Thursday, September 22, 2011

How to Write About Conventions - Some Examples

Here are some examples to help show how to write about genre conventions.  Their taken from a science fiction course I taught in January 2011.

Unit 2 / Genre Conventions - Visual Projects

Science Fiction: My Own Favorite "Genre"

Science Fiction Tropes
This quick blog post tells about some of the main patterns we see in science fiction - you may need a few blog posts like this to describe the genre you've chosen for your own project.

"Hard" vs "Soft" SF
Genres are not set in stone - even a single topical genre like science fiction has dozens of sub-genres.  And for your project, you may find a need to differentiate sub-genres in order to define where your work exists in relation to others.

Monsters Movie
As a blog post, there isn't very much here of my own work - I provided the links to a movie trailer and an interview with Gareth Edwards, the director of Monsters.  From a blogging perspective, I want you to avoid this approach - simply linking to works by other artists doesn't allow much room for understanding how those works apply to your own project.  From a visual perspective, though, you may want to create something that looks very similar.  You could create a movie trailer as your project, and then video a kind of "director's interview" as your description of what you did and how you did it.

Also, I highly recommend watching the Gareth Edwards interview - he gives some great anecdotes on the relationship between the production of a movie and the "real world" that's always going on during the filming.

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