Friday, December 9, 2022

Genre Blog: Final Decision- A Very Tense Verdict

     Hear ye! Hear ye! It's the moment you've been waiting for, finding what genre we've decided to go with now that we have reviewed all of our options. We have come to the conclusion that it would be best to go with the thriller genre for our short film.

    The reason why we decided to eliminate the comedy genre was because of our mutual feelings that whatever jokes we came up with were not guaranteed to be understood by those outside of our social circle. The translation of jokes across age differences would likely not be understood. Hence, our film would not be entertaining to a wider audience of people outside of teenagers and people close in age. That is because of the inherent subjectiveness of comedy that we have pointed out prior in our earlier research blog. Moreover, since our film has the possibility of being heavy with more mature themes, adopting a lighthearted tone that a comedy might have provided may not be the best way to deliver an otherwise serious message (unless we were to have taken a satirical approach). My team and I definitely feel that we’ve come a long way from the novice cinematographers we were last year. However, we are not prepared enough to tackle such a nuanced genre.

    As for why we opted not to go for the horror genre, it was partially because of the fact that we felt it may end up being too expensive. In the case that any deaths or injuries were to occur in our short film, we may have needed to incorporate SFX makeup. In order to make the wounds as realistic as possible, we would need to acquire a decent amount of money outside of our very limited budget. That money would likely have gone towards high-tech CGI software editing programs that really would have made our makeup more convincing. On the topic of difficulties using SFX makeup, we would also encounter issues with actually trying to apply it since none of us have done so before and, as such, slack the necessary skill set to do so for the purposes of our project. We also felt that the horror genre might have forced us to incorporate unnecessary gore or violence in attempt to meet the standards that said genre would impose upon us. 

    Part of the reason why we were drawn towards the thriller genre was because of the feeling we had gotten from the pitch we had agreed upon, and the ideas that we initially had in mind, would fit better with the suspenseful ambiance that a thriller would provide. Despite having not chosen to pigeonhole ourselves into the horror and comedy genres, instead electing to frame our film around the thriller genre, we might still incorporate features from either genre into our short film. The fact that the thriller revolves around a somewhat realistic scenario meant that we would not need to struggle to acquire niche props or costuming, significantly decreasing the amount of money we would need to spend as well as the amount of time it would take to prepare for filming. Additionally, the thriller genre plays heavily upon the audience's indirect involvement with the film, providing them with the facts and clues they need to piece the story together before everything is revealed to them, giving my team and I the opportunity to fully think out all of the possibilities and routes the film could take before deciding on the most satisfying and conclusive ending.

All in all, the thriller genre seems to have everything we were looking for and more, so it makes sense that it has become our “chosen one” (A2 2006).



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