. The Happy Meal is targeted at a younger audience and to attract them to buying the meal more they include toys that are to do with a new children’s film that is released in the cinema. So distributors will search as wide as they can to get their new film out there. From specially made websites to toys in kid’s meals.

Survey Monkey Research on Horror

                                                             5 people failed to anwser this question. Or simply forgot.
                                                             This shows that on average 2/5ths of people arn't huge
                                                              fans of Horror films, so they go but only when they feel like it

                               As we can see Male's seem to have a much wider interest in Horror films.
                               More than double the females.                                        



On average the Male's and Females's favourite sub-genre of film was Physcological.

Another question that was asked was: What is your favourite Horror film?

It was interesting on how the films varied. Here are some of the responses:

• Dead Snow (Zombies)
• Scream Trilogy (Slashers)
• The Shining (Physcopaths(?) )
• Poltergeist (Ghosts)
• Paranormal Activity (Ghosts)
• Saw (Physcopaths)
• The Exorcist (Demons)
• Alien (Animals/Aliens)

It was interesting to see that some of people's favourite monsters/villains are other wordly, the idea that the other scares them the most.

Click to take part in our survey!    <-----------------

Horror Movie Mood Board

Plot and Title for our Horror Movie Trailer.

                                                                The Spare Room


A young couple (Kellie and Mitch) and  are travelling across the U.K on a holiday but their car breaks down along the way which seems to be in the middle of nowhere.
AsMitch checks on the car, a farmer (Michael) comes up to them and asks if they need some help. They ask for a number of a local bed and breakfast and a mechanic. He offers to fix their car because he fixes tractors for a living and he offers them a place to stay in his spare room. Kellie is unsure about staying at the house but Mitch finally persuades her to stay. Michael leads them into his house and takes them up to the room, and they see that the room is dark, smelly and eerie. They finally manage to go to sleep in two dingy fold out beds.
They awake in the morning gagged and tied to the beds and cameras recording them. The farmer and others enter the room carrying power tools and then begins to torture the boyfriend, when the farmer and others leave the house to see who else has driven up near the house. During this moment Kellie manages to tip the bed she is on and cut the rope around her ankles and wrists. She tries to untie her boyfriend but in the middle of doing so the farmer comes up the stairs. She says that she will come back for him while she goes and finds the police but from the loss of blood he eventually dies. The farmer and other slashers realising that Kellie has escaped pursues her down the road where the house lies.

Paranormal Activity 2 Teaser Trailer

This trailer is very effective, the point of a teaser trailer is for it not to give anything away.
To leave you going, What? It makes you want to see what's going to happen and if it's anything like
you thought it would be like.

My Initail Movie Trailer Idea.

                           MY INITAIL MOVIE TRAILER IDEA                        

                                                      The Locals

4 friends are on road trip over the U.K, they are driving along the back roads in the countryside, they are lost so they don’t know where they are going, when suddenly their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, one of them sees a light in the distance coming from a house. They travel up the road to go to the house and ask if there is a spare room available. They knock on the door and a 40 year old farmer man and his wife answer the door.

They ask if they can stay the night and that they will be gone in the morning, they also ask for the number of a local mechanic to fix their car, the framer has had experience in fixing tractors so he says he will try and fix their car. He collects their car from the bottom of the road and sends them into his house. His wife sits them all down into the lounge and gets them a cup of tea and shows them to the spare room where they stay the night.

They are shown to really dingy, tea stained beds in a small cold room with no heating and a really odd smell. They settle down for the night as they hear the sounds are drills and tools being used to fix the car…or at least that’s what they think.

They awake to find themselves chained to the beds by their wrists and ankles and gagged so they cannot scream for help. They look around to see other video cameras around them and blood stained power tools on the floor. They see masked figures, heavily breathing and staring them down. The masked figures then go through a series of torturing the teenagers, all for the entertainment of snuff films that the couple keep for their entertainment. The couple explain how their son was killed by a group of teenagers so they now wreak havoc on all teenagers who pass by and come to the house. After 3 of the teenagers are killed including her boyfriend, the final girl is able to escape by cutting the rope around her wrists with a saw that is placed on the floor in the room, she has to sneak out of the house avoiding the masked couple and run and get help, but more masked figures turn up and spot her trying to escape, a lethal game of cat and mouse pursues and see has to stay alive till morning to escape and get help from the locals.

This is a local town, for local folk

3 Horror Movie Trailers That Made Us Go...Cool. We'll Use That!

Devil: The Official Trailer

What Harry and I liked about this trailer is how the use of a match on action cut from the lift to the CCTV footage in the security room of the lift and how there is a quick flash of their dead bodies and blood on the walls.


The trailer had inter-titles but no voiceover, which we prefered as it didn't disrupt the music or the actor's dialogue which is vital to this trailer. It broke up what was happening so that suspense could be built and we could be drawn in.


A typical horror convention of this trailer is the setting. The claustrotophobic entrapment styled environment adds to the horror as we know that they can not escape easily without harming themselves.





The Hills Have Eyes: Official Trailer

What Harry and I liked about this film is the fact that this film didn't give much of the plot away, just so much that we know that this family are isolated in the middle of nowhere but they are not alone. The use of still frames edited together at speed to create a montage effect, it influences or views of the film to be terrifying and fast-paced.


A convention of this trailer is the fact the audience in the cinema are put into a voyueristic stand point. We see the young woman in a bikini and we zoom and bit closer into the shot where we just see her from the chest up and that it stills and fades out, also when we see the hand stroke the other woman's face and we witness that dead on, so that attracts the target audience which are mainly teenagers.


A Horror convention that is used in this trailer is the character types. We have the oldest man who does seem the main protaganist who we want to idolise with, we have the woman who is sexualised, the young boy who again we could idolise with.
Obviously we have these monsters, who we don't fully see, but we know that they are not 'normal'.













Sorority Row: Official Trailer


A convention of this film that Harry and I like would be the production value that this film will have for teenage boys. The trailer shows college girls wearing next to nothing, this appeals to a sexualised teenage audience.
The horror convention that we like in this film is the sound. We like the fact that they use real songs for the soundtrack and how the song is cheery when the situation definatly is not. This is a good use of a contrapuntal soundtrack This repeats with the song at the end, when it is girls are singing and clapping and it echos and gently gets quieter. This is a convention that we would like to create in our horror movie trailer.

Narrative Theorys in The Shining

This is Todorov's Theory on Narrative, he says that all stories start with an equillibrium, that is where all the opposing gorces are in balance. Relating this to "The Shining" I think this works very well. The equillibrium is that Jack gets the job at the hotel and the family move up there for 5 months.




The disruption/disequillbrium is inforced by an agent of change, we were unsure if this was Delbot Grady, Room 237 or The Hotel itself in the film but in my opinion I think Room 237 is the agent of change the first time around, it starts to make Jack go mad. The pathway to resolution in the film is a long pathway, Jack is asked to kill his family by Delbot which again makes him an agent of change as this wasn't Jack's intention. When he chops down the bathroom door we think it will be the death of Wendy but this gets interupted by the prescence of the Chef( and then he dies). There is a peak in the pathway where Danny and Jack are in the maze and Jack chases after Danny with an axe, we think that Danny may die but then the restoration of the equillibrium is when Danny and Wendy are free from Jack and when Jack dies.




Although the argument is that it dosn't fully resolve as we don't know if Sanny and Wendy survive the storm and when we zoom into the picture of Jack in 1921. Can Jack truly die? Will he come back again?












Vladimir Propp proposed that in most tales/stories there are 8 character roles, these are:






1. The Villain-Jack? Delbot?




2. The Hero-Danny




3. The Donor-(Provides The Hero with some magical item or property)-Tony




4. The Helper-(who aids The Hero)-Dick




5. The Princess-Wendy?








6. Princess's Father-N.A




7. The Dispatcher-The Hotel Owner




8.The False Hero-Jack



Claude Levi Strauss looked at binary opposites in the narrative structure. Binary oppisites are sets of opposite values which reveal the structure of a media text. These were more analysed than other as they went more in depth. The ones that are present in The Shining are:


1. Good/Evil


2. Known/ Unknown


3.Life/Death


4. Known/Unknown


5.Present Life/Afterlife


6. Adult/Child


Bordwell and Thompson described narritave as a chain of events in a cause-effect relationship, occuring in time and space. We piece together what we see in a media text so that we try and understand the story better. For instance if we were to see a still of a man holding his face in his hands and then moved to another still of a dead body we would assume that the man then killed this person, if we then moved to another image of the man crying and then to a picture of him with his mother we would assume his mother has died. We try and find a casual effect between them. This technique is done using flashbacks, replays of action. slow motion, speeding up and jumping between places and times.


This is done in The Shining mainly in the part of where Danny is on his trike and he is out side Room 237, where Danny sees the twin girls form the "past" and it then flashes back to Danny becoming scared, we obviously assume that he is being terrified by these 2 girls and then when we flash quickly to them had being cut up and blood painting the walls, we then assume that they are dead and Danny is being haunted by beyond the grave. What we are unsure of is that Danny so far has only seen the future and been told the future by Tony we are unsure if that they are dead or that they are going to be killed, by who?





In my opinion I think Todorov's theorys nake more sense and apply to The Shining better than any other ones, because there is the disequilibrium and a pathway to resolution before that. There is a rise just before the ending and the resolvement to resolution where Jack kills Dick Halloran and then chases after Danny in the maze but then order is restored when they escape in the snow cat and Jack dies. Or does he? There is however one flaw in applying Todorov's theory to The Shining, do we know if Jack really dies as we zoom in onto the picture at the end of the film and do we know if Wendy and Danny escape and get back to civilization?