But I'd like to make a few points about narrative here, in relation to this video. The graphics are impressive, but in my opinion, carry the weak narrative along. Makes sense, perhaps, that only one day was spent filming, two years honing the special effects.
The video's narrative is made of essentially four distinctive blocks. The man lying down in an empty landscape, examining photos of a woman that float in the air. Then, he begins constructing an elaborate world--a few streets of what appears to be some European city setting. Then, the woman from the photos appears from a doorway and takes in the world, delighted. Finally, the world deconstructs itself, and we see the woman lying in a hospital bed, see on a sign what the world building has been all about. I haven't mentioned the cheesy use of a flower, by the way, but its use at the end, in which the digital flower appears in an actual glass of actual water, is a too well-worn "surprise" that film has used again and again: a person returns from a fantasy world, and yet carries with him/her some object from that world, which implies that it wasn't a fantasy at all.
Thinking of our discussion on Shakespearean Design in the last class, though, how could the four blocks of the narrative described above be moved around, rearranged to create perhaps a more interesting narrative? What might be added to it, or subtracted, to transform the story's meaning? Any ideas you might come up with we could discuss in our next class.
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