G321 - Notes on chosen genre

The genre of our filming opening is a tragic drama. We chose this genre as we felt confident that we could create something original by using this genre and we felt it suited us as a group. We all felt a connection to films of this genre and have all said how we enjoy watching dramas. This helped as it meant we could come up with more ideas as we understood that drama is a broad genre. To it down we then decided to make it a tragic drama. We did this to make it more specific and to show how we were not touching other aspects that are associated with dramas. In dramas there are certain aspects of a film that you can expect to see. Because the genre is so broad there are many different types of dramas. This is why we wanted to make it into a tragic drama as we already had a vision of what we wanted the film to be like and we wanted it to have emotion and tragedy which is usually caused by a death. If we stuck to it being a drama then it could give the wrong kind of impression to the audience as they may not be sure to what may conclude in the film.
Something typical that happens in dramas is romance. We understood this and because ours is not based on romance, but romance that is lost, we did not want to give the wrong impression. Instead we wanted to show the tragedy of it and how love is no longer there due to the tragedies life has thrown at a married couple. As we are only creating an opening and in this opening there are only two characters shown a man and a woman we did not want it to seem as though after the opening, the film was going to be focused on romance because we wanted to highlight the space created between them.
Another type of drama is a period or historical drama. We knew from the start that we did not want to go into this as we felt it would be too difficult to re-create a period of time without loosing the effect. We also felt we did not know enough about this type of drama to base our film on it and stuck with tragedy as the end result would be more effective
Another type of drama is a melodrama. This is similar to the type of drama that we chose to do but more exaggerated. If we did this we could have made it come across as fake and may not have created the same emotion we intended to if we did a melodrama. Melodramas contain emotion and tragic elements but they take it to the extreme. They are usually performed in operas which is why we stuck to our original idea as it may not have worked in a modern day based film. We wanted to create something that audiences could relate to and feel sympathy for the characters involved. With tragedies we knew we had to incorporate a death but in an opening it is difficult to put that across. Because of this we instead decided to start from the young girl already passed away and base our film on the struggles that families face when having to death with death and how it breaks relationships and unravels hidden secrets.

Yasmin