Narrative Theories
As part of my research into short films, I've looked into a few narrative theorists. This served as a way of us understanding what the basic structure of a film story should be and what features should reside within a film narrative. Altogether, there were a total of four different theorists that I looked into: Vladimir Propp, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Rolando Barthes and Tzvetan Todorov.
Propp
Vladimir Propp was a Soviet folklorist/scholar that gave us an idea of eight different character models. This came from his 'Morphology of the Folk-Tale' (published in 1928). His book basically stemmed from his research of folk tales and legends across different countries in which he noticed lots of similarities. He noticed that a lot of the basic plots/character types seemed to be mostly the same across all the tales. From this he identified the eight different character types that seemed to be the most consistent:
1= The Hero - the one embarking on the quest.
2= The Villain - the one that opposes the Hero.
3= The Donor - the one that assists the Hero by giving them a magic tool.
4= The Dispatcher - the one that starts the Hero's journey by sending him/her on their way.
5= The False Hero - the one that tempts the Hero away from his quest.
6= The Helper - the one that helps the Hero (companions).
7= The Princess - the "reward" for the Hero.
8= The Father of the Princess - the one that offers a reward to the Hero.
​
Upon consideration, there are a vast amount of films and stories that conform to this theory such as Star Wars and Kidulthood but there are just as many that don't conform. For example, sometimes there are characters that start off as Heros and later become Villains or vice versa. As well as this, there's not always side characters such as the Helper or the Donor but the basic principle remains that most of these character types are found across multiple stories.
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French structuralist philosopher/anthropologist that gave us the idea of binary oppositions. Essentially this is the idea of good vs bad and day vs night. Lévi-Strauss noticed that these oppositions tended to structure texts such as stories and plays but they could also be found in films too. It's a very easy concept to grasp because it's the most common way of structuring a narrative. For example, the binary opposition in Casino Royale is Bond vs le Chiffre and in Star Trek Beyond is Captain Kirk vs Krall.
To ease the understanding, some other examples include washing powder adverts and news reports. Washing powders or dermatological products tend to rely on a 'before-and-after' contrast with which they use to persuade the customers to purchase the products. Then, on the other side of the spectrum you have news reports that use binary opposition to represent any story as the 'good' and the 'bad' which basically makes the stories easily presentable and easy to understand.