2. Introduce your media product and its purpose
I am going to be focusing on my teaser trailer that I made as part of a marketing
campaign for a film titled Casey's Journal. The purpose of my teaser trailer is
to draw our target audience in to the campaign behind the film and to show them a
snippet of the full film.
3. Bring in the concept - give a definition
Genre is a way of categorizing texts in our media-saturated culture. John Fiske
theorizes this is for the convenience of both producers and audiences, whilst Rick Altman
argues that genres are usually defined in terms of either semantic or syntactic elements.
4. Relate theory to your media product
John Fiske states that genre is for the convenience of both producers and audiences. In our teaser
trailer genre was useful as a selling point and we were able to use signifiers of the teen drama genre
in order to appeal to our target audience such as a typical narrative of that genre which included
elements like friendship issues and fitting in. We found that these storylines were typical to this
genre and appealed to our kind of audience.
Lacey works through five areas to recognize elements of genre in each, this is known as Lacey's
repertoire of elements. The five areas are setting, character, narrative, iconography and style. The
setting which is mainly used in our film Casey's Journal is a college setting to show how the
characters are and what the main genre of the film is. The characters are predominantly teens in
our trailer, shown through their environment of education as well as appearance and technology
being used, also all of our characters are female which it why our target audience is skewed towards
females. The narrative of the teaser trailer follows a conventional structure for Teen-drama. For
example, the trailer's characters are introduced through a new beginning for the main character.
Therefore, suggesting a change in this characters routine, in this case moving schools. Instantly
suggesting the climax and problem that may occur in the story line such as loneliness, bullying,
being an outsider. The setting of a high school and the girls bedroom are links closely to the teen
genre because teenagers spend their time in school or at home therefore these settings can relate
to the genre. The style of lighting used in our trailer presents every day realism, relating to the
issues presented in the film which also are common to everyday life.
5. Conclude
Genre has been a useful marketing tool because we researched similar
films within the same genre on websites and based our target
audiences on the audiences of those films.
