Brainstorming Genre

 When I first heard we had to make a film involving chess in a meaningful way, my first thought process was 3 things:

1. Action film

It would be easy to have an intense scene of 2 people playing chess. Maybe something is on the line like some money, a love interest, maybe their own life. Since there is a lot of subgenres of action as well, I thought this would be a beneficial genre to choose right off the bat.

2. Comedy

Going back to my last post where comedy was one of my main genre's I watched, of course I chose something I'm well-versed on. One of my favorite comedic moments in film is when there's a scene with high-intensity- the camera seems to move quicker, the characters are fully focused, the sounds and music are at a higher level- when suddenly the camera quickly cuts to frame farther zoomed out than it was, bringing the intensity down and making the previous moment seem absurd in hindsight. I feel like this could be easy to pull off as on paper, a game of chess realistically shouldn't be as intense as it could be made.

3. Martial Arts

Technically this is a subgenre of action, but I fully felt like this could be an aspect that ties in both genre's to a familiar classification. You could have that high intense scene, the camera zooming in on both of their eyes, then cut back to the board, cut to one of the character's who's sweating with hands shaking, cut to the other character who looks just as nervous but is attempting to hide it. Suddenly both character's quickly move the pieces around until there's only 2 kings left on the board, both hopping around their kings trying to outplay the other. This visual easily ties in aspects of action and comedy that I think could work for this film.

As the editor of the film, I was trying to picture what I would have to do in post-production to see these genre's through. How would I frame shots, would I have dual-shots, etc. When we were discussing as a group, Brendan brought up bringing in a videogame subgenre with special effects. I've never used programs other than iMovie or VideoLeap, so I knew the editing going into the genre would be too complicated for me, so I shot down this idea. All of us ended up agreeing on the idea of a mafia-based plot where our character is playing against a mafia boss in a battle for his life, as previously discussed under my action point. I feel like we have the basis of our vision for the film down and are all on the same page for how this short film will play out, we just need to research into this subgenre more.