Genre, Narrative and Film task

In todays lesson we looked at the film theories of Nick Lacey, Levi Strauss and Barthes. For our first task we were told to devise an idea with a clear narrative structure. Horror, 5 teenagers on a road trip, Four of the teens disappear/diea. One (a girl) survives. The task was to come up with a detailed synopsis of a story for the above premise, which is as follows:

From Following Nick Lacey's Schema of genre, we can clearly see that our film complies to many of the generic conventions of a horror film, inlcuding narrative, iconography and characters. However, the second part of the task was to look at ways in which we could break the narrative conventions. To do this we changed the changed the chronological order of the narrative so it was more complicated and non-linear:

When coming up with an opening for our film, we investigated the 'Shark Bite' technique. The shark bite technique basically means there is a highly intense and enticing opening, that will make the audience interested from the offset. With regard to our film, we decided that it could open with a flash forward of the couple hectically escaping the hotle room and finding the laundry room full of bodies. This would be followed by the sound of the killer entering the room (sound effects only) followed by the scene coming to an abrupt end, in which we are brought back to the car scene, the initial opening in the linear narrative we composed at the beginning of the task.

Ask the task drew to a close, we looked at how cultural and semic/symbolic codes could give subtle clues that one of the teenage girls is interested in the occult. We instantly jumped to the opportunity of using the character we had labelled 'Moody Girl' in our detailed synopsis. We did not want to overtly display her stating that she worshipped the devil or anything too unrealistic, so we thought we could add to the mise en scene by giving our character a enigmatic book she carries around with her, or possibly including a shot of her wearing a satanic pendant. We thought this idea was also interesting as it could be highly misleading to who the actual danger is, taking the spot light off the evil girl (the girlfriend of the couple).

 Levi Strauss came up with a narrative theory investigating the idea of Binary Opposition. He believed that narrative was made up of conflicting points caused by two conflicting sides, as if there were an us and a them. The story develops through the opposite actions and events that occur. Binary opposties can even be applied to mise en scene. For the final part of our task, we were told to show how there could be a binary opposition in two characters from the film we had created. We decided that the characters that represented the greatest opposition were our 'Arrogant Joker' character, and 'Moody Girl'. To show this we devised a basic photo shoot, creating some basic attire to convey this opposition as clearly as we could, these photos were as follow: