Tadorov's theory

Tadorov's theory 

The Narrative Theory

Todorov in 1969 produced a theory which he believed to be able to be applied to any film. He believed that all films followed the same narrative pattern. They all went through stages called the equilibrium, disequilibrium, acknowledgement, solving and again equilibrium.

There are five stages the narrative can progress through:

1. Period of equilibrium

2. Moment of Disequilibrium 

3. Period of Disequilibrium

A film that follow these steps is 'Seperation'.

1. Family moving into a new town and settling down (The equilibrium)

2. Find out theres a serial killer in the neighborhood and are spied on (Moment of Disequilibrium)

3. Serial killer comes and kills them (Period of Disequilibrium)

Criticisms

Postmodernists would see Tadorov's theory as basic and simple.

Modern texts are far more complex than this. 

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Results -

https://www.surveymonkey.com/analyze/_2FVSR_2Bc0PxfmXsy1WZULeYnR6RRdtmVZZQs0x2uXaYy8_3D 

Synopsis - Props theory - Practical

Protagonist- Final girl = the hero/princess
A young, intelligent, and respectful girl who is the main character, known as the Protagonist and the 'Final girl'. She is the leader in her media class who does literally everything. For her coursework, as a group they are asked to produce a horror trailer based on the ideas their teacher has shown them. She comes up with the idea of filming in the woods. As they set to film, a class mate sets off to find signal on her phone, during this moment there is a scream and comes to find out her class mate has been murdered. The 'new girl' acts as the hero and wants to save her. She tries to call for help but is convinced by the 'helper donor' to save her self first.

Teacher=Villain/dispatcher

An exiting new media teacher joining a new school encouraging new media students to create a horror trailer as part of their coursework. He shows his students ideas as horror films but of the same stories and similar killings. He encourages his students to prepare a similar piece. He ends up being a real killer, an evil crazy monster. He hides his identity with a mask, the same mask the students decided to use as a prop.  

Student #1- Helper donor (geeky nice)
An innocent geeky boy who is willing to succeed in school. An easy target to be teased on and bullied. He is a media student who is asked to make a horror trailer with the rest of his class. They go out to film their horror trailer, but one of his class mates get killed. He tries and wants to save her, but uses his common sense to save the people he can first. He is known as the helper donor.

Student #2- False hero (coward)
A lazy, stupid, coward young boy, who doesn't know the definition of smart dress is known as the false hero in the horror trailer. He is a media student asked to create a horror trailer with his class. His personality crashed with the rest of the class mates as he's not bothered and makes only little effort. After going out to film their horror trailer, a class mate is killed. Him as the 'false hero' panics and runs to save his life leaving the rest of the group worried and scared.

Student #3- Promiscuous girl that dies first
A young, sexy, slutty girl who wears the most shortest skirts and reveals her body is known as the promiscuous girl. She is a media student set out to the woods with her group to make a horror trailer as part of their coursework. She is constantly using her phone to socialize and goes off deeper into the woods to find signal on her phone whilst the others set up the cameras and tripods, getting ready to film. She gets killed, and is the first to be murdered and left in the woods as her other class mates panic and try to save their own lives. She is the promiscuous girl that dies first. 

Script- Shots

School 

-mid shots of students getting off the bus and some shots of walking into the school

(could use a school bell)

-Establishing shot of the 'learner building' 

-Tone card 'New school' 

(can use a voiceover with the tone card narrative including words in the cards and fadeouts)

-Shot of the 'new girl' entering the building. - close up of her and her books sybolising her intelligence. 

-film her walking past students playing ping pong in the playground. following a shot with the pig pong ball bouncing off the table sybolising something is going to go wrong. 

Assembly

- wide shot from the middle and back of the hall welcoming the setting.

- head teacher introduces the new media teacher in the assembly

- shots of the teacher smiling an waving

- shots of the 'new girl' looking naive and timid. 

- Showing a mid shot behind the teacher as he turns his head showing his dark side. 

- fading into a tone card 'New teacher'

Classroom 

- wide shot of students walking into the classroom.

- Point of view shot of from the 'new girl' of the different characters.

- slutty character talking to the boy next to her sitting of the table, dressed proactively (establishing the characters).

- Nerdish girl/boy setting out her books and equipment. Quietly sitting there waiting for the teacher to arrive to class. 

- Lazy/dumb kid throwing paper in the bin and making paper planes. 

-Shows 'new girl' prepared to work showing her innocence. (sound bridge of student talking).

- Point of view shot of the teacher walking in 'quiet down' - silence (creates the atmosphere of a classroom)

- Low angle shot of him introducing himself sybolises his power as higher than the students. Showing the authority figure. 

- gives an introduction to the subject and explains the main task. "our task this term is to make and create a horror trailer as park of your coursework" 

-Jump cut 'Here is an example' (shows clip of a previous trailer of people getting killed in the woods)

- Students like the idea of the trailer so decide to do something similar.

- Tone card 'Same story' (maybe a red tone card symbolising danger and blood).

Woods

- (Introduction of next setting) Wide shot of woods merging in after the previous 'same story' tone card.
-  Longshot of the students walking in the woods carrying their props, cameras and tripod to show the audience they have set out to film their trailer.
- comments from characters to introduce their personalities more. 'This is long' 'I ain't got no reception'
- the slutty girl goes off to find signal on her phone, as she goes off the others carry on setting up and there is a scream.
- The slutty girl is found to be killed by something/someone with blood all over her body and clothes.
- Close up camera shots of her arms and legs to show how badly she's been slaughtered.
- Props theory- 'False hero'- Lazy boy panics and wants to leave the dead girl and run to save his life and tells everyone else to run. Others want to save the girl, 'helper' tells the 'new girl' to run as they need to save their own lives first.
- They run off with the camera on recording 'hand held' shots.
- They drop the camera on a hip showing them running for their lives down the hill
- camera shots of the masked villain walking towards the camera picking it up.
- camera stops recording.

Poster for actors

As directors, I had created a poster to find actors to play the characters in our horror trailer. As we are in a college, |I believed that updating a cv would be a powerful idea attract students to read the poster. 'Keep calm' quotes are very famous, so i used this as young people are familiar with these quotes and like to read them. 

Postmodernist theory - Funny games trailer

                                Funny games Trailer – Postmodernist theory

The postmodernist point of view would say that this trailer knowing the rules break them down and does the unexpected in an unknowing way.

Referring to the Funny Games trailer they attempt to distance themselves from structuralism as there is no form of genre. Ferdinand de Sassure says that a society must use semiotics (science of signs) to explore the structures within a culture for society to be culturally constructed.

The trailer demonstrates this in many ways such as the mise en scene, lighting, sound, setting, characters, paradigms etc.

The setting starts off with a family of three moving into a beautiful house in the day time. This is deliberately done in the day time to set a jolly setting. They also play an opera cd in the car which sets a happy setting. This is a torture, and starts the setting totally opposite to the theme.

Mid way, the music stops to create confusion and the young son says seriously ‘mom there’s someone here’. It turns out to be a kind young gentleman who one of the ‘villains’ and is shown to live next door and politely makes his way in. The music that introduces the villain, is jolly and mysterious .This is where a paradigm shift is used; the ‘kind’ villain is amazed by the golf kits and suddenly uses it to hit the father and breaks his leg, unexpectedly. This is when the pace of the music starts to get faster.

The villain makes a bet, ‘by tomorrow morning you’ll all be dead’. He then sings “inee meeni mini mo” choosing who to kill first. This again is done unexpectedly; a song is used to pick who to murder as if it’s a joke. This shows that there is no genre or structure to the trailer.

At the end of the trailer, the pace of the music increases even more. One of the villains says “you shouldn’t forget the importance of entertainment”, this plays with the ‘bricolage’ of the film. Most to the time the villains are calm and smiling/laughing, on the other hand, in other typical horror films the villain would tend to be angry, evil and mean. This trailer does the opposite which plays with the construction of the film.

There are many tone cards in this trailer and doesn’t just use words related to horror but uses positive words too. This can be referred to the postmodernist theory as there is no structure of the tone cards. 

• -        The game is simple                       -   Savage
  -        Pick a family                                   -   Extreme
  -        Pick a victim                                   -   Evil
  -        Darling                                            -   Magnificent
  -        Dangerous                                     -   Mysterious
  -        Wicked                                            -  Brutal
  -        Wild                                                 -  Brilliant
  -         Sensual

The tone cards are purposely used starting with the same letter twice which is very interesting as it shows contrast. For example darling and dangerous are completely different and shows how it can be nice and it can be horrible.

Pitch and treatment preparation

Here as a group, we have come up with ideas for our trailers and shared our ideas onto a diagram using props, characters and settings.  

My example of a Pitch and a Treatment

Pitch 

Thirteen year old possessed twins torchering families, just like yours. Escape is impossible, stealing pure souls, slaughtering the blood from their hearts. Our morning juice they call it.

Treatment  

-October 2013, South London. A family of three, mum, dad and 13 year old Johnny. Its Johnny’s first day at his new school. He makes new friends, Mia and Tia the twins.  He invites them over for tea. The same Johnny’s dog dies. Mia and Tia are confused and feel extremely sorry for Johnny. Johnny’s parents couldn’t find any evidence of how their dog died, even by taking it to the vets. They assume it may have been because of his age but what they couldn’t understand is how it happened so soon. Johnny is very upset about this and doesn’t act himself.

Mia and Tia decide to cheer him up. They go for a bonfire night in the woods with his parents uninformed. They have a picnic and take lots of snacks with them. Then the twins insist on playing hide and seek, but blindfolded with their hands tied up. As its  Johnny’s turn, he’s blindfolded and his hands are tied. As they play they spin him around and make him find them. 

Suddenly Johnny feels something behind him approaching him, he tries hard to undo the knots tying his hands but its too tight. He is helpless He feels something scratching his back. He can not see anything and screams. Mia scrapes her nails into his back. Tia rips poor Johnny's chest open with her dagger like teeth. The animal like twins are evil monsters trapped in little girls bodies. They are possessed children. 

After slaughtering poor Johnny and drinking their so called 'morning juice' blood, every bit of evidence is destroyed. His flesh and bones are buried or thrown in the river. Johnny's parents are left sick and worried crying out for their one and only missing son. Police are set out to find him but he is nowhere to be seen. 

Mia and Tia come to visit the next day and ask if Johnny's okay as he didn't come into school today. Johnny's parents question the twins asking them if they had seen Johnny after school or any other information they had of him as he hasn't come home since yesterday. There response was that they had not seen him after school acting shocked and worried. 

After months of searching, for there beloved son, they still find it hard to accept that they have lost their son forever and that he will not be found. A friend of the father comes to visit, he is a priest. He looks into the story and believes that something had happened relating their dog to die and for their son to go missing. He suspects that something is doing this. 

The priest prepares rituals. The twins find this extremely disturbing as it violates their devilish spirits and so they come to haunt the parents. During the haunting of the parents, the twins prepare scary scenes in the house during late nights. The parents start to believe that the house is haunted. The priest then comes the next day and identifies whats doing this. He tells them its the twins as they find a hair ribbon in the garden. 

The priests performs other rituals to destroy the possessed spirits in the twins. The fight is difficult.  

Pitch research

A killer known as Ghostface begins killing off teenagers, and as the body count begins rising, one girl and her friends find themselves contemplating the "Rules" of horror films as they find themselves living in a real-life one. - Scream 


Paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren work to help a family terrorized by a dark presence in their farmhouse. – Conjouring


A husband and wife who recently lost their baby adopt a 9-year-old girl who is not nearly as innocent as she claims to be - Orphan 


A reimagining of the classic horror tale about Carrie White, a shy girl outcast by her peers and sheltered by her deeply religious mother, who unleashes telekinetic terror on her small town after being pushed too far at her senior prom. - Carie 2013 


A young girl buys an antique box at a yard sale, unaware that inside the collectible lives a malicious ancient spirit. The girl's father teams with his ex-wife to find a way to end the curse upon their child. - The Possession

In 1921, England is overwhelmed by the loss and grief of World War I. Hoax exposer Florence Cathcart visits a boarding school to explain sightings of a child ghost. Everything she believes unravels as the 'missing' begin to show themselves. - The Awakening


With a dead body lying between them, two men wake up in the secure lair of a serial killer who's been nicknamed "Jigsaw". The men must follow various rules and objectives if they wish to survive and win the deadly game set for them. Saw 2004

My pitch ideas


A loving husband, infected into a hideous monster, sending worm looking creatures to infect the innocent into zombies. - (Can relate to Slither)

Thirteen year old possessed twins torchering families, just like yours. Escape is impossible, stealing pure souls, slaughtering the blood from their hearts. Our morning juice they call it. 

Chase scene evaluation

Intro- As a group, we created a chase scene on a horror/slasher genre called ‘The Lesson’. It was about a teacher doing a one-to-one tutorial lesson with a student who goes to get a book from her office and gets killed by the villain with scissors. She then gets chased by the killer and is tries to lock herself in a classroom, however the killer manages to open the door. We planned this through storyboarding on large cardboard. We had then added the essential ideas such as the camera shot/angles, sound/music, mise-en-scene onto the storyboard to add to our understanding, which was very effective. The overall chase scene was effective as everything was set as planned. There were a few parts of the scene that were manipulated to suit the theme or if something had clashed we had changed that to blend in with the trailer. Camera- The choice of camera choices was very open as we had a variety of shots at different camera angles. We did this to ensure that we had numerous ideas to help us when it comes to editing. If we were not sure about one clip, we would always have others as a backup.

Sound- We were very fortunate to find a piece of music and download it from YouTube, which fit in perfectly into parts of our chase scene. We also used our initiative to produce sounds such as the killer’s footsteps. One of us had stood up on the table and created the sounds of footsteps and recorded it through using a Microphone. The use of non-diegetic sounds makes the scene feel more alive. We had found a gaping scream of the internet which we had edited and used to

Mise-en- Scene- We used a variety of iconography and props such a pens, scissors, paint for blood, and an emotionless mask. A pen used to write on the board sets the scene as an educational environment where it’s expected to be seen as a safe place. The use of scissors was used to symbolize school equipment as a sharp weapon that murders which also fits in to the slasher/horror genre. We used red paint for blood, as it was the closest prop to it. The red paint was used effectively as it was the danger of the scene, the scissors were bloody with the blood spillage next to the victim create the sense of shock with blood smudged over her arms. The killer, played by myself, decided that it would be ideal to use a mask, an emotionless mask in particular. I made this decision, as I believed it would create tension to the audience. A face with no emotion keeps you confused and gets the audience to think why is the killer doing this? Are they angry or upset, we don’t know! This makes the audience feel worried and frustrated. Add examples i.e. scream

Editing- When it came to editing, we used software called ‘Final cut pro’, which I personally think took skill to use. We gained the skills to use new software called ‘Final Cut Pro’. This helped us to learn new things through editing such as adding fadeouts, credits, titles, removing/adding sound, cutting and pasting clips etc. We learnt how to use fadeout effects, which we had used at the scene of the door closing after the teacher leaves the student and also at the time of the student waiting for the teacher. This also demonstrations to the audience how long the student has been waiting because the fadeouts make the scene feel longer and creates tension, realistically us as editors are saving time. As we didn’t need to use tone cards in a chase scene, we learnt how to add titles and credits, which was a key skills developed. Para3- we used a variety of media technologies in this task. At the planning stage, we used computers to research for ideas that could help us with our clip. We had researched horror trailers and chase scenes on you tube such as ‘Halloween’ add more examples. This expanded our knowledge, which allowed us to think broadly about our task. We had used a storyboard to plan our chase-scene. This was very effective as it structured our task. We used the Internet for non-diegetic sound/music, which we had then downloaded. We also used a microphone and a recorder to record diegetic sound such as footsteps. Whilst recording the chase scene we used professional cameras with tripods, which helped us stay in line and record perfectly. It also helped us to record from different angles and movements. We also filmed without the tripod for a point of view shot, which made it more realistic. Conclusion- Overall I believe I have accomplished a wide set of skills and gained my knowledge in film and research.

'THE LESSON' - Chase scene clip

Story board for the chase scene