Original Genre

The genre of “The Help” is fiction, and the sub genre is historical fiction. An imaginative story with fictional characters and events in a historical setting fit as historical fiction. This book focuses on the life of African- American maids during the 1960’s, and has its main characters writing a book to try and make a change and shine a new light on society. During the 1960’s in Jackson, Mississippi, where the book takes place, many people were very racist, although they wouldn’t deem themselves so. In the book, the author managed to portray the attitudes and outlook of people in that area and outline the events happening in that time period. This book is authentically written, and through happy, sad, tragic, and comedic ways, accurately depicts the lives of African-Americans working under white households. Therefore, because historical fiction is set in the past with true characteristics of that time period, “The Help” fits perfectly into that genre.

 

Reworked Story Genre

The new genre that we have worked “The Help” into is drama, the sub genre being mainly tragedy with a hint of comedy. In order to make “The Help” fit into this genre, we had to filter through important scenes from the book and choose those most suitable for our desire’s genre. As our main subgenre is tragedy, we made sure to choose majority of the unpleasant moments or scenes from the book. After choosing these scenes, we organized them into a way seemingly best fitting. For the background music we also made sure to add a more somber tune, to make it more dramatic. We also put in some black screens after a big moment to add a dramatic effect. For the comedic aspect, we either added in small appealing moments from the book or added a bit of a comedic flair into the already existing scenes. By weaving in some scenes we found funny from the book, we added a bit of humour into the trailer. We kept most of the scenes the exact same as in the book, apart from changing minor details in order to make it more suitable for the subgenre of comedy but put them together in such a way that made the book appear much more miserable than it actually is. The outfits we used also added a bit of humour to our trailer, all the same keeping the integrity of the original book. Because of the time and setting, many women wear mainly dresses, therefore we tried to do the same and kept our costumes limited to dresses, apart from a few exceptions. These exceptions included an animal onesie for one of the character’s pyjamas. Therefore, by only taking the bad moments and some funny moments from the book, and with the costumes, music, and special effects, we changed the genre from historical fiction, to drama.