Breaking Down the Narrative

This week I read more into the works of Mike Wayne in a book titled "Theorising Video Practice." I read his chapter that focused on breaking down the different kinds of narratives in the films that we all see. The way that clips are arranged in film makes a huge difference when trying to convey a message. He started early on describing the classical narrative and goes on to explain how you can break down this type of narrative into five parts. These stages are the exposition, conflict, rise, crisis and closure. His insight on the classical narrative provided a very interesting read but for my video I am definitely not focusing on a classical narrative. Wayne than goes on to talk about narrative and certain codes that filmmakers can play off of to create a flowing narrative. These codes were developed by Roland Barthes. The first set of codes he describes is the Semic Codes. In the text he says, "they are labels we mentally attribute to character and locale." (Wayne, 156). Secondly he talks about Cultural Codes which generalize all the general "knowledges" that we experience in everyday culture. Reading about these codes was extremely interesting because when planning out my capstone I really wanted to convey ideas in a non-classical way. I want to make something that is heavily subliminal and everyone can relate to in a way. By reading about these codes it really helped me develop some ideas for different imagery I can use to convey my ideas. Not only that, but it gave me some insight into styles of narrative that I could experiment with in later videos!