Belated decision and looking into codes and conventions for the film

Belated decision...
Whilst discussing the films we watched in my group, we found that the majority of films viewed were teen comedies. We also all found it very difficult to pin down any film as a 'comedy' as they were all mostly sub-genres of comedies. Therefore, we decided a teen comedy would be the best option for our film opening, and also suited our target audience.


As a group, we discussed which of the codes and conventions we found would be possible for us to use in our film opening. We figured the following would be attainable:

• Setting of school, characters' houses, 'parties'
• Non-diegetic voice-over
• Non-diegetic music
• Props- everyday objects e.g. schoolbooks
• Costume; teenage actors already have teenage characters' clothes
• Costume to connote charater types (e.g. thick glasses for 'geeks')

We also talked about the differences between British and American teen comedies, realising that our target audience would be British and our film would have to be set in Britain anyway. We could think of a very long list of American teen comedies, but hardly any British teen comedies- in fact, the only two we could think of were Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging and Bend It Like Beckham, which are both Certificate 12, so are aimed at a little younger than our target audience. This made us think, have we found a gap in the market?

I also thought about the difference in the style of humour used in British and American comedy films. I have found that in British films the humour is often very self-deprecating, whereas in American films it is a lot more slapstick. As my target audience will be British, I should perhaps focus more on the self-deprecating humour. However, looking at my audience profile, the favourite films, actors and actresses listed are predominantly American. Plus, due to the lack of British teen comedy films, we will have to follow the codes and conventions of American teen comedies anyway. Perhaps a combination of American teen comedy conventions and self-deprecating British humour will make a winning formula.