Genre Theory
Genre itself is a means of organising the production and marketing of a film, it allows filmmakers to identify and fulfil audience expectation. Before any pre-production work, as a group we had to identify the specific genre of our short film. When we had in mind that our film was a psychological thriller, we furthermore could then plan our marketing techniques and develop our ideas for lighting and sound whilst filming our production.
When researching genre theory the Robert Smyth School raised an interesting point about genre and the theory behind it, they basically said that for a genre to be established certain conventions need to be followed and become identifiable by the audiences. With this point in mind, there can be a variety of problems… A film may have conventions of one genre as well as another, when this is the case it then ultimately becomes difficult to identity what specific genre is used and followed. The genre of any media text is defined by audiences and usually used in broad terms, with this in mind the idea of genre theory can be said to be irrelevant to contemporary society; it is infrequent for a film produced in today’s society to contain just one single genre. Exploring this point even further, this situation occurred in defining the genre of our short film. The film shows elements of a psychological drama as well as to some extent a film of romance. Eventually as group we came to the conclusion that the film, when produced, will be hopefully a psychological thriller. This does not however, mean it is just this specific genre, it is important to understand that when producing our short film we encourage and establish the other elements of different genres too.
With “Closer”, I personally think the genre is affective and one that isn’t as popular as others. With this in mind, the use of the genre could work to our advantage as audiences should hopefully become more curious to view the production.
Audience Theory
The second theory which is commonly discussed in our preparation for our short film is the Audience Theory. Audience theory is very important for the success and distribution of our short films; it reinforces the fact that texts have many different possible meanings which are interoperated by audiences. Andrew Hart believes that audiences are vital in communication and if it wasn’t for audiences media wouldn’t exist. With this point in mind, I encouraged a significant amount of communication links between potential audiences and us as distributors/ producers.
It could be argued that it is audiences who define the genre of films, and as producers we are affectively part of a variety of audiences, so we are able to elaborate upon the reasons that suggest our film is a specific genre. It is important to keep the link between audiences and distributors as eventually they will encourage the success that comes from your film. During my preproduction work, specifically my post card designs, I used a lot of my feedback received from audiences to determine which post card I should use for the advertisement of my short film. This helped me grasp an understanding of the perspective they see my film from as well as me influencing them on the images and messages we are trying to create from a directors point of view.
No comments:
Post a Comment