Human lives are shaped by stories. A narrative is a story. This is explained as a series of connected events that occurs in time and space. A narrative has three components namely causality (cause and effect), time and space. A narrative also constitutes the plot and story. The plot is everything that is visible and audible while the story is the set of all events. The story can be presented explicitly or can be inferred by viewers. The story world where actions takes place is called the film diegesis. Items such as credits and music are non-diegetic elements, which are normally outside of the story world.
Characters are people or entities in the film and are normally the agents of cause and effects. They have a form and traits, which distinguishes them from other characters. In some movies for example disaster movies, the character might not be the agent of cause and effects. Some movies also offer advance information of a scene, which is called causal motivation. This may lead to inference by the viewer. Some movies also withholds information in order to arouse curiosity, which is common in horror and science fiction genres.
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The story time is usually formed from the plot presentation. Temporal order is how plot information is presented in order. Effects such as flashbacks can be created by re-ordering of the story events. The story duration, screen duration and plot duration all make up the temporal duration. The temporal frequency is described as the appearance of story events more than once in the plot.
The space is the location where the story takes place. These are usually well-defined locales and may have different settings depending on the story and plot. The spaces in a film narrative are the plot space, the story space and the screen space. The story and plot space happens in the narrative itself defining where actions took place and vividly describing how the setting looked like. The screen space on the other hand is what the viewer sees.
A film begins and this initiates the narrative. How a plot is developed is based on the three elements of the narrative that is causality, time and space. There are many patterns for film development. A change in knowledge is a pattern where causality is affected due to new information becoming known. Goal oriented plots work towards a certain purpose. The investigation pattern is commonly found in detective films. The use of different patterns of narrative development creates different effects on the viewer. Some patterns invoke surprise, suspense, shock, curiosity and many others. The climax is the high point of a narrative where it seeks to bring a higher degree of tension to the viewer. This helps in solving causal issues in the narrative. Once the narrative is finished, the film ends.
Narration involves how the story and plots information is distributed. This can be done in different ways to achieve different effects. Narration helps in building the story out of the plot. The range of story information and depth of story information affects the narration. The range is simply the degree of information presented while the depth is how the plot enters into the characters’ psychological states. A narrator is therefore the one who is telling the story. A narrator may be a character or a non- character.
The classical Hollywood cinema is known all over the world. This is because most movies tend to follow such patterns of story development and due to the popularity of Hollywood movies.
