Fragmented Narrative Exercise - Vernallis Theory

 

We began by quickly creating a slightly disjunctive narrative idea for the Little Red Riding Hood brief given to us, and sketched out a full storyboard. We then removed roughly half of the frames at random, creating a fragmented narrative with lots of space for other shots, such as cutaways or other elements. This slightly montage-esque technique, with some elements of narration and a chaotic (on paper at least) storytelling style is extremely conventional for a generic music video.

• However, we noted that not all music videos go along with these conventions, such as the all-performance videos that are all performance, or videos that present a Hollywood continuity-style narrative film 

Finally, we chose four frames out of these, which we then storyboarded in more detail to discover the actual number of different shots we would need to have filmed if we were doing this for a real video. This was an eye-opening experience for me as to the amount of footage we will need to shoot if only for a single second of video, let alone the whole thing. This exercise also taught me much about the types of shot used in conventional music videos and the way that a narrative idea can be presented in a fragmented fashion to create enigma and sustain interest, compared out work last year with conventional dramatic narrative storytelling in films using continuity editing techniques.