It’s the last week of teaching which means we are approaching the final stretch of the semester. There were no screenings this week and lessons were more like sombre farewells and final scrambling for consultations with lecturers and fellow peers for advice.

Exploding Genre studio has been a tough ride, with a little more research and writing than what I had in mind. In the first week of the semester, I recall Dr Daniel Binns, the lecturer delivering this course, mentioned that this studio would be very much more intense than all of the other studios he has conducted in the past. Laying out all the ground rules and preempting us the assignments and project briefs that we have to produce by the end of the semester was really daunting. Not forgetting something that he said stuck with me throughout the semester, “this studio mainly consist of 40% hands on and 60% theory.”. I was never a big fan of theoretical stuff when it comes to readings, research, academic materials, and would swing more towards the hands on, nitty gritty, full on tech mode on. However, as the weeks go by, I realise a balance between both where research does complement technical competence.  In simple terms, you can’t drive a car without having to know how to use the steering wheel, throttle and breaks…

With very little academic knowledge prior to this studio, Exploding Genre not only aims to deconstruct the theory and industrial practice of genre, but also exploring terms that might not be developed or practiced as much, scholarly and industrially. All these seemed so hard to grasp at the beginning, but as the weeks went by, my understanding and impression of genre or just feature films in general has taken a new shape. Conventions, tropes, ideology, and more, play intricate roles in defining what makes a genre. However, we also have genre hybridity which borrows various concepts and applying it into a different context.

Genre functions in so many levels, from marketing strategies, to conceptualising storylines and narratives. It is an ever evolving landscape that changes with the times, like fashion and music. Exploding Genre does not define genre as whole, but takes us from how it began, how it transforms, how it branches out, and how it is presented now. Genre can be really subjective, but I strongly believe that genre is always improving, objectively.