Wednesday 28 March 2012

Discuss how you used genre in one of your products

The product I am going to discuss in relation to genre is my foundation portfolio, in which I created a 2 minute thriller film opening. 
The genre of my film opening is obviously thriller, however our sub-genre's that we chose were revenge thriller and psychological thriller. Once we chose our sub-genre we had to begin to apply the generic conventions of a psychological/revenge thriller, by doing this it would be able to be recognised by our target/existing 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 dark settings and flash-forwards which show the antagonist preparing tools which would be used for a torture against the victim. The pattern of variation is seen where we included the abduction of our victim as well as showing the torture scene, we also let the audience see a glimpse of the antagonist, to encourage them to continue watching the movie. 
For our research into our thriller sub-genres we watched many thriller openings which had the same sub-genres as our thriller opening. We felt we needed to do this as genre is what attracts the desired audience as Christine Gledhill says, 'Different genres allow different audiences to be identified and catered to..' as our genre is revenge/ psychological thriller we made sure it appealed to the right age group, 15-24 year olds. By incorporating the right conventions to highlight out genre, we hoped that it attracted our desired audience, this is why we felt it was important to research our sub-genres and why we tried to stick to the conventions of our genre. We found that genre plays a big role in relating to a specific audience, which is why we used our producers and distributors to help us. In our thriller opening we used the producer name 'Perfect Dark' the reason we chose to use this name is because we felt it reflected our genre and would help us further in attracting the right audience. Denis McQuail refers to the commercial and industrial significance of genres, and stresses that it is important as it helps target audiences or producers capitalise on the success of the product. In order for our opening to be a success in reality we needed to use the genre as one of the main elements to attract our audience and potential producers. 
However we didn't stick to the conventions of a thriller exactly, as the first scenes with the victim walking are filmed in a bright setting. This would conflict with the common conventions of a thriller genre, this is because you wouldn't usually associate abductions in a thriller to occur in daylight. This particular setting and scene could make audiences question our genre and the target audience could change as it doesn't show repetition within a genre. This is the first scene in our opening, the audience also see the victim being abducted in daylight which can also been seen as a conflict in our specific thriller genre. 
Our thriller opening uses genre very clearly and efficiently, as it uses repetition in my conventions and settings. My advanced portfolio shows how the use of genre attracted my target audience and how the use of specific producers can also effect how the audience would perceive the genre. 

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