Carolina's Blog: Represent!

So we've decided on our genre and now it's time to look at who our film will be targeting. Analyzing the target market of the coming-of-age genre would help us include features in our short film that will appeal to the audience. Ideally, the coming-of-age genre targets a teenage/young adult audience since they can easily identify themselves with the characters. Teenagers are going through the stage of life where they are developing into adults which makes them feel represented in the media. Looking at films like The Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Breakfast Club, Lady Bird, The Edge of Seventeen, you can see how all the protagonists are teenagers. In addition, all these examples constantly use school as a setting, which again represents the idea of youth. While the coming-of-age genre targets teenagers from 12-18 years of age as a whole, females are more likely to go see these movies since it aligns more with their interests and is able to emotionally connect to characters in an easier manner.

To make our protagonist likable, it is important we consider typical characteristics given to teenage girls in films. This means making our protagonist seem like a normal, quirky teenage girl so more audience members are able to sympathize with her. Our protagonist should be facing some sort of hardship that exposes her vulnerable side and humanizes her. Audiences love seeing their favorite characters make mistakes and grow, so our female protagonist should do just that to represent what being a teenager is like. We also want to include a unique characteristic that differentiates our protagonist from other people in the film; for instance, we are making our protagonist amazing at writing. Our character is made even more three-dimensional and interesting to the audience if she has something to prove. Here are a few examples of female protagonists in successful coming-of-age films who meet these characteristics, whom we can take inspiration from when creating our own character: