Analyse media genre in one of your coursework productions - s1b

The media product I am going to write about in relation to genre is the piece of coursework I am most proud of – my Advanced Portfolio “Forever Young”. It is a short film warning its audience about the dangers of using a mobile phone whilst driving, and also not concentrating whilst crossing the road.

Genre covers every aspect of a media text, i.e. characters, narrative, representations, mise-en-scene, etc. All of these fit together to create the genre of that text. If any of these aspects are not necessarily fitting to the generic conventions, it will be harder for the audience to understand the intended genre of the text and therefore it will not quite have achieved its purpose. Attention to genre is very important for an audience to understand and follow the film easily and the way the creators intended.

The genre of my short film is documentary/drama – this allowed us to be very creative with our narrative and the way in which we shot it. We followed the basic conventions of a documentary as our story was based on situations that happen in real life, we thought this would allow us to attract our audience even more as it makes them thing about their own life and engages them in our story through emotion. We based our film on the ‘Think!’ adverts which have a narrative aiming to make the audience think about their actions, sending out a strong message. This is what we tried to achieve but developed it more into a documentary by delving further into the character’s lives and showing the consequences, as well as making it longer in length. We entered it into the drama genre by building up the tension by showing two different outcomes to the decisions the driver could have made. This made it more intriguing for the audience as they are able to see both consequences, but also because it leaves them with a kind of ‘cliffhanger’ as to which choice the driver did chose, which adds to the drama, and it also will make them think about themselves in that situation and realise how much harm it could actually do.

We didn’t really challenge the conventions of the two genres, as we wanted it to be obvious which genre the film would fit in to. We weren’t trying to challenge the audience or confuse them, our aim was to instil a strong message and for them to think about their actions next time they may be faced by such a decision. Our characters were average, normal people, as this would enable our target audience to relate to them and imagine themselves in the same position, therefore achieving the aim of our film. We didn’t necessarily challenge or change the generic conventions, as this would make it less believable. Our research showed us that young males have the highest rate of road traffic accidents in the UK, therefore we cast a young male to fit perfectly into this role and represent the UK statistic. Steve Neal said that ‘genre is a repetition with an underlying pattern of variations’ which means certain generic features have to be included and repeated throughout the film. This theory was applied to my film with the use of the same location in both parallel worlds to give the sense of how very different the outcome could have been, yet affecting the same people in the same place. The music was repeated in both outcomes, and also were the scenes; in one outcome the little boy was walking home and the camera was focused on his feet, this was then swapped with the police officers feet, again to emphasise how it is the same place and the same actions, but with different people.

We gave the film more of a documentary feel to appeal more to the audience’s feelings and emotions by showing how real the storyline is. This genre was emphasised at the end of the film with the inclusion of statistics relevant to the storyline showing how it does happen in real life and it is not a rare occurrence. We aimed to emphasise the documentary style of it through the font, making it very factual and serious and iconic to documentaries.

Overall, as our film was very particular to a genre, we had to follow the general conventions of that genre to achieve our very important role of informing, educating, and warning our target audience. I think we achieved this through attention to detail in representations, mise-en-scene, narrative, etc. all enabling us to successfully convey our message within the genre.