Narrative Structure

According to Todorov there are stages to a story and he found these stages through studying folk tales. The stages are equilibrium à an event that disrupts the equilibrium à then there is recognition of the event à attempt to fix the problem (resolution) à this results in a new equilibrium. With this theory in mind, as a group we decided to follow these rules when creating a narrative for our movie.

So for our movie idea we started with an equilibrium which consists of a group of friends who live a normal life, they go to college together and do things outside of college as well, and we planned to show them doing these sorts of things so that the audience would know who all the characters are. However for Todorov’s theory to be put into place we had to have something that would disrupt the equilibrium that we had created. We wanted to have a signifier for the movie and so this became the Ouija board and from this it felt as though we needed this to be the disruption for the equilibrium, and so we decided that something would happen with an Ouija board that would make a change between the friends therefore making a change within the equilibrium. The next step in the theory is for the disruption to be recognised and so to do this we decided that the main character would realise that something has happened to herself and that no one else can see how much they had changed due to the signifier. So, to do this we used a clip in the trailer where the main character asks what is happening to her however it takes her a while to convince others around her that something is going on and eventually they begin to realise that something went on when the Ouija board was used within the group. We then needed to decide how the problem would be resolved and this would then result in a new equilibrium being created, due to a few of the characters being killed off during the process of disruption, we knew that a new equilibrium would be needed anyway and that there would probably be new characters added into the storyline. The resolution to the problem would have to include the main character overcoming what the signifier has done as well as the disruption and signifier being taken away and this case, we decided that to destroy the Ouija board would be the best way to show that resolution has taken place.