(As with all my 'Thoughts' postings, these are my ramblings 'out loud' - as I think through particular problems.) 

Exercise 4 [In brief]: Write a case study of a 10 minute segment of a film, identifying genre and genre conventions and assessing what effects these have on the audience. 

If you are a A Level Film Studies student in full time education, this post may hold less significance. But if, like me, you have been out of full-time education for some time and are studying part-time or as part of a distance course, then you might be dreading the idea of writing your first essay.

For me it's been nearly 10 years since I had to write an essay! So I have real trepidations about undertaking this project.

A helpful adage to remember if you are in this situation is 'preparation is everything'. The more background work you do before you actually put pen to paper (or cursor to screen) the easier the task will be. I may be stating the obvious, but nervousness can often make you forget the lessons you learned when in formal education.

'Read the question'

Oh yes, this old chestnut. But it remains ever relevant and one of the greatest reasons why so many essays go wrong. People (and I include myself) simply do not take in quite what the exercise intends you to produce. Luckily, the A Level course book I have goes as far as giving you two example case study essays on which to base your own.

'Write what you know'

Obviously, you can't always choose what the subject matter of your course essay - but in this case you are permitted to pick the film on which you will base your case study. This is a great way to get into essay writing, as there is extra confidence to be had writing about familiar topics.

Choice of film? 

The fact that the course work allows you to choose which film on which you will base your case study is of particular advantage with this exercise, as you have to identify a specific 10 minute segment within the film which includes topics that support your case. In other words, you have to be familiar enough with a particular film to know that there is 10 minutes that will have the sort of narrative and associated scene material that will be relevant to the questions asked.

Now get on with it!

This is the worst bit - actually getting down to it! So far I have whizzed through the first three discussion based exercises, but now have floundered on this fourth. Having now written down my 'strategy' for writing the essay I no longer have an excuse for putting the work off...

I guess after two or three essays I will wonder what all the fuss was about - but one things is for sure, it's better to get the first essay out the way, even if it's bad, just to break the ice.

(Part 2 of this post will be a 'debrief' of the actual essay writing process. It will be interesting to see whether I will feel it was a bit of a doddle after all...I suspect not!) 

One thing about studying Film Studies on ones own is that you do not benefit from either the partnership of working together on the course exercises, or the class discussion after the exercises are performed. This means that I miss out on a lot of ideas and points of view about the tasks that just don't occur to me working in isolation.

I do, however, have time to mull over the exercises after completing them, and I would like to keep a record of some of the things that come to me after particular tasks are complete. I also wanted to keep these thoughts as separate items from my task answers, as I have a tendency to ramble and may divert from the point of the course exercise.

The following thoughts go beyond the scope of the questions posed in Exercise 3 of the A Level course book that I am studying, but are just the sort of issues that would probably have been raised in the post-exercise classroom discussion.

Hybrid and sub-genre confusion

Exercise 3 of the course book asked the student to decide - from the evidence of two film stills - which of the sample films could be categorized as being of the hybrid genre and which was a sub genre movie. However, having completed the primary aim of the task it did become apparent that this exercise was perhaps not as clear cut as it first appeared.

For example, while 'Day of the Dead' is obviously a sub-archetype of the Horror genre (a 'Zombie' movie), it could also be described as a 'Hybrid' movie as it includes element of Action and Science Fiction conventions. Likewise, 'The Lord of the Rings' is, on the face of it, a Hybrid film - including as it does aspects of several different genres - but it could as easily be categorized as a sub-type of the Fantasy genre, having many attributes which would identify it as 'Sword and Sorcery'. 

So, categorizing films into specific classifications within the genre system isn't straight forward, although it is apparent that there is usually some sort of pecking order into which a film's genre classifications can be arranged. I have decided to call this process GENRE PROMINENCE (there is probably a correct term for it).

'The Lord of the Rings', for example, can be given the following genre prominence:-

> FANTASY (Principle genre)
- > SWORD & SORCERY (Sub-genre)
-- > ACTION
-- > HORROR
-- > ROMANCE -- (Hybrid genre attributes)