Narrative

The difference between narrative and story.
Story - A sequence of events, known correctly as the plot.
Narrative - The way those events are put together to be presented to an audience.
Therefore when we analyse a narrative we analyse the construction of the story e.g the way it has been put together, not the story itself. Also considering what the story is about in its most basic terms e.g the theme.
All media texts have a narrative whether they are a six hour TV mini-series or a one paragraph story or a glossy magazine photograph.
Analysing a narrative will involve the following:

Technical Codes
This refers to all the aspects of narrative constuction that involve technical decision making. Therefore anything to do with camera angles and movement, lighting, sounds, props, shot framing, composition, design, layout and editing. What do each of the choices made tell you about what is going on. E.g how does a camera shot make you feel if it is from a high angle or a low angle, how are sound affects used to help you understand?

Verbal Codes
The use of language - written and spoken - and signs contrained in graphics. We learn a lot about a narrative from what we are told in this way, but the best narratives show rather then tell, leaving the audience to draw their own conclusions.

Symbolic Codes
These are the signs contained in the narrative that we deocde (work out the meaning of something) as being significant (shows or means something) and having meaning. E.g a ragged coat may mean a character is poor. Use them as clues that have to be followed, and different viewers/readers will follow clues in different ways.

Structure
Russian theorist, Tzvetan Todorov suggests that all naratives follow a three part structure. They begin with equilibrium, where everything is balanced, progress as something comes along to disrupt that equilibrium, and finally reach a resolution, when equilibrium is resotred. Equilibrium - disequilibrium - New equilibrium.
The simple formula can be applied to virtually all naratives - it is a more formal way of thinking from the beginning, middle and end and it takes into acounnt Aristotle's theory that all drama is conlfict. e.g there is a disequilibrium at the heart of every narrative.

Narrative Conflict
Aristotle - "All drama is conflict"
Claude Levi-Strauss came up with a theory of Binary Opposition, meaning that all narratives had to be driven forward by conflict that was caused by a series of opposing forces. This theory is used to describe how each main force in a narrative has its equal and opposite.
Analysing a narrative means identifying these opposing forces, e.g light/dark, good/evil, noise/silence, youth/age, right/wrong, poverty/wealth and understanding the conflict between them and will drive the narrative on until finally, some sort of balance or resolution is achieved.

Bobo's doll experiment;
One theory of whether watching something violent can cause you to act in a violent way e.g video games.
Bandura had a number of predictions about the outcomes of the Bobo Doll Experiment, fitting with his views on the theories of social learning.

1. Children witnessing an adult role model behaving in an overly aggressive manner would be likely to replicate similar behavior themselves, even if the adult was not present.
2. Subjects who had observed a non-aggressive adult would be the least likely to show violent tendencies, even if the adult was not present. They would be even less likely to exhibit this type of aggression than the control group of children, who had seen no role model at all.
3. Bandura believed that children would be much more likely to copy the behavior of a role model of the same sex. He wanted to show that it was much easier for a child to identify and interact with an adult of the same gender.
4. The final prediction was that male children would tend to be more aggressive than female children, because society has always tolerated and advocated violent behavior in men more than women.