Main Post 6: History of my chosen genre

Our chosen genre is drama however because it is such a broad genre we chose to focus on the sub-genres of teen drama and social realism. I decided to get a better understanding of our chosen genre by researching it in hope of keeping conventional when creating our film.

From this website http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drama_film drama is described as;

' ...a film that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as ... violence against women and corruption put the characters in conflict with themselves.'

From this website http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teen_drama our sub heading of teen drama is described as;

'...a dramatic television series with a major focus on teenage characters.'

This information wasn't extremely helpful due to it focusing on television series and not films however I did notice that to reach a teenage audience I need to include a teenage cast. So I looked even further for information on teen films and found this website http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teen_film which was helpful as it focused mainly on teen films and found out that the basic story lines to grab hold of a teenage audience usually included;

'....coming of age , first love, rebellion, conflict with parents, teen angst, and alienation. ..... Films in this genre are often set in high schools, or contain characters that are of high school age. Sexual themes are also common, as are crude forms of humor.'

This was helpful as I was then aware of what our film had to include to make it appeal to a large audience, I also noticed that the majority of these films were set in the USA and only a few were set in the UK. This site was also useful in explaining the usual codes and conventions that our target audience would be used to which also explained how our target audience was used to an American culture. Major events that a teen would expect to see would include;

'....proms, alcohol, illegal substances, high school, parties and all-night raves, losing one's virginity, relationships, social groups and cliques, and American pop-culture.'

http://www.movieweb.com/movies/2012/drama This link showed me popular and current film drama's, I found this useful as I was able to see what was popular with my film's target audience such films included the images below.