Why is genre an important factor of film making ?

The genre of a film is dependent on various factors such as who the director is, what the audience expectations are and the storyline. In using the genre it creates a short cut in how the film describes and we know what to expect. When making a films its important to know whom the intended audience are. For example you must take into account what time the film was made and for what audience. Every genre has a unique set of characteristics influenced by the medium it will appear in.
Genres are also important to audiences, as they select their choice on the genre also certain genres are considered appropiate to certain ages or genres in society and their choices are made accordinly.
Audiences have a system of expectation about the content and style of a text according to its genre. this enables the audience to take pleasure in what their watching, pleasure may also be drawn from the differences.
Also audiences idenitfy with repeated elements in generic films and this may shape their own idenity, such as young girls dressing the same as their favourite film stars.
Genre provides structure and form which can allow a great deal of creativity and virtuosity, especially when a reworking of a generic conventions happens.
When making a film its also important to the producers as they market films according to genre because a niche audience has already been identified as taking an interest in that type of film.
Producers standerise the production according to the genre and audience, therefore cutting cost. Overall genre is very important when filmmaking as it determines the audience and structures the film.

Introduction A2 Media

This year in A2 Media we will be studying the concept of short films, our brief is to produce a short film of 5 minutes in a group, we then have the choice when working individually to create a poster to advertise the film and a review of he film for the publication in a magazine or a radio trailer. We will cover the development of short film as a media form, the narrative process in film making, representation issues, audience consideration, generic devices and technical code to help us make our sort film. We will then study these issues together to inform the promotional material for short films and we will explore film review writing techniques.

As well as producing the film and practical work we have to provide an evaluation and evidence of research and planning on this blog.

Evaluation

When creating my magazine i used different fonts on the front cover and sometimes re-used some that were eye catching and stood out from the rest, this grabbed the readers attention and made them want to read the articles. I also used selling lines and and pull quotes, dip in styles and enter points. I flattered the audience, making them feel as though the magazine is polite and talking to its audience directly. i selected certain colours and make a specific layout for the magazine, so that the style was similar throughout and also consistant, therefore giving a more professional outlook on the magazine.
I would want IPC to publish my magazine as they would be the most suitable, they also publish magazines such as 'heat'. The audience for my magazine would be young teenagers and adults, as my magazine uses bright and bold colours and fonts, it also has articles that young people would take more of an interest in, such as interviews with up and coming artists.
To produce my magazine i mainly used 'Photoshop', I took my own photos and used them throughout the magazine, by doing this i learnt the basics of how to use a digatal camera. I leanrt how to use 'Photoshop' and by doing this it helped me alot when it came to editing my photos and adding special effects.
When i created my music magazine i focused a lot more on the quality and audience, whereas when i created my college magazine i was just trying to to hard and focusing on my photos, i believe that i have improved a lot more and now understand what goes into making a magazine and how the audience effects how the magazine is put together.

We also had to create a double page spread for our magazine, again i used a made up pop star named, Lola Belle. I created an interview with her and made up questions and answers that would be believable to my audience of people interested in pop/ indie music. I also took photos of my singer as though it had been done professionaly as though it was a photoshoot and i was happy with the outcome.
This is my double page spread.

We then got on to making our magazine, we had some lessons on photography and designing our front covers. For my front cover i looked at other bands for inspiration and decide to get a group of my friends together and create a pretend band name 'brella boys'. I edited the photos in photoshop, and picked the one that i thought was the best and most effective. This was my front cover for my music magazine.

After learning about these we picked our audience that we were targeting, there are many different ones such as; goths, heavy metal, pop, punk, indie, grunge, rap, mc,dance, techno, country and westen and many more.

For my magazine i picked pop/indie. We had to do a readership profile of the people that inspired us to pick the genre of our magazine, i chose to do this through photoshop;


This was my readership profile.

We then did a questionairre, the see what our audience would be.


1. What is your age?
0 - 15 16 – 25 26 – 37 38 – over

2. Male or female?

3. Which ethnic background are you from?

4. What genre of music do you listen to?

5. How would you describe your fashion sense?

6. How would you describe your personality?

7. What region do you live in?

8. What religion are you?

9. Are you in full time education?

10. Would you mind telling us your mother and fathers profession?

11. What are your interests and hobbies?

12. How would you describe your lifestyle?

13. Where do you prefer to eat around college?

14. Do you think there is enough time for socialising during college?

15. Do you have a part time job, if so where?

16. Do you have a boyfriend of girlfriend that goes to this college?

17. What do you aspire to be?

18. Who would you say your role model is?

19. If you could be anyone for one day who would it be?

20. If you could change anything to make the world a better place what would it be?

21. What made you choose prior college?

22. Do you enjoy college, if you do, what do you enjoy?

23. If you could change anything in college what would it be?

24. Do you take part in after college activities?

25. What type of music do you listen to?

After creating our college magazine we then went on to make a music magazine. We looked at NME and other music magazines for inspiration. We looked at what makes different mediation, such as selection, organisation and focusing.
We also looked at media concepts such as the popularity of media and how it can influence the way we behave. We looked at different audiences we aimed to explore how audiences are defined , how to go about defining them and how you may conduct research on finding a specific audience.