Portfolio Project Genre #2

 Horror and Supernatural Horror

What is Horror and Supernatural Horror?

The genre of Horror is made to provoke fear, suspense, and emotional discomfort (made to make you feel fearful). It often portrays themes like danger, the unknown, death, and terror. Horror can take many forms: slasher, psychological, creature-based, supernatural, and more. The sub-genre of Supernatural Horror is used to demonstrate horror while including characters, creatures, or elements from beyond the natural world. 

What is the target audience?

Research shows that horror seems more intriguing to younger demographics, especially Gen Z, who studies have shown rank horror as one of their top preferred genres. A Deloitte study found that 28% of Gen Z list horror as one of their favorite genres. The primary target audience for horror is teenagers and adults, reflecting the genre’s themes, intensity, and rating restrictions.

Genre Conventions with Content:

Horror aims to evoke fear, suspense, and emotional discomfort. Its conventions often revolve around danger, vulnerability, and the unknown. Most common themes are: fear of death or the unknown, isolation or entrapment, loss of control, human evil or moral corruption, survival against an overwhelming threat. However, supernatural horror uses conventions previously listed but also includes elements that involve forces beyond the natural world. For example, their most common themes are: life after death, spiritual or religious fear, possession, curses, or hauntings, fate vs. free will, and the unseen or unknowable.

Genre Conventions with Techniques:

Handheld camera to create instability and realism, close-ups on terrified faces or disturbing details, slow zooms to build dread, point-of-view shots to align the audience with the victim or the monster, are all ways techniques are used to create that feeling of unease or suspense. Although supernatural horror is a form of horror and uses a lot of the same techniques, there are some techniques that are not used in horror to help to convey that supernatural presence. Such as, slow creeping camera movement to mimic a ghostly presence, floating or gliding shots to suggest supernatural point-of-view, sudden whip-pans to reveal apparitions, and distorted lenses to create an unnatural atmosphere.

Institutional Conventions of Horror and Supernatural Horror:

Many of these conventions that will be listed apply to the horror genre as a whole, regardless of subgenre. Dark or desaturated color palettes (black, red, grey), a central frightening figure (monster, masked killer, distorted face), isolated victims or silhouettes, sharp contrasts and shadows, typography with jagged, distressed, or blood-like fonts. Although many of the listed imagery are also used in Supernatural horror, the following listed imagery focuses on the unseen or otherworldly: ghostly figures, shadows, or silhouettes, possessed characters with unnatural eyes or expressions, haunted houses or cursed objects, mist, fog, or ethereal lighting, and blue and green color palettes to suggest coldness or death.

It (2017) is one of the most popular and highest-grossing horror movies of all time. It is a great movie that demonstrates all the techniques previously listed.  

A Quiet Place (2018) is a amazing movie that demonstates supernatural horrors due to the paranormal deaf creatures that are invloved within the plot. 

Portfolio Project Genre #1

 Romance & Rom-Com 

What is Romance & Rom-Com?

Romance is a genre that includes the subgenre Rom-Com (romantic comedy) that focuses on lighthearted, humorous tales of love, balancing comedic situations with the emotional journey of a relationship.

What is the target audience?

The target audience for romance and rom-coms is predominantly women, often ages 18-44, seeking emotional connection, escapism, and satisfying relationship journeys.

Genre Conventions with Content:

Romance and rom-coms center on a developing love story with emotional tension and an optimistic, satisfying ending, but rom-coms add heavy humor, lighthearted themes, and comedic situations, while traditional romance focuses more intensely on the love aspect of it. Such as internal emotional journeys, deep character conflict, and specific "obligatory" scenes like the first meeting and intimacy rituals, using tropes (opposites attract, enemies-to-lovers) and supporting or opposing characters (helpers/harmers, rivals) to drive the plot towards commitment.

Genre Conventions with Techniques:

Romance genres center on a central love story leading to an emotionally satisfying, optimistic ending, emphasizing character-driven plots, internal and/or external conflicts, and palpable chemistry, while Rom-Coms layer comedy and light-hearted themes onto these conventions, using witty banter, situational humor, and meet-cutes for an uplifting tone, often involving opposites-attract tropes and comical obstacles.

Institutional conventions (narrative image, marketing, etc) of Romance and Rom-Com:

Institutional conventions in romance and romantic comedy genres are established narrative patterns and marketing strategies that create a shared language between creators and audiences. These conventions shape audience expectations and the commercial presentation of the content.

The Notebook (2004) 

is a classic movie that is

a great example of the 

Romance genre. 

Ten Things I Hate About You (1999)

is a Rom-Com that is a classic and still 

very popular, even over 2 decades later 

Music Marketing Blog #2

 Enjoy our video of the behind the scenes of putting together our Music Marketing Project!! 

Music Marketing #1 Blog!

 We have started a new project named the Music Marketing Project. I am working with a group of 4 other peers in my class and we are doing our project around the genre of heavy metal. Our song we had chosen to work with for the music video aspect of the project is Blind by Korn, however our new name for our band is the Quarantine Souls (or QS for short). 

We also created a schedule to help us keep track of what days we should be working on either the presentation or the music video and what days we need to be done with either. We also broke down the presentation to divide the different parts amongst all 5 of us. We are hoping to dedicate at least one day during our Thanksgiving break to hopefully start filming, if not completely do all the filming for the music video to get it all out of the way. This is to hopefully insure we have enough time to make sure everything is completely edited, formal, accurate, and overall just a great campaign for our band. 

Mise-en-scene Activity

    In my Aice Media Studies class we participated in a project named Multimedia Mise-en-scene. The objective of this project was to create a station for groups to go to and learn about a character. The station had to have at least 4 different parts to it to help illustrate the character. This project not only had to be interactive but representative. The character my group got was a single father, who we named Samuel Samson, is a community librarian who uses storytelling to connect with kids. He's patient, thoughtful, and always ready to lend a helping hand. 

To illustrate our character Sam we really utilized that he was a librarian and created a mood board with elements to represent our character such as; Sam reading to the children, a shelf full of children's books, the Stanford University logo to represent his son and a kid holding up her first library card. Another way we illustrate our character we  and made a interactive library with blankets and candy, this part of the station gave the other group members a opportunity to sit around a computer listening to a audio recording of the book "A Cat In The Hat" and a physical copy of the book for people to follow along with. We felt this really represented Samuel because we put the other group members into almost a day in his life reading to the children.

We organized our elements in a way that took the group members through and a dat in his life and then invited them to his story time. The first thing the groups would do is listen to an audio recording of Sam introducing himself, here he talks about him being a librarian, how his wife died, and his son who just left for college. Then the groups would go to the next tab opened with Sam's mood board, once they were finished looking over the mood board the group would go on to a video of a tour of the community library Sam works that. Concluding the tour Sam asks the quests to join in for his story time hour. Once every group member was done with the tour they transferred to the floor where they had the library set up like I described in the previous paragraph. My group developed our character with the selection of focusing on him being a librarian and not talking about his life outside of it to really add to his character of being lonely. We also used the stereotype of a librarian being older to help convey Sam being a single father because his son has left for college but this also contributes to his loneliness. In the end, assigning each member their own role of developing elements to add to our station really came together well, overall, I feel the project went well and the interactive library was super fun thing to add to our station. However. I feel as if instead of doing different tabs they switch through to go to each element there could've been something that we could do that was a little neater, well organized and creative. 

    

 

Romance Genre Research

 What is Romance? 

Romance is a genre that portrays an emotional feeling of love, compassion, butterflies, warmth, and excitement to the audience. Some people when they think of romance they think of "ew kissing and making out", although, that isn't the full story behind romantic films. The central storylines of romance films could be a love story between two people, love triangles, enemies to lovers. Romance films also tend to have reoccurring plots of a first case or marriage of a relationship and even in some movies separate for the better. Romance films are very popular among the teenage to young adult age group, especially females. There are also very popular watched around Valentine's Day because what could go wrong with a romantic movie with your significant other. However, even then some people just might like to watch romance movies and enjoy the comfort and warmth. They may feel from seeing a happy movie involving a couple.

Contents: 

In lots of romance movies there are often very popular choices of contacts such as cute meetings conflict, resolving in happier ever after, and grand gestures or performances. When it comes to marketing romance movies, you will typically see two popular and likable characters which draws people in because they are already known, but you will also see lots of couples imagery meaning to the actors standing side-by-side with their backs together or even facing each other, looking up into each other's eyes.

Anyone But You is a movie filmed with the two main actors of Sydney Sweeney and Glenn Powell, which are too very likable actors and well-known. In the picture shown the movie is marketed with the two characters facing each other looking into each other. This helps provide a little bit of understanding of what may happen in the movie during the movie. This film portrays central story of enemies to lovers while also faking their love for each other until it became real.

10 things I hate about you and the one on my personal favorite romance movies in this film the two main actors Heath ledger and Julia style play the characters, Patrick "Pat" and Katarina "Kat". The central idea of this movie is that from a bet real love created even when it wasn't intentional. This movie has a grand gesture in it where Pat puts on a performance for cat during her soccer practice, where he sings, "can't take my eyes off of you" by Frankie Valli. This song is also a very romantic song made in 1967 therefore, this also adds to the romantic feeling. This movie also aged fairly well because it was released in march of  1999 and from then on it was a very popular teenage romance comedy movie and even now two decades later it is still very known a popular among the teenage to young adult age group.

Other Sample Popular Romance movies! 

Sound Project Blog

 During the lessons on sound I learned how much sound really does come into play on films. Watching the two comparison films with Jurassic park and now much the emphasis of the sound really did matter and did make a difference on the overall production of the clip, I understood how much thought and trial and error is put into films. 

Then in class we had to complete a project making a film strictly with sound only no pictures, clips, videos , etc. We also had to use Foley to make our own sounds for this soundscape. Then we were able to edit in the sounds and layer them along with sounds we downloaded from the internet to get the best results. 

My partner and I's approach for completing sound project #1 was coming up with something we thought had a lot of sounds, we were really trying to go for like a beach setting however that didn't really work out for us so we went for a man fishing on a boat. This really helped us create an outline of what sounds we could use and what sounds we for sure need. This also really helped get an idea of what sounds we will attempt to make by ourselves. Using Clip-champ was a really good resource for making this sound project because we could make the most of all the sounds we could import, this allowed us to test a lot of sounds out and make sure we get the sounds that best align.  

Overall I feel my partner and I did really well putting all the sounds together and making sure everything aligns properly to go with the auditory storyline. However, I feel as if we could've chose a storyline that requires a lot more sound to overall add some entertainment to the project when listening. 

SoundProject_anciso