‘Media texts rely on cultural experiences in order for audiences to easily make sense of narratives’ Explain how you used conventions or experiments narrative approaches in one of your production pieces.

I am going to discuss theories of narrative in relation to my advanced portfolio. We created a music video for Jack Johnson’s acoustic rock song ‘Better Together’.

We drew conventions from real media texted to ours, to understand ways in which they conveyed certain concepts to their audiences. Me and my partner looked at James Morrison’s music video for ‘You make it real for me’, which is about someone losing faith in himself and about how one person can bring it all back to him and make it all better. To look at the video in depth, I compared it to Vernallis’ theory of how music videos are constructed around four concepts – Narrative, Editing Camera Movement, and Diegesis. The video complies with bits of Vernallis’ theory of however does also challenge it. We really liked the way the video was fragmented, but still had a sense of flow and the shots that were used which we decided to incorporate in our own music video.

While creating our version of ‘Better Together’ we looked at Vernallis also. Once analysing the lyrics of the song, we found that it was about a couple being apart and realizing it’s always better when their together. Therefore we decided to create a narrative of the artist and his girlfriend being apart in two different locations and then coming together. The narrative in our video was fragmented, keeping the structure of the video disjointed which supported Vernallis’ theory that ‘the narrative is not always complete’. This is because throughout our video we had photographs of the production of the filming. It also complied with Vernallis’ theory that ‘there is not necessarily a balance between narrative and performance’, as we spent more time on the performance of the artist, but still tried to keep an element of narrative. This was a convention of acoustic rocks music videos, which we decided to stick to as we wanted our audience to recognise it belonging to a genre.

We also looked at a theorist called Andrew Goodwin who believed there was a relationship between the music and visuals. However our video challenges most of our video was of the artist performance and the parts of the video that were narrative did not illustrate what the visuals apart from at the end of the video where the couple are both together and the lyrics ‘we’re better together’.

On the other hand, although we did not have did not have much narrative in our music video, the different shots of the artist performing and the photographs of the production were still able to drive the music video forward. This supports Vernallis’ theory that ‘Something drives the video forward, but often it is not the narrative.’

Our narrative went against Todorov’s five stage narrative structure. His first stage is ‘equilibrium’ which is essentially where everything is good, however our music video starts with the artist being alone, without his girlfriend, challenging what Todorov says. He then goes on to say that there is a something happens that ‘disrupts the equilibrium’.   Our music video does not involve any kind of disruption, but a solution to the artist being alone – the female. However the narrative does have ‘a reinstatement of the equilibrium’ at the end of our video where the artist and his girlfriend are together.

To conclude, we were able to create a music video which was primarily performance based, however still involving elements of narrative. Our video supported most of Vernallis’ theory on narrative, but went against Todorov’s theory on narrative structure. I am pleased with our final product and would not have been possible without looking at real media texts to gain the main conventions of the genre.