Cambridge Portfolio Brainstorming

Finalizing our genre

So we've done it! We've finally decided on our genre. My partner and I will be doing a coming-of-age film. We are more comfortable with this genre and from most of the ideas we pitched, we saw a trend: they all revolved around the coming-of-age genre. So, in class today, we began to watch coming of age movie openings to understand more of their conventions. We knew we wanted to do something with sound and music, and so focused on that aspect while watching examples.

Now last post, I talked about the conventions of audio/sound in drama movies, such as Shawshank Redemption. Because we have nixed the idea of doing a drama opening, we had to analysis a new example. So, I watched the film opening of 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)-- linked below. In this opening, the director focuses on developing the character, Kat Statford, and her environment. Her actions in response to the girls helps develop her unique personality, and differentiates herself from usual coming-of-age main characters-- something we want to do in our opening. The film's opening also uses a popular rock song, "Bad Reputation", which helps to develop the young, rebellious tone. My partner and I want do something similar to this: we want to use a song that will add to the mood of the scene and be a representation of our character's personality. 

We also really like the stylization of the credits. The drawn-on credits adds to the youthful, rebellious tone and relates directly to the coming-of-age genre. We can do something similar to this if we choose too. I have animation experience in After Effects, and have done draw-on animations before, so this is something we can incorporate as an option in our planning. The only problem with this approach is that the process is extremely tedious because you have to go frame-by-frame and write out the entire name each time. This will definitely be time consuming, so if we choose to do this, we need to decide early-on. 

Because of our chosen genre (coming-of-age), we now have a better idea of our target audience for our opening. Coming-of-age movies typically have a target audience of teenagers, usually from ages 12 to 18. This is because these people are in the stage of their life when they are going into adulthood, coming of age so to say. With our young target audience, we will have to cater the aspects of our opening to their interests. For interest, we can choose a well-known, popular song to include in the opening. We can also write our story to include terminology or everyday items that are known to teenagers; this will further appeal to them and gain their interest in watching our production.