… a beginning, a middle and an end.
And when we heard this, it kind of made sense. The stories we'd been told as children and the films we had watched at home all started with Once Upon a Time, they all ended Happily Ever After and there was definitely something in the middle.
In fact, the notion of stories having a conventional structure is so engrained into us from an early age that we take it entirely for granted.
Filmmakers can exploit the expectations we have of the structure of a story - but before we can understand how people break the rules we first need to know what the rules are!
Your primary school teacher wasn't too far off the mark - a theorist called Todorov analysed how stories move through what he calls 'Stages of Narrative'.
Lets see if we can apply this to a film that might also remind you of your childhood; Richard Donner's classic kid's caper: The Goonies.
Read the synopsis and try then click through to see how we can apply Todorov's Stages of Narrative…
Nothing too complicated - try again with this short film…
The next film is called Deserts it's a short experimental movie staring Ewan McGregor.
It seems very different but can you still apply Todorov's theory to this film?
