Genre, Period drama, drama documentary, crime, soap opera and comedy

Genres within film 

You have been recruited to shoot a short drama for a new slot just before the early evening news aimed at young adults. Effective production will call upon your ability to put into effect knowledge and skills relating to single camera formats, structures and techniques, as well as your ability to plan a shoot and film and edit the drama.

Genre

A category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterised by similarities in form, style, or subject matter.

-          Period

-          Dramadoc

-          Crime

-          Soap

-          Comedy

Period Drama:

A costume drama or period drama is a period piece in which elaborate costumes, sets and properties are featured in order to capture the ambience of a particular area.

The term is usually used in the context of film and television. It is an informal, crossover term that can apply to several genres but is most often heard in the context of historical dramas and romances, adventures films and swashbucklers.

This implication is that the audience is attracted as much by the lavish costumes as by the content.

Drama Documentary:

In television programming and staged theatre, a docudrama is a documentary-style genre that features dramatized re-enactments of actual historical events.

A docudrama may be filmed or written. In the core elements of its story a docudrama strives to adhere to known historical facts, while allowing a greater or lesser degree of dramatic license in peripheral details, and where there are gaps in the historical record.

Docudrama producers sometimes choose to film their reconstructed events in the actual locations in which the historical events occurred.

Dialogue may include the actual words of real-life persons, as recorded in historical documents.

      - Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster

      - BBC

Crime Drama:

Crime films are films which focus on the lives and activates of criminals and/or those men and women who pursue them.

The stylish approach to a crime film varies from realistic portrayals of real-life criminal figures, to the far-fetched evil doings of imaginary arch-villains.

Criminal acts are almost always glorified in these movies as successive generations of viewers become inured to the nastiness of the crime focused on.

Soap Drama:

A soap opera, sometimes called “soap” for short, is an on-going, episodic work of dramatic fiction presented in serial format on radio or as television programming.

Historically, soaps were radio series broadcast in weekday daytime slots, usually five days a week, when most listeners would be housewives; thus the shows were aimed at and consumed by a predominantly female audience.

Comedy:

Comedy-drama is a genre of theatre, film, and television that combines elements of comedy and drama, having both humorous and sometimes serious content. 

H/W: Examples of genre, Expand on particular genres, genre history/theory. Graphics, stills, Extracts. Filmmaker does the encoding and the audience does the decoding -Codes and conventions- repeated elements through each example within a given genre and audience expect to see. Codes and conventions of genre.

Narrative Structure:

STORY- Whole diegesis (story world)

PLOT- Arrangement of story units and the cause of and effect of relationship between the units.

NARRATIVE- How s&p are represented and communicated.

·         Narrative

·         The overall arrangement of parts that a media text comprises.

·         In film the narrative includes:

-          The story content

-          The plot- The particular ordering of story units.

-          All the technical and stylistic elements that are used to deliver the story content.

·         Linear

·         Nonlinear

·         Flashback

·         Realist

·         Anti-Realist

·         Open Endings

·         Closed Endings

A linear narrative is one which runs in a straight line, delivering events in a chronological order.

A good example of a linear narrative is a soap opera.

Soap operas rarely jumps around in time, either forwards or backwards. Most soap aim at actuality. Representing real life as it is lived and experienced.

A non-linear narrative is one that does not proceed in a straight-line, step-by-step fashion.

A non-linear narrative may present events in an order that is not the chronological one.

In a crime plot, a writer might place a story’s ending before the beginning and the middle acts.

The 2000 America neo-noir psychological thriller Memento directed by Christopher Nolan.

The film is presented as two different sequences of scene interspersed:

·         A series in B&W that is shown chronologically.

·         Colour sequences shown in reverse order.

This un-chronological ordering of the action stimulates the mental state of the protagonist, who suffers from anterograde amnesia. The two sequences “meet” at the end of the film, producing one complete and cohesive narrative.

·         
      Flashback:

·         Flashback narratives- not to be confused with non-linear narratives – begin at a later stage in the story and then jump back almost immediately to the very beginning of the story to proceed linearly from there and usually proceed past the supposed “ending” shown at the beginning.

·         Flashbacks were a predominant feature of the television shown Lost.

Realist, Realism, Realistic… What is the difference?

Realist narrative aim at representing life as we know it. Phrasal terms such as “social realism” extend this idea and focus on issues that confront use in the everyday actualities of our own lives.

The vast majority of films made for mainstream audiences aim to be realistic, that is to say, they aim to preserve an internal logic established early on in the film regarding. In order for realism to be maintained, the rules established at the beginning of film governing the way the film work d works cannot be broken later on.

(Italian neorealism, kitchen sink, Social realism)

A realist narrative draws its power from the portrayal of real events.

Realist narratives focus on the life that we know and are bound by the same rules that our own lives are bound by.

We do not expect a male character in a realist narrative to suddenly zoom up into the sky- unless of course he is wearing a jet pack.

Realist narratives often focus on the kinds of issues and challenges that face ordinary people in their everyday lives.

An anti-realist narrative has the freedom to indulge in the presentation of events that could never happen in ordinary life.

Superhero films have their own realism – and internal logic that establishes the “special powers” possessed by the characters which govern what protagonists and antagonists can can’t do.

Even given this realism, they are not what we would describe as “realist”. In everyday life men cannot stretch their arms around buildings – unless they are Lego ones.

An open ending is one that leaves the major conflict initiated by the suspense plot unresolved.

An open ending leaves an audience with a definite sense that the story is unfinished or may continue after the section of the narrative we have seen.

·         Closed endings, by contrast, do just what the phrase suggests, name bring closure to a story.

·         They present a definite end to the story being told.