Thriller Research - Narrative
For the third section of audience research I decided to find out how narrative structure effects the way people view a thriller film and how different directors use different narrative structures to ensure their films have a unique storyline, and to what effect this has on the paying audience.
Quentin Tarantino is just one director who does not always use the conventional continuous narrative structure in the films he directs. Films like Resovoir Dogs and Inglorious Bastards use flashbacks to tell a past story of events that are occuring on the screen. Inglorious Bastards often used flashbacks to promote individual character storylines. In fact the start of the film is all sent many years in the past, to establish the setting and theme of whats to come.
I decided to ask family members about how this kind of narrative structure effects how they view a film, and then possibly use the findings as a way to choose the narrative structure of my own film.
When showing people various clips from Inglorious Bastards they mostly agreed that the use of the past narrative in the opening of the film was key into understanding the following storyline. Infact both men and woman agreed that without this part of the film there would most likeley be no film at all due to the way it explains the drive of the characters invovled to hunt each other down. Furthermore both agreed that when a flashback was used to promote the past storyline of a character - such as the "bear jew" - it was relatively pleasing due to a bit of back story being added to the continuous narrative.
Although flashbacks were seen as being generally pleasing, there were some problems with narratives that werent continuous especially from the female viewers. Sometimes the use of to many flashbacks, or indeed a narrative that jumps from time period to time period could be confusing and unhelpful. This lead to a lot of people getting bored of such films due to them having to constantly work out what was happening and who the scene was invovling.
The Research itself was interesting, Inglorious Bastards used a continuous narrative mixed with flashbacks to support the plot and was easy to follow, other films however such as "Vantage Point" which played a repeated narrative in the viewpoint of several people over and over again got rather tedious and irritating. Therefore I believe that it would be best to ensure the thriller I create has a continuous narrative, which could include flashbacks - rather than a narrative that confuses and irritates the audience.
Quentin Tarantino is just one director who does not always use the conventional continuous narrative structure in the films he directs. Films like Resovoir Dogs and Inglorious Bastards use flashbacks to tell a past story of events that are occuring on the screen. Inglorious Bastards often used flashbacks to promote individual character storylines. In fact the start of the film is all sent many years in the past, to establish the setting and theme of whats to come.
I decided to ask family members about how this kind of narrative structure effects how they view a film, and then possibly use the findings as a way to choose the narrative structure of my own film.
When showing people various clips from Inglorious Bastards they mostly agreed that the use of the past narrative in the opening of the film was key into understanding the following storyline. Infact both men and woman agreed that without this part of the film there would most likeley be no film at all due to the way it explains the drive of the characters invovled to hunt each other down. Furthermore both agreed that when a flashback was used to promote the past storyline of a character - such as the "bear jew" - it was relatively pleasing due to a bit of back story being added to the continuous narrative.
Although flashbacks were seen as being generally pleasing, there were some problems with narratives that werent continuous especially from the female viewers. Sometimes the use of to many flashbacks, or indeed a narrative that jumps from time period to time period could be confusing and unhelpful. This lead to a lot of people getting bored of such films due to them having to constantly work out what was happening and who the scene was invovling.
The Research itself was interesting, Inglorious Bastards used a continuous narrative mixed with flashbacks to support the plot and was easy to follow, other films however such as "Vantage Point" which played a repeated narrative in the viewpoint of several people over and over again got rather tedious and irritating. Therefore I believe that it would be best to ensure the thriller I create has a continuous narrative, which could include flashbacks - rather than a narrative that confuses and irritates the audience.
Good balanced discussion of findings - it would be useful to know number in sample group and gender split but some useful research.
ReplyDelete