Genre Essay

Apply the concept of genre to one of your media productions.

My media production in year 12 was a film opening according to David Chandler each film has a type our film opening genre type was historical drama.  We based our film opening on the women’s fight to vote and how women now take voting for granted. We did this by setting our film opening both in the past and the present. We made this clear to our audience by our use of setting, themes, icons, and our characters as well as our editing.  

Our genre relied heavily on mise-en-scene to make our film opening look realistic. The setting we used was a local museum it gave the appearance of a large extravagant house, something which set the scene for the 1900s we used this location to link the past and the present between our two characters.  Our main focus was the large grand stair case which we stereotypically associated with a historical film.  We also had stereotypes for the 1900’s for larges houses also having a large acreage especially the rich we used this stereotype and set our outdoor scenes in a place which can be seen to have a large acreage.  This also sets the tone and the scene for the past in our film opening in contrast to present day. We used all natural lighting in order to represent the 1900’s we acknowledged that there would not have been artificial lighting so we therefore used natural lighting to our advantage representing the era.

Some stereotypes of a period-dramas narrative are the basis of forbidden beliefs, love, with a hero or heroine as the main character. We conformed to this stereotype of a historical drama with our narrative, our 1900’s suffragette characters went against the belief that women couldn’t vote participating in the suffragette movement to allow women the vote. These characters can be seen as our heroines. Our narrative can be seen to criticize usual ideologies of the time something which is also typical of a period drama.  We did however subvert to stereotypes by not focusing on love interests within our film opening our main focus was on the criticisms of the time periods dominant beliefs that women could vote and how important it was for women to fight for that right.  This conforms to Steve Neals theory that film openings must be different to be interesting.

We used binary opposites with our characters to represent the time difference in our film opening.  The suffragette women in 1900s’s was represented by her clothing long skirts, blazer very covered up wearing a vote for women sash to identify her beliefs clearly to the audience. Our present-day character appeared a more modern business woman wearing trousers and a blouse. The representation of our characters evidently represented our genre; this is because of the icons we associated with our characters. In particularly the icons we identified our suffragette women with. We used icons and props such as votes for women signs and sashes to represent the women’s struggle to gain the vote in comparison to our modern-day women, using a voting letter to write her to do list on and her use of mobile phones and computers representing a modern-day life where women take for granted their opportunity to vote.

Our genre was clearly represented in our editing as we changed the scenes set in the past to be black and white to show clear opposites between past and present this effect went with our setting, character and costume as we matched them to appear old. We kept the present day scenes in colour to show how technology has developed with the time this also shows how life has developed in comparison to having to fighting to vote and then being a business women who doesn’t vote in the present day.

Our product conformed to the typical historical drama genre as we subverted to typical setting and costume stereotypes for each of our characters in past and present. We also conformed with our narrative challenging the ideologies in the 1900’s era we did however challenge the idea that the main focus should be on a love interest or of family as we wanted the focus to be on the important issue that women in the present day forget what women went through in order to give us the vote.