Film Blog: Screenplay / Genre #2

Genre groups movies by like kind and classifies audience expectation. Audiences know the principles and peculiarity of their favorite stories, so they will instantly know if you are out of touch with the genre. Truly special movies, nevertheless, not only meet audience expectation, they transcend it. In other words, they go beyond what’s been done before.

The Godfather, Saving Private Ryan, and Alien were landmark films because they transcended audience expectation in their individual genres (Gangster, war, and horror). To write a screenplay, short story or a novel on this level, you must master the genre you specialized on or that you are working on.

There are has been much written on the topic of genre, however the best way to master a genre is to watch movies, read novels and read scripts. This applies to movies, books bad and good, old and new. By doing this you will know a particular genre is placed in its group. It also helps to visit cinemas and interview people to find out what they look for in a particular genre. 

Another way to get familiar with different genres is to go online and download scripts. Script daily  http://www.dailyscript.com/ is a good site that has readily available scripts for your study.

The following lists are some of the popular genres.

Action Adventure – stories about quests, survival, and rescue

Animation – stories with cartoon characters, puppets or computer 

Buddy – stories about friendship 

Coming of Age – stories about maturation 

Crime – stories about private eyes and detectives 

Cop – variation on crime genre where the focus is the world cops

Mystery – a variation on crime genre where the opponent is unknown for much of the story (a “who done it”)

Horror – stories about the occult, supernatural and monsters

If you want to know more about this I will suggest you go to film school or a college among others.  Priezo Film and Media Schools is a good one coming your way soon. With them you can sit at home anywhere in the world and do your studies. And you can either do a certificate course with them or just enroll for knowledge gaining‘s sake.

I will be coming your way next with genre in novel writing before we discuss “Concept.”