Todays housekeeping was replaced by a lecture from an MMU 3rd Year/MA Graphic Design Tutor, Clinton Cahill. He wanted to talk to us about narrative as he has a personal interest in this area of design.

    So what is Narrative?

    You can define narritive in many ways but here are a few that Clinton threw at us:

    • An account or story of events/experiences.
    • That part of work that relates events.
    • The process or technique of narrating.
    • Telling a story.

    These days it is often advertisements that try and involve you in a narrative and create a world for you to involve your imagination. It is all about leaving space for you to move into, letting you feel more as if you are making the decision rather than the advert. Clinton Cahill used 3 lovely words to describe it; Nudges, Hints and Gaps. This feels much more passive, like someone trying to coax a small animal into a cage with bate.

    I realise now more than ever that narrative must always involve time, it is essentially about a series of events/experiences and this time line can be manipulated in order to create a more interesting narration. A good example of this would be films such as Momento or Groundhog day.

    I also found the character arc’s and Joseph Cambell’s – ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’ of great interest. It systematically describes almost any film I’ve ever watched and I was very unaware of the diagrams prior to Clintons Lecture. Here are the two diagrams in question:

    Character Arc

    Character Arc – The Hero's Inner Journey

     

    The Hero's Journey

    The Hero's Journey

    I enjoyed the lecture very much and Clinton Cahill came up with some good suggestions about the direction of our project but I would of preferred the lecture to have been at the start of the project when we were in the idea generation stage.

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