GENRE: essay.

Analyse one of your coursework productions in relations to genre.

Genre helps us to watch and study different texts by dividing them into categories. Each category has its main characteristics that define it. I created an opening sequence of thriller genre. I decided to make it a crime thriller. I had to follow certain generic characteristics when creating the opening sequence to make sure it came across as a crime thriller. Some of those generic characteristics were: typical visual style, typical types of narrative, generic types of characters, typical sound design and typical editing style.

I decided to follow my chosen genre's conventions and give in to set boundaries because, as Jason Mitchell stated -a media text should have easy to understand conventions to make it a successful media text. By following standard conventions in my crime thriller piece, it would mean that audience would easily understand what was going on in the first 2 minutes I made as they would pick up on cues that they have seen already in other texts.

Altman said "people look for certain pleasures when choosing a film genre. These are emotional pleasures, visceral pleasures and intellectual puzzles". My opening sequence would be what audience would watch for the pleasures relating to intellectual puzzles. Intellectual puzzles enable the audience to solve a mystery/crime and make assumptions of what will happen/could have happened. My piece starts with an introduction to characters and a mystery murderer, killing a whole detective's family. This would enable my audience to question some parts of the plot, anxiously waiting for the story to be revealed. In the title sequence, we placed a few clues as to why the murderer would come to the detective's family but only audience who really do enjoy intellectual puzzles pleasures in films would find this interesting.

However, my opening sequence is somewhat set on what genre it fits into but some parts of it lead to thinking it's mystery thriller rather than mainly a crime thriller. Abercrombie said that "the boundaries between genres are shifting and passing through one another". This is a post-modern view on the genre theory and to some extent, my opening sequence fits to this statement. Crime thriller is a sub-genre of the Thriller Genre. Sub-genres emerged where the audiences had enough of the same thriller characteristics being put in films under one and the same category, so film productions companies started to do something about it. That's how crime thrillers and mystery thrillers are now firm sub-genres of thriller, very popularised and one of the most famous ones to be made. This is also one of the reasons I made a crime- thriller opening sequence.

Even though, I made a crime thriller opening sequence, specifically following genre conventions to make sure it does come across as what I intended it to be, in a few years time, all it may become is parody-like sequence as other media texts of my genre would be and then they would be deconstructed and new genre would be made. This is a reference is Metz' stages of transformation of genres. There is experimental stage, classic stage, parody stage and deconstruction stage. I made my opening sequence as a crime thriller because the sub-genre is in its classic stage. It is still enjoyed by many so it would be successful.