Choosing a Genre

Before we could analyse and take influence from any particular trailers we had to make a decision as to what the genre of our film will be. We narrowed it down to two genres that we all agreed on: Coming of Age/Teen Movie and Teen Apocalypse. We chose them because we believed we had the resources to create these films (being teenagers) and it was also different to the other genres we had previously produced: Comedy and Thriller.

Coming of Age/Teen Movie

Having seen films such as The Perks of Being a Wallflower (dir. Stephen Chbosky 2012) and Mean Girls (dir. Mark Waters 2004) we thought about perhaps going down a Teen Drama or Teen Comedy route. Looking at storylines of books and films of the genre to base our narrative ideas on such as: The Summer I Turned Pretty (by Jenny Han). We then came up with a basic storyline involving a love triangle, thus covering issues such as relationships and sexuality. Watching trailers for the appropriate genre we have since found that it would be very difficult to find a Unique Selling Point (USP) for our film's plot, many Teen Movie trailers are very generic and a bit cheesy. We then went on to make rough sketches and designs for posters and magazine covers for both genres, however we began leaning further towards Teen Apocalypse as we felt it would be more unique and also more of a challenge.

Teen Apocalypse

We have often seen trailers for films about the apocalypse such as 2012 (dir. Roland Emmerich 2009) and The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich 2004). Even trailers for films set after the apocalypse in their own genre of post-apocalypse such as I am Legend and The Road (John Hillcoat 2009). We used a literary reference to help form ideas for our narrative. In the book The Lord of the Flies (by William Golding) a group of school boys are marooned on a paradise island- they soon split into two factions as Jack and Ralph battle to become "Chief". This is a socially critical novel demonstrating in a microcosm that without rules and authority we would descend into chaos. We decided that we too would like to demonstrate a more contemporary example of this social criticism, using the idea of adults disappearing rather than have them on an island instead have them on the outskirts of a small town.
 
We chose Teen Apocalypse we wanted it to be ambitious and also as a Hollywood-style institute it has not been explored in the ways we want to explore it. It is a different type of action and narrative compared with a film like The Hunger Games because that is very controlled and is focussed on the ending of the Character's lives rather than the world. We wanted to show total anarchy could follow the sudden disappearance of adults and authority. Although being a Hollywood company we wanted to make our film and it's trailer have a meaning and social criticism.

We made brief sketches of potential designs for posters and magazine covers for each of our favoured genres. This was so we could decide which genre we had more ideas for, we thought that the teen apocalypse had more room for creativity and so we decided to peruse this genre.