People Who Influenced Films

David Thompson is a British film and television producer and is most famously known for being the founder of BBC films. He originally worked as a film programmer and documentary maker and then left to start his own film production company. He is now known as an executive producer and is still working in the film industry today; some of his more famous films are Revolutionary Road, The History Boys and Brideshead Revisited.

David Bordwell is an American film theorist, film critic and author. He is the Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies at the Emeritus in the department of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the founder of the cognitive film theory which is an approach to film that relies on cognitive psychology as a basis for understanding films effects. It is an alternative method to the psychoanalytic/interpretive approach which was responsible for widely dominating film studies in the 1970's and 80's. David Bordwell is married to Kristin Thompson and they have written two textbooks together, these are Film Art and Film History. Film Art is the most widely used introductory film textbook in the United States.

David Bordwell is also associated with the approach known as neoformalism; however it is his wife Kristin Thompson who has done the majority of writing on this subject. Neoformalism is an approach to film analysis that is based on an observation first made by the literary theorists known as the Russian Formalists; this means that there is a distinction between the story and the form the story puts across. An example of this would be if in a detective film the murder comes at the beginning of the story, however you don't find out any details about the murder until the end. Neoformalism also deals with the idea of de-familiarization which aims to show us familiar objects or concepts in a way that encourages us to see them in a new light.

Pam Cook is a professor in film at the University of Southampton. She was a pioneer of the 1970's Anglo-American feminist film theory along with Laura Mulvey and Claire Johnston. In the mid 1980's Cook co-authored and edited the leading textbook in film studies which is The Cinema Book for the British Film Institute and from 1985 to 1994 she was Associate Editor and contributor to BFI and Sight and Sound magazines. She retired in 2006 however still publishes books and continues to write articles.

Propp and Todorov's Narrative Theory

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp was born on the 17th April 1895 and died 22 August 1970. He used the narrative structure in a formalist way and after breaking down many different Russian folk tales he believed that every film was made up of these eight main characters.

1. The villain who struggles against the hero.

2. The donor who prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical object.

3. The (magical) helper who helps the hero in the quest.

4. The princess or prize — the hero deserves her throughout the story but is unable to marry her because of an unfair evil, usually because of the villain. The hero's journey is often ended when he marries the princess, thereby beating the villain.

5. Her father who gives the task to the hero, identifies the false hero, marries the hero, often sought for during the narrative. Propp noted that functionally, the princess and the father can not be clearly distinguished.

6. The dispatcher who character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off.

7. The hero or victim who reacts to the donor and weds the princess.

8. The false hero who takes credit for the hero’s actions or tries to marry the princess.

Tsvetan Todorov was born in Sofia on March 1st 1939. He believed that stories began with an equilibrium or status quo which was then disturbed or disrupted by an event or problem and finally the all would be resolved and everything brought back to its normal state. This is usually broken up into these three stages:

1. Equilibrium (Normality)

2. Disequilibrium (Normality is interrupted)

3. New Equilibrium (A new normality appears, however this may not be good)

In my film trailer I use the idea of Todorov's theory. The way I portray this in my film is that the equilibrium at the beginning of my trailer is when the women is with her fiance, where they are both happy and feel they are living the perfect lives. The disequilibrium, where normality is disrupted is when her fiancé goes crazy on her and his personality splits into two. The new equilibrium is then where she settles down in her new town with her new boyfriend and feels her life is returning to normality.

Advanced Porfolio Task

I am going to produce a promotional package for a film. This is going to include a tester trailer, a magazine, a front cover and a poster. My work must be presented on my blog format and edited to my individual taste.