Narrative Essay Plan

Introduction:
As part of our AS Media project we created a 3 minute film opening about a group of childhood friends who are starting high school whilst trying to stay connected through the club they have together.
There are four main characters, each with different personalities, who have been friends since they were children. They started a club when they were younger as a place they could all go when they had family or personal problems; in this club they would play old school board games and just get away from it all.

Para 1:
We wanted to ensure that our narrative was interesting for our viewers and so we used Levi Strauss' theory of binary opposites to help structure our narrative.
The binary opposites we used:
Children / Teenagers
Indoors / Outdoors
Conflicting personalities within the group
Our group / other teenagers at school
Boys / Girls
Binary opposites were extremely important as we were able to show conflicting elements in our narrative and create some excitement through conflicts such as Boys vs. Girls and our group vs. other teenagers.

Para 2:
As well as Strauss' theory we needed to decide on the arc of the plot so we looked to Todorov's theory of equilibrium. We wanted to keep our plot interesting so that our viewers would not get bored. In order to do that we would have to come up with our normal equilibrium before deciding on the disruption.
We decided that our film would begin with scenes of happiness between our four friends: everything is good as they start high school and they still go to the club together. The disruption would come predominantly from their new school as some of the group become popular and the group falls apart. As two of the friends became more popular, the group begins to split up and forget about the rest of the group and their club. High school would present challenges for all members of the group which becomes clear as the narrative develops. But soon enough they realise that the only friends they need are each other and they break the typical stereotypes they are pigeonholed into. Following this, the equilibrium is restored and the narrative is returned to its original equilibrium.
This is how we used Todorov's theory to influence the narrative of our film opening.

Para 3:
The final elements we needed to consider when developing our film opening's narrative were the enigma codes, what we wanted to keep from the audience and what we wanted to slowly reveal throughout the narrative.
Within the film opening itself we hint at one key enigma code: will they stay friends?
This enigma code was to be prominent throughout our film and hinted at towards the end of the film opening. We hinted at this by saying at the end of the film opening "We never expected things to change…" This was an important code to get across to the audience as it would be key in keeping the audience interested in our film because they would want to know what happened to our friend group.