There are certain elements in which people would assosiate with certain genres of film. For instance, a horror or thriller is likely to have eerie music, night scenes, murders and manic characters. An western however, would be assosiated with particular clothes, horses and the desert, but what about a romance?
Ghost
How does a romance film, differ from genres such as a drama or a 'chick flick'? According to Wikipedia, "A romance film can be loosely defined as any film in which the central plot revolves around the romantic involvement of the story's protagonists"
To create a realistic romance film, we had to research into the romance genre, and what people typically thought a romance film should include. For this, we have used secondary research found from various places around the internet and our own interpretations.
The Notebook
Creating Obstacles and Tension between characters
To create a realistic, authentic storyline, boundaries and obstacles need to be present. A romance movie needs to be more than just 'a couple being romantic', as this would be an extremeley boring film, simply depicting how much two individuals love one and another. Creating obstacles will allow the audience to feel a sense of compassion, emotion and gives the story a sense of direction, and could include elements such as if one character: dies, is married, goes missing, kidnapped (among others)
Sexual
The majority of romance films have a sense of sexual activity between the primary characters at one point or another. A film doesn't have to show the scenario in great detail (Not only may this be considered distasteful, but may affect the certificate regulation), but often shows what is necessary to allow the audience to build repoir with the characters. Within romance films, this can be as subtle as holding hands, putting arms around eachother, or a kiss.. or as overt as full intercourse (obviously with much of it excluded, which I wont go into detail about)
Keep the audience guessing
Whilst endings in films such as PG (happy endings) or horrors (main character survives) are usually predictable - romance films are often quite unpredictable. Not only does this add to the excitement of the film, but it allows the audience to relate to the film overall - romance films are typically realistic to add realism and authenticity, and an unpredicted ending adds to the real-life comparison. Romance films are respected in this sense, as the audience's heart can be torn apart at times, or made up at others - and it is considered a great achievement to build such a powerful storyline in this way.
Likable characters
Whilst the storyline is typically realistic, the characters are often exadurated slightly. You may find, the male characters are often charming and lovley, whilst the female characters are beautiful and funny. This can be seen as a sort of psycological method that film producers use to help with the storyline, as the audience is always wanting the two characters to be together in the end, so making the characters as likable as possible greatly helps with this (to which then the writers could easily destroy them in a plot-twist)
Pretty Woman
Therefore, in brief, a good romance film may have many of the following features...
- Creates obstacles so the two characters cannot be together
- Involves physical romance
- Keeps the audience guessing
- Realistic so that the audience can relate it to real life
- Has an extremley happy or extremley sad ending which is unexpected
- The characters are brilliant
Take a look at the 5 movie stills from this post. How many of the above bullet points are you able to apply to these films? Presumable, a large proportion of them.
Titanic
Romance has always been a popular genre in creativity, as it's hard for people to say why they dislike them. People may hate horrors because they don't like to feel afraid, or hate sci-fi due to the unrealism - but romance is something that everyone at some point in their life will experience.
Twilight
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