A Brief Conversation about Genre

 After deciding on a broad idea of what this film would be about, the next logical step is deciding what the genre of my film would be. Although I don't have the finer details ironed out, I know I want this film to depict the internal struggle of a depressed man as he attempts to manage his deteriorating mental state and the few personal relationships he has left. I know that I want this film to be serious, but it's more difficult to narrow down what exactly will be the genre of this film.

             (I used this cohesive list of genres at Studiobinder to see all the available options for a genre)

Without doing any research, I thought that my film would be a psychological thriller, since I had thought that all movies where the main conflict deals with mental illness are psychological thrillers. After looking into my options, I realized that a psychological thrillers lean towards the horror genre, as they create fear and suspense by utilizing a psychological conflict. I don't want to create a horror film, so I continued my search and finally settled upon the Drama genre. The drama genre is typically serious in tone and revolves around realistic problems, where other genres tell stories that are unlikely to occur in real life.

When looking for examples of a drama film, I came across Titanic. Although a drama film, Titanic actually falls into the category of a melodrama, which is a subclass of the drama genre. Melodramas are still serious in tone, but the conflict and details of the story are exaggerated. Unlike the vision for my film, Titanic uses exaggerated aspects to move along the story. For example, the scene where the ship sinks is exaggerated by having the ship get tilted so that the ship is completely vertical, yet realistically according to historic accounts, the ship only slightly turned around 40 degrees.

Notice how when thinking realistically, this scene would have played out extremely differently. I want my film to be relatively realistic and natural in nature, so I would portray my film as simply a drama movie.

Now that I've narrowed down what is the genre of my film, I can now start looking at typical characteristics of drama. This will aid me in creating storyboards and ideas for certain scenes for my film opening!