Development of ideas and structure in Moving Image

Digital storytelling

With the advancement of technology and the ever increasing netizen culture, it’s become inevitable that multiple platforms are now being used to bring films and TV shows to a wider audience. Social network websites such as Facebook and Twitter have become worldwide names, with Facebook alone having more than 500 million active users. One of the uses of Facebook is that you can make pages and groups for anything, and make them visible for the entire website community. In recent years television and production companies have been creating groups for their own shows as a way to make them more accessible for the younger generation and gather a wider audience, and it’s not just Facebook their using. As an example I’m going to use E4’s television show ‘Misfits’, whose premise is basically that five outsiders on community service get struck by a flash storm and attain special powers. It has its own official Facebook fan group, a Facebook character profile, an official Twitter page, and Twitter accounts for each of the main characters, along with its own website. All of these were created by E4 as a way to promote the show to a much larger audience and allow people to actually interact with it. The official website even has online games based on episodes of the show. It seems to be becoming increasingly more popular now for tv/film companies to give their characters profiles on social networking sites so that people can see what their doing, befriend them, and talk to them. Yes, this makes the characters more accessible, this adding an extra dimension to how the viewer experiences the show, but sometimes people seem to forget that they are only characters and that the person they’re talking to probably isn’t even the actor that plays them on screen, but I guess that doesn’t really matter as it’s a way to immerse yourself more fully into the story.

Story development: The hero’s journey

Joseph Campbell’s 17 stage ‘Monomyth’ refers to a basic pattern found in many narratives. The example that I’m going to use is Disney’s Mulan. She starts off running late for an appointment with a matchmaker, and after numerous mishaps, many due to a supposedly lucky cricket, the matchmaker ejects her from the premises exclaiming that she will only bring her family shame and dishonour. Her crippled father then gets told that he has to serve in the army, but Mulan asks the messenger to find someone else as he already served with the army, her father says she has dishonoured him and he would be glad to serve the emperor once more, and goes back inside. Mulan decides to go in her fathers place, steals his armour and sword and rides out to the army camp in the middle of the night. The family guardians send the great dragon guardian to watch over her, but demoted guardian Mushu ends up going instead, this is her supernatural aid. The next morning after they meet she has to go into the camp and start training, but first she has to pass as a man, this is crossing the first threshold. The belly of the whale is her having to keep up the charade. The training is vigorous, and it’s clear Mulan can’t keep up, this is her road of trials, she gets better though, and eventually is one of the best. They go off to fight the huns, Mulan gets revealed as a woman and left behind. She goes to the victory ceremony to warn her friends that the huns are still alive, but isn’t believed. The huns kidnap the emperor, and Mulan and her friends save him. She is honoured by the emperor bowing to her and showing all of China that she is a hero.