conventions used
Overall Storyline:
As I studied coming of age films I noticed high school themes and teenagers are very common within this genre. So, my partner and I decided to make our coming of age opening sequence and storyline based on teenage romance but also with a slight difference in it with the female protagonist suffering with a health issue. This was very much inspired by the film 'The fault in our stars'.
Characters:
Due to the coming of age genre we stuck to using teenagers as our characters and we used a male teenager aged 16 and a female teenager aged 16. We also made sure that their characters during the acting made it obvious they were young and still growing, for example in the way they spoke and how they would dress. We told the female protagonist to wear minimal makeup as it is not common for younger teenagers to wear lot of makeup for no occasion. Also the male protagonist in one of the scenes has to lift the female up, this is a very stereotypical moment as a male is seen as a stronger character majority of the time.
Location:
Usually, within the coming of age genre the films are based in high schools or in very youthful areas but we decided to take a risk and film it in Bristol, harbourside. This area emphasized the romance side of the film as it is a very beautiful scenery to film with the boats and love padlocks on the bridge.
Conventions Developed
FONT:
For our font we decided to go for a sweet a handwritten looking one to emphasise the 2 protagonists youth and also their innocence with first love.
SOUNDTRACK:
Usually in a coming of age film there will be up beat music with lyrics that foreshadow the story line but it did not fit within our genre in romance. We also included a non diegetic sound specifically when the female protagonist falls over to add a thud noise.
DIALOGUE:
In our coming of age opening sequence we wanted to use the stereotypical typed script with a lot of slang and youthful talk but as our film is aimed mainly at older and maturer teenage audience we made our scripts dialogue quite polite in the way they 2 characters communicated with each other.
conventions challenged
LOCATION:
As a typical coming of age film would be based in a high school we decided to take the risk and do it by the Harbour side, this is what mainly makes it very unique and stands out from the rest of the films.
