Film codes and

conventions
Propp’s character theory
The hero(s)
The villain
the
person(s) The person trying
who have to to block the hero’s
progress. in this
solve the case by trying to
problem hunt them down
one by one
 The dispatcher The helper

The crew all

wakes up the work together
crew to send to get rid of
them off to the alien. two
investigate the of the
members
distress
search for
call/alien weapons to
give to the
others
The donor

helps the hero by

sacrificing in this
case he insists he
does the most
dangerous search
for the alien in the
vents.
 Three act structure

1 2 3
Crew travelling back to with crew killed off
earth come across a
Alien is born from
distress call which they host and is lose main character tries
are told to investigate (obstacle) to escape the ship
(beginning), they find eventually killing self on count down
aliens which hosts off a of most of the to self destruction
crew member (inciting
crew (crisis). (climax).
incident).
 Goals and obstacles
The characters are just ‘’space truckers’’ working in a mining
cargo ship going back to earth (goal). The crew is woken up as
they have received a distress call which they are told to
investigate (obstacle). They find a ship and find alien life
which attacks a crew (obstacle). They try to save the crew
member but he dies when the alien who is hosting off him
releases offspring which gets loose and they try to catch it
(obstacle). They plan to kill the alien (goal), but they fail and
many of the crew is killed off as it is smarter and stronger
(obstacle). Main character tries to get information from the
ships computer (goal). But then finds out that another crew
member was ordered to capture the alien for study killing the
others if they have to (obstacle), he is then killed in a fight
with the main character where he turns out to be a robot. The
remaining crew hatch a plan to evacuate the ship (goal) and
they split up to do their tasks but half die. The main character
alone is still trying to evacuate the ship setting up the self
distruct in the process to kill the alien and now must get to the
escape ship before the ship explodes (goal). But the alien
made it onto the escape ship (obstacle).