genre essay

The genre that we chose for our film opening was thriller. I think that our thriller conforms to most of the traditional structures that make up a thriller.We haven't evolved the genre and given it new meaning, but we tried to stick to the conventions and keep within the one genre.

Daniel Chandler said that there is a distinctive type of text/genre. We conformed to this as we did not break the barriers for a thriller and didn't attempt to mix genres together. We kept to the thriller theme by the use of shot types, fast pace, quick shot changes and a lot of close ups to show mystery. The  lighting and editing we used was also mysterious as it was dark and the editing of the camera gave effects such as shaking and this was suppose to give a trippy feel to interest the audience. The soundtrack we had created ourselves and this was made with the intention to sound creepy, it was slow paces pianos which is relative of a thriller theme. We did however break the male role stereotypical rule as we cast a woman for our psychologically troubled role.

Altman said that media texts have genre to create emotion,visceral and intellectual meaning.To some extent our thriller caters for the emotional meaning because there is a mother and daughter reltionship. This is not very apparent to the audience though so this is a faint connection. Our thriller is categorised under the sub genre of 'psychological thriller' this creates mystery and keeps the audience thinking. This could be classed as intellectual because the audience is not fed all the information they have to try and piece things together.

Steve Neale  said that genres are dynamic and evolve over time. We did not evolve the thriller genre very much. We cast a woman to attract more women as thrillers are mostly watched by the male audience. But apart from that we broke no boundaries and stuck to the main rules of creating a traditional thriller opening.

Mittel says that genres are a way of selling to an audience. We tried to make our thriller apply to a wider target market than just the 12-25 year old men. We tried to broaden the audience type so

that we would not limit the people we could sell too. So we broke this traditional structure of genre as we tried to cater for the needs of different target markets.