Creating A Genre

In order to show the genre of a rom com, we decided to firstly increase the saturation of our picture so that everything seemed slightly lighter but not too much so that it seemed unrealistic. We also used bright colours for the costumes such as pink to show the happy nature of the genre and the comedic dancing that the main character does at the beginning shows the comedy part of rom com. We also thought about the narrative conventions of a rom com and came up with the idea of having the girl as really geeky and the boy as the typical man, complete opposites are used to emphasise the differences between the characters. We used editing to show our genre by using fade in/out which are quite soft edits along with the use of long, sweeping shots to portray the romantic atmosphere of the film and  the extensive use of the happy, non diegetic music during the beginning half of the clip increases the comic feel of the movie.

 

In order to develop our ideas about the genre of rom com we looked at two directors that specify in this particular area; Mark Waters and Marc Webb. I looked at the work of Mark Waters first as he directed Mean Girls, Freaky Friday and Just Like Heaven which are all films that have many of the rom com conventions that we looked at previously when looking at making our opening. Most of his films, especially Mean Girls, use the idea of having a main girl who starts off by being quite geeky and unpopular and then throughout the film gets more and more popular, she then gets the guy which reaches a climax and ends with the boy and girl together. This is a traditonal convention of rom coms and one that we, when making our film opening, we will take into consideration. I then looked at the works of director Marc Webb, director of the very popular 500 days of summer. This film uses the idea of the 'meet cute' situation at the beginning to get the two main characters to meet together and we decided to use this idea in our opening.

Using many of the technical and narrative conventions of a rom com and looking at different directors in order to get inspirsation, I think we were able to effectively portray this genre to the audience.