4. From Genre Theory to the Practice
of Genre
Theory and Practice
7th March 2012

5. Why talk in terms of genre?
✤ It helps to describe media products
✤ It helps to produce media products
✤ It helps to sell media products
✤ Explains the product to the audience
✤ Forms a contract with the audience

6. Generic Conventions

7. What Elements Could we Include?
✤ Characters
✤ Tone
✤ Locations/Set Design
✤ Sound/Music
✤ Editing
✤ Framing/shots
✤ Other

8. Character
✤ Not just in dramatic terms:
✤ Experts, presenters, contestants, members of the public,
celebrities,opinion leaders, audience, heroes and villains
✤ Costume, fashionable, casual, formal, period, continuity

9. Presenter
on
location
Brian Cox- Wonders of the Solar System, Sahara Desert

10. Game Show ‘characters’
Host
Audience
Contestants
Million Pound Drop, C4/Endemol

11. Costume, the formality
of Newsreaders
Bill Turnbull & Suzanne Reid,
Breakfast, BBC1

12. Costume: Light
Ents takes a
less formal
more colourful
approach
Graham Norton

13. Costume: Children's TV presenters,
bright colours, casual, and not
unlike children's clothes

14. Continuity - presenter wears the coat for
exterior shots throughout the series
David Starkey, Monarchy, C4/Granada

15. Tone
✤ Humour, balance, opinion, polemic, information, entertainment, realism,
challenge, fantasy . . .

16. When ‘tone’ goes
wrong

17. Location
✤ Studio, set dressing, size, lighting,
✤ OB, outside - appropriate to subject and character
✤ Interior locations - appropriate to subject and character

18. Studio - set
dressed to
emphasise the
domestic
This Morning, ITV1

19. OB dressed to
look like studio
Question Time, BBC

20. OB - location
used for its own
features
Songs of Praise, BBC

21. Sound/Music
✤ Diegetic/non-diegetic sound, sound beds, speed, rhythm, atmosphere,
silence, voice-over, applause, sound effects

22. Editing
✤ Average shot length, variation of shot length, transitions, effects...

23. Framing/Shots/Camera Movement
✤ Cut-aways, establishing shots, piece-to-camera, interviews, reverses,
noddies...

24. Exposition
✤ Demonstration, graphics, metaphor....

25. Other . . .
✤ Post-production Effects, Graphics, (Identifying Participants)
✤ Acknowledging the Audience - or not
✤ Scripted
✤ Breaking convention - use sparingly

26. Where is the only place you will see a question asked in text
on a screen?
umm.........
Here!