Film Genres

Here I have created a spider diagram of the main film genres:

After composing this and beginning to think about the genre of film I want to create a teaser trailer for, I ruled out a few genres straight away due to lack of technology and the impracticality of them. For instance, I felt that both action and adventure films were not suitable as films of this genre now usually use many special effects, CGI and stunts. Even though the trailer wouldn't have to include all of these it seems that real film trailers of this genre do. As they are giving the viewer a true view of the standard and style of the rest of the film. 'The Dark Knight' would be a film which fits into these genres and the trailer for the film back up why this genre wouldn't be suitable for me.

Here is the link to the teaser trailer of 'The Dark Knight' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWw0ov-cAUg and as you can see, although it is a fairly simple trailer showing the trade mark Batman logo, my strengths and abilities lie in filming and not special effects production.

I feel that comedy wouldn't be a suitable choice in genre as it would be hard to find and film actors for my trailer that are funny/seen as entertaining, with out the trailer looking too 'staged'. The content of the trailer would have to be deemed amusing, which can be very hard to achieve as peoples sense of humour differ. Also after doing some research, it seems that comedy films tend not to have teaser trailers, as this style of film doesn't have such a large built up to it. Comedy films seem to just have normal trailers, which are longer than teaser trailers and are released within a shorter space of time to the films premier.

Making a teaser trailer for a Documentary film, I think wouldn't work well as I would have to research facts that the film would be based on and these films are less common to the film world. A teaser trailer is also meant to be exciting and increasing the built up to the films release, I think that this would be hard to achieve around a documentary film.


Many family and fantasy films, these days are produced using animation or lots of special effects, which I do not have the facilities to do, making them an unsuitable genre for me. Other unsuitable genres for me, would be; Musical, Romance, Sci-Fi (due to need of special effects), Sport, Western and War.

This leaves me with the choice between:

• Crime



• Drama



• Horror



• Mystery



• Suspense



• Thriller

I feel these different genres are all suited to having a teaser trailer made about them. These genres are similar in a sense, and can be combined e.g.

• Crime Thrillers, a thriller film where crime plays a large part e.g. Seven (1996)



• Crime Horrors, a horror film where crime plays a large role e.g. Saw films (2004-2009)

This means I can focus into a sub-genre and target my film at a more particular genre

There are styles of film which I could choose to follow when creating my film, like Film Noir and Neo-Noir.