Stereotypes In Our Opening

We have already made a post on the typical sterotypes that you would expect in a drama film. This post will explain how we used them in our own film.
One of the main features of a drama film is the non-diegetic sound. The music plays a key role in capturing the emotion of the film or a specific scene. For example our inspiration for the music was when we watched the opening to Forest Gump. The music was slow and steady making the audience really understand the emotion and seriousness of the scene. We decided to use an instrumental piano track because we believe that this really relates to the emotion of our film. It was vital for us that we included non-diegetic sound in our opening 2 minutes because without it, it wouldn't follow the key stereotypes of the drama genre, therefore making our film unrelatble and complicated to our target audience. I think the pace of the music we have decided to use will make our target audience really understand how emotional the scenes in our film are.
The narrative of drama films always have to relate to real life situations along with realistic characters and settings. Our main character is a young teenage girl with a lot of issues. She is homeless and has run away from her foster home. We believe that we have made our character convey all the typical problems a girl in foster care and without parents would have at the young age of 16. We understand that not every young person has the same amount of issues and drama in their life as our main character but we believe that our character is still able to be relatable to our target audience. Our storyline is quite dramatic and serious, not everyone will be able to relate to how our main character is feeling but we hope that her facial expressions and body language will help our target audience understand her troubles. Being homeless isnt something that all teenagers can relate to but we think that our film could show people what it is like and how young people going through it can feel and act. Our film is set in a busy town centre. These are around in every town, so we think our setting will be relatable to everyone, especially around Christmas time because everyone knows how stressful the shops are at Christmas.
Camera composition is a key convention in a drama film. For example high angled and low angled shots can portray someones weakness or power. Drama films tend to include a lot of close ups showing the characters emotions and reactions. We think we included a decent amount of high angle shots showing her weakness and more than enough close ups showing her emotional state. For example in the scene where our main character is slouching against a wall, we made sure this would be a high angle shot to ensure that the audience understood that she was weak and emotional.
The typical clothing you would expect a homeless peron to wear are quite scruffy and ragged. We wanted this to be the case with our character but we made sure the clothes she was wearing were still somewhat nice. We definatley tried to make her look homeless. We made sure her hair a a bit of a mess and that she was wearing barely any makeup. This would ensure that the audience knew she was homeless.
The props we used also helped us get across to the audience that our main character was homeless. We made her carry a sleeping bag around with her which we thought would let the audience know that she would obviously be needing it. We also made a conscious effort to mention that she had run away in our monologue.
The lighting in drama films are usually quite dim. This reflects the emotion in each scene. We wanted to use dim lighting in our film to make the emotion really stand out. Another reason we wanted to use dim lighting was because it was the evening and we wanted to show the sun gradually setting throughout the two mintues. This would make the audiece feel sorry for the girl because she has to sleep on the streets on her own.