Discuss how you used genre in one of your products

I am going to discuss genre in relation to my foundation portfolio for which I had to create a three minute thriller film opening. Genre is a way of categorizing media texts according to its style/content, enabling the audience to easily choose what they want to experience. 

The genre for our group was ‘thriller’ with which we researched several of its subgenres and chose to look at ‘psychological’ in particular. To gain an understanding of the conventions of this particular genre, I and my group began to research several real media texts of this genre, looking at films such as ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ and ‘Se7en’ which all had running themes of psychology and mystery.

A theorist called Steve Neal said that ‘genre is a repetition with an underlying pattern of variations’ which meant certain generic features had to be included and repeated. While analysing these texts, some of the conventions we found were the use of low lighting, deserted and isolated locations and point of view/ close-up shots. 

Our psychological thriller opening sequence was called ‘captivity’ for which our storyline was a boy who was obsessed with seeking revenge on his wife’s killer. We recreated the generic conventions and set our opening in two locations. We used two locations as we wanted to create an anachronic type of narrative, which meant our opening narrative did not have a clear flow with constant cross-cutting between the locations and uses of flash-forward’s. This anachronic type of narrative was created by a theorist called Allan Cameron. This pattern of variation that Neal talks about is seen in our opening scene where we included two locations, one of a victim being tortured and the other scene of him being captured. We decided to do this to keep our audience captivated, wanting to know who and why the victim was being tortured. This related to Barthes’ enigma code which is a theory that suggests a text portrays a mystery to draw an audience in and pose questions. 

However our opening sequence may have gone against some conventions as when our victim was being abducted it occurred during broad daylight. Many thriller films are set when it is fairly dark or use low lighting. On the other hand, in a sense this uses ‘binary oppositions’, a theory which was looked at by Levi Strauss. The two scenes showed a contrast between good and evil. One of our scenes in which the victim was walking, not knowing what was going to occur, was shot in daylight, whereas the torture scene was shot with use of low lighting in an isolated room, which portrays violence and evil. For the scene in which the victim was casually walking we tended to shoot more Point of view and establishing shots whereas in the ‘torture scenes’ close-ups were used more, which captured the severity of the situation.

Each genre has its own identity which can be recognised by the mainstream society. I believe that the genre of our thriller opening sequence was successful in being able to be recognised and fitted the conventions of its genre.