Film Opening Genre Research

 GUYS! OK Here's what I'm going to do. The main genre in my piece is going to be drama. Last post I mentioned I wanted to make a comedic piece. However, for the story I want to do, it would make more sense that the main genre would be a sports drama. I'm still going to include comedic components in some scenes but the piece will mostly be serious. In this blog post, I will go more in-depth about my genre research in drama. So the first thing I'm going to do is search for the main components of a drama film.

So right now I'm looking at a website called screencraft.org

My idea for this film opening is to create a sports drama piece about a young male teenager who aspires to become a professional soccer player. On the website listed above, it suggests various components that are important to include in my sports drama. 

There are two films that I personally enjoyed a lot that inspired me to want to create a sports drama film opening. The first film I would like to talk about is Apache: The Life of Carlos Tevez.

I watched this show a week after it came out and it caught my eye because of the struggles Tevez had to deal with growing up in the "hood" of Buenos Aires, Argentina. I also liked it a lot because I'm Argentinian :). I really loved the use of mise-en-scene in this piece. The clothes worn by the character and the building just really helped the audience better understand the setting and was indicative of the financial situation. Although the dialogue throughout the entire film helps us understand the story behind the character and his persona.

Now I don't want the protagonist in my film to have a low financial status. In fact, my goal isn't really to develop my character through mise-en-scene elements, but more so through dialogue. I want to incorporate scenes that help people understand the character's goal, struggle, background, etc. I couldn't find an opening scene for this film since it's an 8 episode series. 

Now another inspiration I had for my piece is from the Creed franchise. The Creed franchise is a spin-off of the popular Rocky franchise. It focuses on Adonis Johnson's (Micheal B. Jordan) journey in the boxing world. What I like about it though is that it talks a lot about the character's background and it doesn't heavily focus on training, boxing, repeat, so that's kind of what I'm going for. I wanted to watch the film opening to kind of get an idea as to how to do my own.

Now I sped up the video so it wouldn't be that long but basically, the opening scene is set in a juvenile detention facility and it shows a fight scene between Adonis and another kid. So what we can gather from this is that Adonis is a delinquent, he likes to get into fights, and it doesn't show in the clip but if you watch the whole video it reveals that Adonis thinks he does not have a father and that he doesn't want to keep transferring to different group homes. The lady whom we can assume is the mother of Adonis, comes to visit him and explains to Adonis that he did have a father but he died before he was born. So already in this opening scene of the film, we learned a lot about the character mostly through dialogue and that is what I want to achieve with my piece.