Codes/Convention of a drama genre

What are drama films?

Drama films often include dramatic themes such as alcoholism, child abuse, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, sexuality, poverty, class divisions, and corruption put characters in conflict with themselves, others, or even society and how it is flawed. The drama genre is one of the largest movie genres and contains sub-genres such as romantic drama, war films, period drama, courtroom drama and crime.

Narrative

At the centre of a drama is usually a character or characters that are in conflict at a crucial moment in their lives. They often revolve around families. Dramas often, but not always, have tragic or at least painful resolutions and concern the survival of some tragic crisis, like the death of a family member (Lion King (1994)), or a divorce (Her (2014)). Endings are usually happy and resolved if they are not then this is because there will most likely be sequel. 

Titanic (1997)

Mis-en- scene

Mise-en-scene is used to reinforce the realistic nature of the narrative. For drama to have the correct effect on the audience it has to be realistic. So this means the mis-en-scene should be at realistic locations such as suburban neighbourhoods, average neighbourhoods, workplaces or in teen drama’s council estates etc (see fig. 1). Thus meaning that the costume will support this idea there will be no fantastical costumes, but regular clothing that matches the personality of the character.

The lighting and colour of film with be very similar to natural everyday lighting. It will hold authenticity rather than being extremely harsh and garish. Furthermore, this makes the film look as true to life as possible.

Kidulthood (2006) teen drama

Editing

For drama, it depends on the mood of the particular piece, but it's typically naturalistic. Drama uses lots of cuts; rather than having lots in the frame to show everything important, filmmakers just cut to whatever is needed. Drama uses camera movements typically in three ways: horizontally, vertically or in combination. For suspense, much of the time the camera will have a soft focus; dramas often use zoom-ins and zoom-outs to focus on particular parts of the shot such as emotions.

Editing always has a strong sense of continuity it avoids shots like jump cuts as this doesn’t flow naturally. Cuts like this are never used as it takes away from the reality that the film is meant to portray; this defies the intention of the drama genre.

45 years (2015) 

Cinematography

Cinematography in drama films is dependable on the mood of the sequence before. Slow pans are often to draw out tension, or fast handheld camera movements could suggest shaking out of fear, because of the environment, anxiety or stress.

With drama being so heavily based on realism to maintain a realistic environment more often than not little use of dynamic shots that are too juddering that may take scene have less realism, such as extremely high or low angled shots. To keep both the background and the foreground in focus and still look very realistic; emulate to human eye a deep depth of field is used. 

Deep focus used at the start of Citizen Kane (1941). A example of the use of a deep depth of field which allows the foreground and the background to be in focus at the same time.