Genre Research

 Genre Research: Coming of Age

    After some back-and-forth discussion, my group members and I finalized our idea for the plot of our film opening, as well as settled on the idea that our piece will be a coming-of-age story. 

    Coming-of-age stories focus on the protagonist's journey into adulthood(maturing and experiencing large events), therefore the title 'coming of age'. The protagonist typically faces a major challenge that ultimately leads to their growth as a person. These pieces typically use a combination of both humor and drama to tell a meaningful story. To introduce characters and their struggles, coming-of-age pieces regularly use strong, impactful dialogue to influence their audience.

    We researched a few different coming-of-age films such as Thirteen(2003), The Breakfast Club(1985), and Lady Bird(2017)  to get inspiration for our piece. During this research, we found that the target audience for coming-of-age films is teenagers and young adults, and we feel that this will help us when creating our film opening as we are creating this piece as teenagers, and therefore we are the target audience for the same thing we are creating.

    My group members and I researched a variety of topics generally covered in coming-of-age stories and decided that our protagonist's challenge would revolve around the issue of suicide. We hope to make the film opening for a piece that would cover suicide and its impact on the people close to the issue. Our main focus is covering the idea of recovering from a large trauma (which in this case would be losing a loved one to suicide) and facing discomfort while healing and growing from the experience. We plan on conveying strong emotions in our film opening to really focus our audience on the tragedies of suicide.