Short Synthesis Essay: Electronic Media

Narrative Conventions
Student’s Name:
Student’s Number:
Institution:
If one decides to start an interactive analysis into current films, television series and animations, as well as other forms of digital media, the narrative structure and the use of narrative conventions would amaze them. The one thing that is apparent with all of these great movies is that people are living in arguably exciting narrative times. In the 2012 film, “Cloud Atlas”, the developer shifts its viewers from one century to another, even into space and tells six different stories to bring out the overall theme of human interconnectedness. In films like these, filmmakers dispense picture in motion, and storytelling conventions, to enrich their content and the audience are happy to follow them. This paper uses the pilot episode of the first season of the television series, “Altered Carbon”, to support the argument that narrative conventions are more important than video in character development, plot and the thematic concept of a film.
Altered Carbon is a cyberpunk television series that is based on a 2002 novel of the same name. It is essentially a noir film whose storyline focuses on a man whose past embitters him because the government captures and places him in a solitary prison of the dead for 250 years. However, when the system brings him back to life in a different “leaf”, a body”. The change in his appearance and the environment shocks him. As Olney (2013) explains the narrative structures of noir films, the narrative structure of the Altered Carbon is non-linear, complex and twisting. Also, the main character tells the story in first-person. The story is fragmented and maze-like as it contains flashbacks to his past life; his dead sister and the events of his previous existence in his original body. However, the narrative convention aids in the development of the genre and the broader understanding of the film. Most crime and fiction films use the structure to present features of cynicism, fatalism and moral ambiguity (Olney, 2013).
Film and literature are separate but uniquely significant disciplines of storytelling. Moving images play an essential role in narrative because one of them resembles the faculties of the human eye, whereas the other exploits the way the viewers think. However, both of them face a similar challenge. The difficulty with film and literature is how to modify their respective tools to reproduce ideas in a manner that the audience will view them as authentic and accurate representations of reality (Jajdelska, 2019). Altered Carbon uses the subjectivity of expressionism in its narration and flashback, where moving images are vital in the latter. In the episode, the point of view of the narrator is satiated, creating a characteristically subjective plot. The film starts with the denouncement of the main characte...