Genre Research.

As a group we decided which Genre we would be using to film our coursework piece, we settled on Fantasy as a Genre. So that we stick to the Genre's conventions as a group we do research on films from the same Genre, this is help to us so that we know which things an audience expects to see in a Fantasy film and so that we can twist these conventions to make our film interesting.
Three films we used as research were; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End and Lord of the Rings: The Twin Towers. These three films all seem to have many things in common concerning their conventions, all the characters are very well spoken or sophisticated in their speech, Elizabeth Swan (Pirates of the Caribbean), Frodo Baggins (Lord of the rings) and some Harry Potter characters are clear examples of this. Well-spoken characters will be easy to integrate into a final piece as we will simply have to alter the way our actors/actresses speak. In Fantasy there is the cliché of set locations which are usually set in the wild or medieval looking places; forests, castles, fields or meadows. As for locations it may be reasonably easy to use them in our coursework piece because there are certain locations near enough but at times it may prove a challenge because some locations do not allow filming, none the less I think that these certain locations would be good to use. There is also the constant use of mythical creatures (Harry Potter uses Phoenix's and many others whilst Lord of the Rings uses Elves and Pirates of the Caribbean uses the Cracken) Most mythical creatures will be difficult to put into my final piece because there is only so much editing we can do- using costumes would be easy enough but certain editing like CGI will be impossible. However, there are a few typical creatures such as Vampires which we could easily put into our Genre because there aren't many affects that are needed and they are particularly close to humans.
In Fantasy films the characters always find themselves on some sort of mission or having to complete a task where a whole civilization depends on them (In the Pirates of the Carribean, pirates depend on the Brethren Court and The wizarding world depend on Harry potter whilst three races depend on Frodo in the Lord of the Rings), this is cliché because despite the bad events the audience expects a triumph in that one person or group of people a civilization depends on. The characters in this genre are also very typical: there is always a guide to help other characters complete their tasks or achieve their ends, In Harry Potter there is Hagrid, Dumbledore etc, in the opening scene of Pirates of the Caribbean they seem to be led by Barbosa, in Lord of the Rings, Smeagol leads Frodo and Sam towards Mordor. This would also be easy to use in our piece- using it in our piece would also help the audience identify or interpret the Genre which our group has chosen and so I believe keeping mostly to the rules of cliché characters would be helpful.