My Opening Two Minute Film : Exploring Two Potenital Genre's...

We are approaching the time of creating our opening two minutes, and as I am sure many other A-level media studies students, my mind has been buzzing with ideas. Every thing I see I think "ahh I wonder if I could use that as inspiration for my two minutes", and I have been changing my mind left, right and centre as to what I want to do, from the genre to content. So I have decided the way to decide is to research both ideas, think of the positives and negatives, asks others for advice and then decide! So I have limited my ideas down to two main genres (these were both genre that I also focused on when analysing the textual content of two films)

Documentary Genre Film
A documentary is defined as an non-fictional film, that uses factual information. Throughout history documentaries have been changing and trying to take on new forms, some of the new forms since the early days have been termed under propagandist or non-objective. The term 'documentary' is a vague term therefore allows for a broad range of films to categorised under it. Some exemplars of different documentaries are:

• Biographical films (films that are about living or dead people) example of this type is 'Muhammah Ali- When We Were Kings' (1996)
• A well known event example of this type is 'The Holocaust'
• A concert or rock festival example of this type is 'Madonna : Truth or Dare' (1991)
• A comedy show example of this type is Eddie Murphy shows
• A live performance example of this type is 'Cirque du Soleil-Journey of Man' (2000)
• A sports documentary example of this type is in the concentration of surfing is 'The Endless Summer' (1996)
• Examination of a specific subject area an example of this is in 'Frozen Planet' (2011)
• Spoof documentaries which are termed as 'mockumentaries' an example of this type is in 'Summer Heights High'
• Examining a persons life over a period of time (these tend to see extreme lives or events in a persons life and how they cope) example of this type is in 'The little lambs' (2011)

Horror/ Thriller Genre Film
A horror is defined as a film that is unsettling film, that has the aim of creating extreme emotion of panic, dream and alarm from the audience. The aim is to invoke the audiences worst fears and play on our vulnerability (example = playing on our fear of death). For a horror to work it must captivate the audience, whilst entertaining them at the same time.

A thriller film is defined as a film that has one single-minded goal, that goal is to provide a thrill. A key factor to the genre is for the film to be able to always keep the audience on edge as the film plot builds about towards its main climax. The way thriller films build the climax is usually through the main character having to to escape a dangerous situation, one of which to any normal person would be impossible. Life is in danger in thrillers, and the principle character usually enters a deadly situation unknowingly, this is to bring out a reaction from the audience, as they are willing the character not to enter the situation creating the audience "to be on the edge of their seats", this is different the reaction of which just a horror film draws from the audience.There are six different types of sub-genre's to thriller films:

• Action/adventure thrillers
• Sci-fi thrillers (example = Alien, 1979)
• Crime-caper thrillers (example = The French Connection, 1971)
• Western thrillers (example = High Noon, 1952)
• Film-noir thrillers (example = Double Indemnity, 1944)
• Romantic comedy thrillers (example = Safety Last, 1923)