Part 1B - Genre

The media production I am going to write about in relation to genre is my favourite piece from the whole course which is a Drama piece. This is a fairly loose term, as our piece incorporates both music and teenage issues as drugs and love. The genre has many conventions including a main character, then a catalyst which would dramatise the situation. Whether this was for the good or bad, it’s up to the story line. Many drama’s which show a catalyst could be anything from a period drama (Downton Abbey or Crawford) to a modern drama like East enders or Waterloo Road. We researched into many dramas, and in our piece we have a typical catalyst.  Our Character X, despaired, takes a drug to solve his problems, but ends up being killed trying to find the girl he loves. This follows the same pattern as explained in Todorov’s theory of change and equilibrium. Genre encompasses many parts and my short film links to it in more ways than one. The style of genre is very important to a piece and our Drama incorporates many styles. I researched into many short films with music, including some music videos. Many can interpret what they want from films, but i took styles from music videos on how they were shot. I and Ben took on many conventions including Todorov’s theory of narrative. We took his theory in mind and practically reversed it as ours has a sad ending. We also took styles from Tarantino. We have a scene, with the film Pulp Fiction in mind, where the character opens a suitcase and gold light comes out of the suitcase.

A2 exam question 1b - Audience

The media production I’m going to be talking about in relation to audience is my second media product, a short Drama film called 'Lucid Dreams'.

As the genre is Drama, I needed to please positively. 

A2 exam question 1b - Narrative

The media production I’m going to be talking about in relation to narrative is my second media product. This is a short film called “Lucid Dreams” created in a Drama style. This chosen genre thus required that our story would have a main character, where upon situations would occur which could heighten tension. We tried to make this as realisitic as poosible by targeting a teenager audience. Firstly, the film opens with the protagonist in his bedroom taking an unknown drug. The main character at this point in the film is shown as an imperfect and strange character as his bedroom is bare with strange lighting and the use of drugs.  After this, the character is shown walking out and around town disillusioned by the drug and the girl, and he is sent into a dream like state in a field where he finally catches up with the girl. at this point it is shown that, as he was walking out of his house, he was really run over. Its a bleak and blunt ending, but it tests our audience as we edited this subtly. The film does challenge many of the conventions of narrative. There is no seeming structure to the film, for example Gustav Freytag believed that many narratives follow the structure of Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action & Denouement/Catastrophe/Resolution. I like the way me and Ben have created something that is original in its structure and editing. We chose barely any dialogue, which made the audience focus more on the storyline and image. The music carried some of the meaning of our piece, as some of the lyrics fitted the characters mood. The song by Animal Collective was well selected. "And I -
I should be floating but I'm weighted by thinking" We chose this carefully as it reflected our mood of the piece.
 As 'Lucid Dreams' is created in a Suspense style, meaning that the events are dramaticed for effect and meaning. No dialogue is used, this does not follow Freytag’s suggested narrative conventions.
Overall, Lucid Dreams focuses on telling narrative through images and building suspense as the character spirales out of control . The film does not fit into narrative conventions in some ways as there is the sense of bad overcoming good in the story, along with the dramatic  and tragic climatic ending. The ending however is not resolved, nor, for example, is it explained how he got run over, or why he was day dreaming. This is because the genre for the film is Drama style, thus I chose to tell narrative in a different and interesting way.

Good essay analysis

The media production I am going to write about in relation to genre is my favourite piece from the whole course which is my horror teaser trailer.

The genre of the trailer is obviously ‘horror’ and this in itself allowed us to be creative with narrative etc but limited us because we had to stick to a certain amount of generic conventions in order for it to be recognised by it’s existing target audience. Steve Neal said that ‘genre is a repetition with an underlying pattern of variations’ which meant certain generic features had to be included and repeated which in my case was the use of a creepy location of the woods as well as hand held camera and restricted narration to cause disorientation and suspense within our trailer. However, the pattern of variation Neal describes also links to my horror teaser trailer because we were able to creatively push the boundaries by twisting some generic features in order to make the trailer interesting and therefore cause the audience to want to watch the full movie. For this my group chose use a female psycho killer I order to subvert the stereotypical male dominated role. This female identification through point of view shots etc captured our female audience because were providing them with power and this is unusual for the horror genre although it is known for its forward thinking approach as it often attempts to focus on subcultural views instead of targeting the mainstream. Genre encompasses many parts and the trailer links to it in more ways than one. Its use of enclosed location and the fact the woods attempts to reinforce our society’s fear of loneliness and isolation which the woods creates when the three friends get lost. In these sections of the trailer we used a lot of heavy cross cutting between the female victim who is running anxiously through the woods in order to find her friends and get home safely. We also used the Kuleshove and collision cutting methods as the pace began slow as the friends head our in the car unaware of the danger before them and once they are in the woods we deliberately quickened the pace of editing to cause tension and to show that something is not right, keeping the audience on the edge of their seats.

Editing and mise-en-scene is really important to genre and reflects very quickly certain moods and atmospheres. Levi Strauss and Roland Barthes argued that the horror genre like many others used ‘binary oppositions’ in order to show the contrast between good and evil in order to force the audience to be constantly questioning the trailer for example; in my trailer I used light and dark to connote their happiness and carefree attitude in the daytime and the darkness to emphasise their fear and reliance on their senses. This is particularly important to the horror genre as characters are often shown in high angle shots to appear vulnerable and therefore under threat.

Gore or ‘body horror’ is also a common generic convention used by most horror films that we studied including Dawn of the Dead by George A. Romero who used it to make the audience feel sick by forcing them to see extreme violence. In my own trailer we were inspired to use gore differently by showing a hanging scene in slow motion to create tension and the centoring in on the face and neck which had been broken and this was shown by the rope burn we had made from latex and the blood pouring down her chest. This shot moves clockwise and slowly zooms in to force the audience to see what the hang (woman) has done. In our final two shots we finish the trailer with the male anti hero being lifted off the ground with blood pouring out of his mouth which causes the audience to assume no one survives because the final girl is stabbed by her friend accidentally which quickens the pace and adds tension but she is the survivor who as Carol Clover suggests will be terrorised throughout the film and finally overcome the monster. This plays with the audiences emotions and links back to the horror genre well by creating our own style of horror. Andrew Sarris argues because it encompasses so much and is key to explaining a film. Genre is the ideas that collectively make a particular recognisable style that draws in its existing target audience. My horror trailer had expressionist camera angles as the female victim desperately trips over the camera and we see her running above it as well as close ups of her facial expression that causes us to identify with her fear and therefore makes us scared. This meant the audience also were forced to objectify the female victim from the high angle camera shot down her top in which we can see her breasts slightly after watching other Hitchcock movies which use the male gaze theory by Laura Mulvey to force us to take a male’s viewpoint.

In my trailer we also used an iconic symbol of the noose because obviously as a hangwoman she needed the prop but also as a female the circular shape suggested female power and this is something the horror genre often does but for male characters using guns etc as phallic symbols which we also used as the male anti hero takes out a knife and stabs his friend frantically when she walks up behind him. The horror trailer was made much darker in Final Cut Pro using the brightness and contrast menu and also dragged the saturated colours towards the blue in order to create a dark, dusky night time atmosphere a generic convention of horror trailers.

The generic conventions we chose to use were all important to the success of our product and since distributing it on YouTube we have over 4000 which I am really pleased with and gives me the confidence that we obviously stuck to the genre enough to capture our intended target audience but were creative enough to make people want to keep watching the trailer and virally sharing it with others.

Genre places a media text into a grouping giving it an identity which can be recognised by the mainstream society and I believe my product is successfully fitted to the horror genre using the narrative that todorov argued was important to the horror genre by following an equilibrium at the beginning then a problem which in our case was the male anti hero playing a joke on the soon to be female victim making jump running after him causing their separation then a pathway to resolution – as they attempt to find each other and then a new equilibrium at the end which we deliberately left as an open ending to capture our audience effectively.

look at the colours!

                 ...............              = Point

                 ...............             = Explanation/Example

                 ...............              = Terminology

              

Marxism

Marxism

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Mind Map of Genre

The term genre means type or sort and was used two thousand years ago in ancient Greece to put poetry and drama into certain categories. Film is still a relatively new concept of entertainment, and many genres have been invented over the past hundred years. Film genres can often branch out into subgenres, as in the case of a romantic film and a comedy, making a RomCom. Film genres can be combined to form hybrid genres, such as the melding of horror and science fiction in the ‘Aliens’ films.  Films are now highly established forms of art, and can make a huge amount of money, with millions of people around the world watching the ‘big’ films. The 20^th Century has brought phenomenal changes in popular entertainment, including the invention of short films, and the progress of genres and subgenres. Later, from about the 1960’s, film critics began using the word genre as a way of judging the quality of films in a similar way to literature. This was a big step for culture, as films were now compared to literature, yet everyone could watch a film, thus showing the massive progress of popular entertainment in the 20^th Century.

Mind Map of Narrative

Narrative:

• many theorists use genre as point to describe how we describe and catargorize media from the Hyper-Reality theory to Roland Barthes.

Roland Bathes
Barthes believes that narratives have structures and that there is more than one way to read a text including multiple meanings and connotations. These were classifyed as 'Readerly' and 'Writerly' texts. 'Readerly' being not locating the reader as a site of the production of meaning, but only as the receiver of a fixed, pre-determined, reading. They are thus products rather than productions and thus form the dominant mode of literature under capital. and  'Writerly' being a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages. .He also made the theory of the enigma codes which questions the audience e.g Murder Mysteries.


Hyper Reality
Jean Baudrillard's theory differentiates reality from fantasy, a concept that has only been around since media has started. In modern media and times, people cannot help to find fantasy real e.g video games. He also questions how we get our information, e.g how do we know the Gulf War even happened, as we only witnessed it through the media, such is the influence of modern media from the 20th Century onwards.