Generic Conventions Research

For the trailer I will be producing, me and my group have chosen to go for a branch of the comedy genre. We will be creating a Fantasy RomCom film and so I have looked into the generic conventions of each of these genres in order to establish what we should incorporate into our film trailer.

Comedy

- Comedy films are mainly set in bright towns and cities, very welcoming environments, we might subvert this by making the main character's world dull and mundane in order for the audience to sympathise with him and see why he wants to escape.

- A common form of comedy is slapstick, this is used in almost every comedy film at some point and will make an appearance in ours in order to fit with the comedy genre and make our trailer funny.

- Comedy films also use wordplay based humour such as puns to generate laughs and we plan to incorporate this also subtly to make it clear that our film fits the genre and feels like a comedy film.

- Within each friendship group in a comedy their is normally the 'idiot', the joker in the group who is there to make fun of the protagonists hardships and provide jokes at otherwise humourless parts of the film.

- Digetic sound plays an important role in comedy films, lots of the humour is based around funny and witty dialogue so we will make sure the sound quality is good enough for the audience to be able to make out the jokes being made.

Romantic Comedy

- Usual boy meets girl storyline, ends with them together after defeating the obstacle that kept them apart, wether it is social ranking (she is out of his league) or a person preventing them from being together they will overcome it and work it out, ending up happy.

- Romantic comedies sometimes rely on sexual innuendos for humour due to the romantic nature of the film and it is a way to get cheap laughs.

- A common feature from romantic comedies is a voiceover, it is common for the film to start with the characters being introduced to us through the use of establishing shots showing their everyday lives and how they are different with a voice over explaining a little about the main character. This could easily to parody to create humour.

- Another important aspect of romantic comedies is that the creators of the film must use cinematography and mise en scene to make the audience root for the hero and fall in love with the princess, this is often done by making the protagonist a quirky, adorable guy who is innocent and light-hearted while the princess is attractive and kind to the main character. We will need to try and achieve this if we want to focus on a romantic comedy.