'Media texts rely on cultural experiences in order for audiences to make sense of narratives.' Explain how you used conventional or experimental narrative approaches in one of your productions.

I am going to discuss my advanced portfolio in which I created a music video for the soft rock song, 'Better Together' By Jack Johnson, in relation to various theories of narratives. 

One theory of narrative that explains how we used conventional narrative approaches in our music video is Vernallis. Her theory focuses on 4 concepts that relate to the way a music video is constructed. Narrative is one of the 4 concepts, Vernallis looks at a range of points when considering the construction of a music video and its narrative. 

A theory of narrative which our music video seems to challenge is Todorov's narrative theory. Todorov separates music video's into different stages. There are 5 different stages which he believes contributes to his theory, that the narrative must undergo a transformation, therefore the characters featured must undergo this transformation by going through a disruption. 

According to Vernallis theory of narrative we have shown conventional approaches in our music videos. Vernallis says that a narrative may not always be complete, it may be fragmented, partial narrative. Our music video complies with this as our narrative for our video is fragmented. Throughout the video the audience see the main male character alone, however the female character fragments the narrative as we see her from time to time, cutting into the performance of the male artist. This is fragmented because it does not happen at specific points in the video. Also the videos do not correspond to the lyrics as the girl is not with the male artist until the end, signifying 'better together'. The structure of our music video is disjointed as we have included still pictures of the video which would not fit in with a experimental music video according to Vernallis. Our video does not always use the narrative to drive it forward, for example we used different shots of the male artist performing. We also used still images to drive the video forward. this is how our music video fits in with the conventional narrative approach of Vernallis' theory of narrative. 

However Todorov's theory would say our music video challenges his theory of narrative. Todorovs first stage is equilibrium, which is when everything is as it should be at the beginning. Our music video challenges this as we begin it with the male artist alone. As the song is about being better together our state of equilibrium would involve our male artist with a female throughout. But in our music video the supposed state equilibrium is fragmented, this challenges Todorovs theory. In our music video there is no form of disruption that occurs as we can see the male and female are both happy throughout the video. At the end of the music video the male and female character come together and show meaning of the song being better together. This could be seen as the stage of new equilibrium, however due to the fragmented narrative of the performance and still images we can see how it does not fit with Todorov's theory of narrative.

Our music video shows conventional narrative approaches when applied to Vernallis' theory of narrative. However it does not fit Todorov's theory narrative as you cannot see a form of transformation throughout our music video.