The major advantage, I feel, of being a teenager producing a film for teenagers is that I have a rather innate and contemporary understanding of modern youth. However, I did run into some process issues while conducting my research. Friends, this genre research post has been in the making for nearly as long as Unpacking has. Let me tell you why.
I started my genre research long before any of my script and storyboard came to be. Part of it was my existing knowledge as a consumer of films and other productions aimed towards teenagers. I knew I wanted to research coming-of-age films, teen films, and teen drama films. That part is unexplainable; the creative bug often doesn't naturally lend itself to description, I feel. But after that, actually finding research statistics for the teen drama or coming-of-age genres was very difficult.
To begin with, my preliminary searches- on both Google and Ecosia- turned up a surprising dearth of categorization in the teen drama or coming-of-age genres. Most of the information on Wikipedia was incomplete, didn't provide statistics or characteristics, or didn't apply to anything produced in the film medium in the last 10-20 years. However, this writers' blog (here) provided some useful information to me. The main elements of a modern teen drama have to do with intensifying and making relatable the feelings of alienation, self-exploration, peer pressure, and pressure/anxiety of growing up in general that all teenagers often face. Also, since the rise of the Internet, they often deal with the fast pace the Web has enabled bullying and harsh criticism to take.
Overall, while drafting Unpacking, I knew that some of the themes of emotional instability, existential angst, and the confusing boundaries of friendship vs. love vs. family often present in the lives of teenagers (I should know; again, I am one) were things I could express through different elements of my production. But- this research is, finally, available to your eyes- and not just in my brain.
Yours always,
Clover Fields
P.S. I hope you miss that outro. We're getting pretty near to the point where it's stopped feeling like an "always" and started feeling like a "for now". That's a different story, though. This story is still mine.
Sources:
Scripts, I. (2022, April 22). How Do You Write BRILLIANT and ALTERNATIVE Teen Drama? Industrial Scripts®. https://industrialscripts.com/teen-drama/
Wikipedia Contributors. (2023, February 25). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drama_(film_and_television)#Teen_drama
Wikipedia Contributors. (2019, April 11). . Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teen_film
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