The document discusses conventions of drama and action films. It provides details on common elements of drama films including realistic characters and settings, character development, social interaction, and happy endings. It also lists typical drama settings and cinematography techniques. For action films, it outlines fighting, weapons, explosions, vehicles, motives, heroes, and fast-paced music as conventions. It describes action adventure narratives as keeping audiences engaged through exotic locations, struggles, and hair-raising adventures against evil forces.

1. Conventions of
Drama &
Action!
By Shazmin

2. Conventions of Drama!
• Deal with real life situations
• Realistic characters, settings & stories
• Portrays journeys of character development
throughout the film
• Intense social interaction
• Purpose of a dramatic storyline is to move the
audience dramatically
• Audience relate to characters
• Problems that end up to happy endings
• Explores relationships and emotions

3. Setting Conventions
• In a high school
• At home
• Shopping centres
• Outside (parks)
• The City/Countryside
• Neighbourhoods

4. Conventional technical codes!
• Two Shot (Shows relationships)
• Establishing shot (shows view)
• Cross cutting (shows different
relationships)
• Montage (shows passage of time)
• Over the shoulder shot (when characters
talk)
• Medium shot
• Close up (Shows emotion)

5. Iconography
• A happy ending is used in nearly every drama film
to believe that real life issues can be overcome.
• Storyline of drama are often told like a journey
and story
• Because the genre of drama is dramatic, the
sounds that are used are dramatic so the audience
know how to feel.
• Props like mobile phones, special books/boxes,
guns, alcohol etc.

6. Narrative
• Starts happy
• Theres a problem
• Conflict/ break in relationships
• Make up and solve problem
• Happy ending

7. Themes of Drama
• Crime drama and legal drama
• Historical drama
• Docudrama
• Physcodrama
• Comedy-drama
• Melodrama
• Romance
• Tragedy

8. Conventions of action
• Fighting
• Weapons and guns
• Outbreaks in windows, doors,
houses, walls
• Goodies and badies
• Explosions and crashes
• Cars and motocycles
• Always a motive
• Heros
• Upbeat, face paced
sound/music

9. Setting conventions
• The city
• Motorways/roads
• Underground
• They are set in a stereotypical world of the not
too distant past e.g the 1930s, or the fictional
world of storybook adventures e.g. The high
seas of the 19th century.
• Exotic locations where the characters have to
contend with extremes of climate, as well as evil
forces.

10. • Action Adventure films are designed to create an action-filled,
energetic experience for the audience who can live vicariously through
the exotic locations, conquests, explorations, struggles and situations
that confront the main characters.
• The aim is to please the audience by keeping them on the edge of
their seats through a series of mind boggling chases, exotic locations
and hair raising adventures in historically inaccurate but somehow
elementally possible settings.
Iconography

11. Extreme long shot/ establishing
shot (shows location)
Fast paced editing
High/ low angles
Short take
Pan/ tracking shot
Conventional technical codes

12. Narrative
• A main protagonist who is a recognisably normal
guy, and who just happens to have amazing
powers of endurance in the face of extreme
danger, and is also very clever.
• There are always helpers who are a team of
innocent characters who happen to get caught
up in the action.
• The characters take the twist and turns of the
plot very seriously as they are often in mortal
danger from an assortment of unusual animals,
machines and monsters orchestrated by an evil
antagonist.

13. Themes of action
• Dystopian
• Fantasy
• Comedy
• Horror
• Apocalypse