NARRATIVE STRUCTURES

Perhaps inspired by my love of Shakespeare, I find the 5 act structure (particularly as described by John Yorke) to be far more helpful than the three act structure. In this format, the third act contains the turning point, after which nothing will ever be the same. Mercutio is killed in Romeo and Juliet, Claudius isn't killed in Hamlet. However, in a short film it is perhaps easier to combine acts 1&2 and acts 4&5 purely due to time constraints. Yorke also argues that act 1 and 5 often work as mirrors to each other.

In act 3 of Skylark, Anya hears news on the radio that changes the dynamic among the group. As Todorov would put it, it 'disrupts the equilibrium'. However, unlike Todorov's theory, there is no following attempt to repair the damage, and instead the characters move forward with a new, disrupted equilibrium. Much like Yorke, acts 4&5 can be seen to mirror acts 1&2.

Acts 1&2:

        1. Anya is alone, waiting. Silence.

        2. A warm welcome. 

        3. Life as a group of 5. Joyous freedom for the first time.

Acts 4&5:

        1. Life as a group of 5. Refusing to acknowledge the future.

        2. A sad goodbye.

        3. Anya is alone. Music.

My next question came when thinking about the ending, and this led me to consider the endings of popular dystopia and science fiction films. It appeared to me that there is a convention for science fiction films to end with open, or at least ambiguous endings.

Take the end of Inception. Nolan leaves us with a deliberately vague ending. Will the top keep spinning? Or perhaps 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which what exactly a 'star baby' is is never explained. My favourite example is Ridley Scott's Blade Runner - the theatrical version ends very differently to the Director's cut. In the theatrical release, Deckard runs away with Rachael, and there is even some helpful narration telling us how the film ends. However, Scott released a Director's cut in which there is no narration, and we never see Deckard and Rachael running away. This ending to me is far more powerful. The point of dystopia is to question the world around us and its potential future. Importantly, these endings leave us with questions. Is it a dream or not? What was the monolith? Is Deckard an android? And more than that, they leave us questioning the wider world. Can we ever know what is truly real? Will advancing technology be our downfall or our saviour? What does it mean to be a human? By leaving the ending ambiguous, we are allowed to take our own meaning from the film, and therefore we are able to apply it to our own lives in a plethora of ways.

In my film, I have narration throughout, as Anya reflects on her summer. However I wasn't sure whether to narrate the ending. I wanted the film to have a cyclical structure, with Anya starting and ending the film alone, with her violin and her radio. However, I wasn't quite sure where we left the other characters. I wanted there to be an implication that either something bad had happened to them, or that at the very least the group had grown apart. Early on, Anya says in the narration that that was the last summer they spent together. I thought initially that the best way to show this was through narration in the final scene. However, in my first draft, I didn't have any, and I thought that this worked far better. Much like Ridley Scott, I didn't want it to be spelt out to the audience, and I wanted there to be a feeling that in some ways, the narrative was unresolved. However, I still needed to show how Anya has changed over the summer in the final moments. A picture on her bookshelf from Charlie, a busy city outside her window, and - most significantly - a song on the radio.