Analysing Genre

Our next task was to begin to analyse genre. To do this I have created a series of mood boards which identify various themes and genres including, fantasy, romance, horror and animals. Whilst looking for images to place on my mood boards i was able to identify the various stereotypes and representations of the beings represented in my chosen fields. Such as in horror, everything is dark and scary. The people are presented to us as being intimidating and as if they have power and authority. They have an 'evil' eye and the angle that they have been photographed tends to be at a high angle, this effectively intimidates the audience and therefore makes them appear more threatening and comply with the theme of horror. Therefore i we were to choose the horror genre for our final opening sequence, it would be an effective method to use high angle shots and dark colours, as we have identified it as successful in previous horror advertisements and films. Scifi is a genre incredibly popular with teens and computer geeks. They use a lot of bright colours and unrealistic objects. Although after analysing this genre we identified it as ineffective for our opening sequence as we do not have the resources available to us to create an effective scifi opening sequence. As we would need a high level of special effects and we do not currently have the software available to us. The fantasy theme again is similar to scifi, meaning that they use various special effects as most of the characters throughout the films are animated as they are 'fantasy' creatures. The bright colours and use of special effects means that it again would be difficult for us to create an opening title sequence with a theme of fantasy. The last genre i analysed was 'animals'. Now animals is more of a theme then a genre, but after researching some stats, i identified that animals are a very common theme for films and that over 98% of films star at least one animal throughout, whether it be as small as a bird or as big as a horse. And a further 39% of films an animal is the centre point of the film, that's nearly half!! Therefore myself and my sister decided that animals would be an ideal theme for our opening title sequence, not only is this because it does not require any specialist software like the other genres, but we have various animals readily available to us, and would not need to undergo a lengthy casting process in order to find possible actors. Now we have decided to use horses, as we have many available to us, and they are safe to work with, therefore would not be putting ourselves at risk. We are now going to undergo some research to identify the medias common representations of horses and judge what we believe to be the most successful representation and therefore translate it into our own work.