Picking a Genre…

    Choosing a genre and a way to approach my film opening has been harder than I thought. My mind feels like it has thousands of ideas constantly running on treadmills, so how could I possibly decide on a single storyline and genre? A way to tackle this stump, I thought, would be to watch as many film openings as I possibly could. So that’s what I tried to do. I watched a video by the creator StudioBinder about different film openings with the hope that I would be able to hone down which approach appealed to me most. After watching different examples from different genres, I believe that pursuing a film opening in the drama genre would be most interesting. What caught my attention was the example of the opening of the 2019 film Marriage Story. The opening focuses on establishing the relationship between the two main characters in a form where nothing seems to be wrong until the opening finishes to reveal that they are at a therapy session and their marriage is failing. I'm very interested in following the same steps by introducing a character who seems to be normal, but then the conflict is revealed and the peace is disrupted.

    Knowing that I wanted to start off with a serene opening that contracts the conflicts occurring in the plot, I have decided that my film should follow the drama genre, or more specifically, a coming-of-age drama. The next step required me to brainstorm possible plot ideas and how establishing the main character would help contribute to the plot that will be shown in the film. I jotted down a few ideas that all follow a similar storyline that I'm interested in doing. To best fit the common narrative of a coming-of-age drama, my main character will be a teenager (most likely around 17 or 18 years old, mainly because it's easier to cast my friends as the role and that's what age they are) and they'll be dealing with a large conflict that forces them to deal with many emotions and evolve as a person. My ideas range from the main character wanting to go on hunt to find their missing relative to a main character having to deal with abandonment or a parental loss. The idea I'm most leaning towards, for now, is having the main character live the day of an important milestone while dealing with the loss of a parent.

    Having a general idea of the story I want to portray with my film opening, I have to begin planning my process and experimenting with different ideas on how to proceed. At this time, many questions come to mind:

What should the first scenes consist of?

How will the audience know the the parent has died?

How much should be revealed from the film opening alone?

What pacing and sounds should be used?

    A lot of these questions can be answered easier through research of the conventional techniques of a coming-of-age drama film. I have a lot of research ahead of me to be able to know how to best fit my ideas together. Learning from the processes of my past projects, I should also develop a schedule for my work in order to make sure I stay on track. After conducting further research, first focusing on commonalities of the genre, I can begin crafting how to actually bring my idea to life with the resources that are available to me.