Fiction Films, Genres and their Conventions.

Many films showing in the cinema today fall into the 'fiction film' category, for instance, the Twilight Sagas, Abduction and Johnny English: Reborn. The genres for fiction films range from Romantic Comedies, Dectective to plain comedies.
   For any type of film, depending on it's genre they all follow a certain convention. How To Loose A Guy In Ten Days is an example of a Rom-Com, it starts with two people decieving or hating eachother in some way, and then they get to know and understand each other and fall in love, but then there is a problem where all their secrets may come out but there is always a happy ending. If you take Failure To Launch or The Wedding Planner (all funnily enough with Matthew McConaughey in) it will take the same storyline. Here is another example of a rom-com...

   Horror films do not just follow the typical outline of the story - A hero who has to embark on a mission to find out who the villian is, why and capture them, and in the end they do so. They also follow the conventions of lighting being dim and low key, the soundtrack leading up to suspense and disturbing noises to alarm us and camera angles always being unnatural, close up, high and low angled shots. Handheld shots are very effective in the horror genre as it can confuse the audience with what they are seeing. Furthermore, visually, the colours black red  and other dark colours are used frequently.
Every single genre will ten times out of ten follow a certain pattern and does not just happen in films but novels and television programmes also.

To conclude, from the research I carried out to identify what the conventions were of certain genres, my group and I realized when we will have to think of ideas we will have to do so carefully to make sure we stay within those boundaries which make a thriller conventional. When Grace Robinson, Amber Shelley, Shannon Sutton and myself had to create a preliminary video, we knew we wanted to do a thriller, however, once we decided upon that, it became difficult to put into action. As we have now done the research required - acting as a guideline for us - hopefully we will not have the same problem we previously stumbled on.