Genre Question

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

Genre is the style or category of art, music or literature. Daniel Chandler is a theorist who says that 'genre is a type', he said that the genre should meet the audience expectations of the genre. In our film opening which we created at AS called 'On Track', we subverted the target audience's expectations, we did this by using two girls in the film rather than men which are mainly used in most sports films.We conformed the expectations by using the settings of the running track and the swimming pool.

Steve Neale is a theorist who believes that genre is based on repetition and difference. The settings which we used were the running track, the swimming pool, the gym, the field and also the girl's houses. These settings all linked to the genre of the film which was sports, this made it easy for
our audience to straight away identify our film genre which also meant that they were instantly engaged. The themes which we used throughout the film opening were: competition- we used this by putting the girls against each other straight away by using the split screen which included both of their training methods, another theme we used was jealousy- this was shown more subtlety in the film opening by the girls having an argument and not liking each other on competition day, the final theme we used was social class- this was again shown with the split screen, it showed the rich girls fancy and expensive running trainers compared to the poor girls worn out and dirty running trainers, this showed the audience the difference between the two girls and how they were being portrayed as rich and poor. The props which we used in the film were vital, the first prop used was the calendar which showed the date of comp day, another prop used was the gym bag this showed the sporting genre and again the trainers were a prop.

Our ideas worked because it was clear what the film was about and also what the main factors were within it. For example, it was obvious to the audience that it was a sports film and also that there was some sort of conflict between the two girls, it is also clear that the two girls are very different- this is clear due to the split screens of the differences between them and also the girls body language and facial expressions when they are about to go head to head in the race. I feel that the audience want answers and will therefore want to keep watching in order to find out what happens. 

We were influenced by the film 'Fats Girls' within this film there are two girls who are very different in many ways,such as where they live, how they grew up, the amount of money they each have. However, they are both similar in their sport and with their ambition to win the competition. We wanted to do something similar to this within our film as we felt that it was a good story line and also we wanted to do something which was sport related but had a meaning and something interesting. We took traditional conventions of men being the best at sport and also men being more popular to watch doing sport and made it different by using women.