Genre

What is genre?

Genre is a category, which is used to define it by its codes & conventions. Genre is all about repetition and representation. This relates to various media texts and products.

• Horror
• Comedy
• Sci – fi
• Mystery
• Western
• Romance
• Thriller
• Dystopia

What is sub-genre?

Sub-genre is vague with their icons but more specific with the genres

• Historical romance
• Environmental thrillers
• Military sci – fi
• Paranormal mystery

What is Iconography?

Icons also hold powers and give meaning to visuals, genre can be identified by the icons we see. Additionally, Icon meanings can change of a period of time and these genres can change and adapt to icons over time.

What are fixed genres?

Some genres don’t change a lot over time, they are likely to remain the same as before. Why you may ask? due to cultural significance (tradition) and historical events and relations. For example; western movies.Typical american movies which are set in the west are a good example for fixed genres, as they tend to have a similar story line and characters.

What are non – fixed genres?

Most genres tend to change over time like humans and nature do, as everything has a cycle. Therefore, genre works in cycles too.

For example. Vampires, they have evolved in books, films, TV over the years.

The vampire in the 1910’s was thought as rapists, as they would bite ladies and tun them into something sexy. In other words, they were not seen as something good. However, if you look at the most recent vampire film ‘Twilight’ you see how the perspective of them has been changed through the genre. Twilight is a fantasy fiction with some young adult fiction and also some romance. I personally believe that this move changed people’s views as a whole they started seeing vampires as a fantasy and also in a romantic way.

What are hybrid genres?

Hybrid genres are when two genre merges, this is normally seen in horror films. Icons and different conventions work together. why do would anyone merge two things together? they do that to attract audience and experiments.

For my short film, I would like to go for a hybrid genre as it will give me an opportunity to work on a bigger idea. Also, It will help me display my creativity and ideas.

Non – Genre / Anti – Genre

Some media texts cannot be categorised because they don’t follow any specific genres.

Lastly, we watched this video which showed us the evolution of posters, I also learned about how the narrator believes that these posters are all made from templates. Which makes them all look quite similar. Additionally, they talked about the two main colours that are used in almost every poster. I also gathered that the posters now don’t really tell a lot about the story. Like they did before, nowadays its more about making the poster look appealing to audience so that they would watch films. Sometimes the way the poster is made has nothing to do with the actual film or its story line.