The media production I am going to write about in relation to genre is my Foundation portfolio where we had to create a two minute thriller film opening.
The genre of our opening was obviously 'thriller' and this allowed us to be creative with our narrative as there are a variety of sub-genres for thrillers, varying from mystery to psychological. Our thriller was a combination of a revenge and psychological.
For our research we decided to watch a numerous amount of thriller openings which had an apparent theme of revenge and psychology. We thought this was important as genre is a contract between producers and audience which 'disciplines' choices and 'reduces desires'. We thought that this was an important part of our research as our target audience preferred sub genres to contain the common clichés we see in modern film.
Steve Neale said that genre is to do with a circulation of expectations between industries, media texts and audiences. According to his theory, our thriller would have to feature generic or stereotypical characters and settings for our thriller opening to succeed. This is shown in our dark shots where the torture scene is happening. We found that from the existing thriller openings we had researched, we found that they were shot in the dark with minimal lighting. We replicated this by having our torture scene shot in the dark with minimal lighting in to make it look slightly frightening and mysterious.
We decided to use parallel editing to make our opening look fast paced by switching between the two story lines taking place. Although this concept was already common in some movies, we hadn't come across it in our research and our idea arised from watching thriller openings which featured 'flashback' editing.
However our thriller opening didn't feature the full conventions of a thriller opening as in one of our storylines from our parallel editing a man is walking in daylight. This may not be a generic convention of a psychological thriller as you'd most likely expect a man walking in the rain, in New York. However, because our character is walking in the daylight with apparently no danger around him, it creates an enigma code. Roland Barthes' enigma code generates and controls what and how much we know in a narrative and holds our interest. It's a puzzle waiting to be solved. In accordance to our opening, a certain element of mystery was raised, why was he captured? What did he do? Will he survive? We feel that we created an enigma code in our opening successfully as the feedback we got was generally good and a lot of questions were asked along the lines of 'what is going to happen next?'.
Genre is a contract between the producers and audiences which 'disciplines' choices and reduces desires. We felt that our opening displays and portrays our genre clearly as we have used generic conventions from our research. However, if we were to do this task again, we would spend more time in finding a more dark and gloomy location to make our thriller even more frightening.
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