Genre Research

Sharna Mandil

Why did we chose a romcom?• Upon deciding what genre to chose for our film, as a group we was in debate

between choosing either a romance or a comedy.• Once we had done our research it became apparent to us, that the general public’s

favourite genres of film were comedies and romance films. This then helped us merge the two genres into one creating a rom-com, which a lot of people thought was a good idea as not many previous media students have merged genres, more preferring to stick to one genre, so we decided to give our self a challenge and take on two genres as one.

• During class time and personal time, each member of our group watched many short films on websites such as YouTube, to get an idea of how short films of the romcom genre were set up, and how their storylines were produced.

• One example of a short film we watched of the romcom genre:“Dinner Date” - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y_-vsHvPBEDirector: Tom Antos

Dinner Date • Dinner Date, gave us the basis of our short film as after watching this, we

decided we wanted to incorporate a date between two characters, in which the equilibrium was disrupted and therefore, had to be fixed by the protagonist.

• Dinner Date is both a comedy and a romance, which then became the basis of our short film as we liked the idea of having a romantic film with the edge of some comedy.

• The characters in this short film, also became the building blocks in creating our characters. We based our characters losely on the ones in ‘Dinner Date’ however, added our own ideas and thoughts as a group as how the character should be, and created Bobby (the protagonist) from there.

What films did we watch in the romcom genre?

• We watched 2 main films based on the romcom genre: ‘Along Came Polly’ (2004) and ‘10 Things I Hate About You’ (1999)

• We decided to watch these films, as we thought that the characters in these films and they problems they later face within the film, would similarly mirror our short film. For example: ‘10 Things I Hate About You’ one of the main protagonist’s Cameron James (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) a geeky new kid at school, develops a crush on his fellow class mate Bianca Stratford (Larisa Oleynik), a popular attractive girl who is way out of his league. Eventually, Cameron wins over Bianca, which is where we got the idea that our two main characters would mirror these two in terms of the male character would be very geeky, in comparison to the female character who would be very attractive and popular, and the story line would mirror similarly to ‘10 Things I Hate About You’ as the audience are in constant apprehension if Cameron would get the girl, in which case he does, which is something we wanted to incorporate into our film.

Other films we watched

Twilight (2008), although not a romcom, the main characters Edward Cullen and Bella Swan had similar traits in which we wanted to incorporate into our film. Bella, is a shy awkward girl who falls for Edward, a more popular handsome character. We wanted our male character to have Bella’s traits (unpopular, shy, awkward), whereas, we wanted our female character to have Edward’s traits (popular, attractive). Therefore, researching into Twilight at how the characters are portrayed so we could use these traits within our characters.