Context of Practice - Genre

The word genre has quite an extensive meaning, but simply put it is defining categories of literature or other forms of entertainment for example, music, visual entertainment or written or spoken; that carries some form of stylistic criteria. 'Genres' are formed by conventions and ideas that adapt and change over time as new genres are introduced or invented and other genres are discontinued. Due to this ever changing principle, more often than not, works will fit into multiple genres because of the breadth of criteria and features it possesses.

An example of this kind of multi-genre idea in animation is a piece that is directed at children due to the visuals and appropriateness of the content, however, it will have adult undertones running throughout it whether it is conveyed through subtle on-screen action or dialogue between characters. This action or dialogue won't be picked up by the younger audiences, although the more mature audience will recognise the references due to their wider knowledge of the world. So in a sense, this is an example of a piece that will stretch across multiple genres and can be enjoyed by various different types of audiences. An example of this shown to us during the seminar was a piece featuring the Looney Tunes character, 'Yosemite Sam'. During the piece, there was a reference to Mahatma Gandhi. Even the first time watching it before it was made clear to us, I didn't pick up on the reference because I was too immersed in the visuals to notice. Demonstrating the idea that references contained within an animation mainly aimed at children, can also feature adult content without being destructive to the piece itself.

Following on from this, as a class we had a discussion about the purpose of genre and what it does. The point was raised that certain pieces of entertainment are marketed differently in order to aim the feature at a certain audience. An example of this in industry was the film; The Hunger Games. The example here is that the film was originally planned to be marketed as a science fiction film, but it was changed by the distributor to a fantasy type film because fantasy doesn't have the stigma attached to it that science fiction does in terms of previous films such as Star Wars which is a well known science fiction film and has very mixed opinions across a large audience. So because the fantasy genre is much more well received by audiences of all ages and gender etc, it was put forward this way to be more successful. In a way however, I believe this to have been bad practice. Genre isn't really a subjective thing as the point of genre is to have a set criteria in order to categorise certain products or works.

Giving products and work a genre to go under can be very helpful however. It gives audiences a hint about the content of various products and entertainment, allowing them to make informed decisions about their interests and what kind of activities they wish to pursue. One thing however, is due to the rate at which things like entertainment evolve and change, it is often difficult to keep up and content can be misinterpreted or labelled incorrectly by individuals because of this.

I enjoyed this seminar quite a lot, and the discussion made me think quite a lot into the subject. Furthermore, it was interesting to talk about different classifications of entertainment and how that can affect different peoples perceptions on what to expect and the overall content of a piece.