FROM FP TO THE SS: A GT

From Fine Print to the Silver Screen: A Genre Translation

Katya N. Attamimi

University of California, Santa Barbara

FROM FP TO THE SS: A GT

From Fine Print to the Silver Screen: A Genre Translation

As a teenage girl who has watched more romance movies than I can count on my two

hands, the research paper “Experiences of falling in love: Investigating culture, ethnicity, gender,

and speed” by Suzanne Riela, Geraldine Rodriguez, Arthur Aron, Xiaomeng Xu, and Bianca P.

Acevedo, was the one piece of academic writing that resonated the most with me. Therefore, for

my genre translation project, I thought it made the most sense for me to take this research paper

about falling in love and adapt it into a romance movie trailer. I felt that this would be the most

effective translation for me to do because not only do I have a lot of experience as a consumer of

this genre, but I also felt that it would be the best way to keep my target audience -- teenage girls

such as myself -- entertained. The original paper was geared towards other experts within the

psychology field and accordingly was much more formal in writing and contained a lot of

technical terminology and statistics. This type of information can come across as dull and boring

to the average teenage girl. For this reason, I thought adapting the article into a movie trailer

would be potent as it doesn’t require a long attention span and is also easily accessible for my

intended audience. Through struggles in the expression of ideas and the balance of aural and

visual elements, I was able to learn how to shift my thinking and thus create more conscious

decisions.

The first step I took to produce my movie trailer was to storyboard my scenes. Although I

had different scenes floating around in my head, to take those concepts and express them within

a storyboard format proved to be quite difficult. Peter Elbow’s (1986) article, “Teaching Two

Kinds of Thinking by Teaching Writing” perfectly sums up the frustrations I faced during this

process when he wrote, “In first-order thinking we don’t reflect on what we are doing...And
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often enough, no shape or organization emerges at all -- just randomly ordered thoughts” (p. 57).

The scenes I originally envisioned in my head would constantly steer me in the wrong direction,

and cause me to stray away from the actual goals of the project. The genre conventions of a

social psychological research paper and movie trailer differ greatly and as a result, I regularly

had to rethink scenes and ideas over and over again to ensure I conveyed the key information and

purposes of the study clearly.

Length, for example, is a convention that provides both limitations and affordances for

the two genres, as well as a formality that I was constantly in combat with. According to Barton

and Hamilton (1998), “there are different literacies associated with different domains of life” (p.

63). As I previously mentioned, the social psychology research paper was aimed at other

psychologists who were trying to further debunk the infamous nature versus nurture controversy

in terms of romance. Hence, the domain of psychological research generally requires lengthy and

insightful detail for other experts to possibly replicate, support, or refute their claims. The

research paper I chose to translate took up a total of 21 pages, filled to the brim with knowledge.

Although the standard convention of numerous pages within research papers enables the authors

to have large spaces for content, it limits their possibility to widen their audience. In this modern

era, young adolescents’ attention spans are gradually decreasing. Long and time-consuming

written pieces are likely to deter this demographic and cause them to simply skim through the

material and gain rather simplistic insights about the topic.

In contrast, movie trailers generally range from two to three minutes. The short length of

movie trailers combined with its visual and aural attributes appeals to the short attention span of

the younger generations. The conciseness of the trailers grants the audience the right to assume
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that what is displayed in the video are the key points needed to understand the storyline. My

movie trailer, accordingly, was two minutes and 39 seconds long. I wanted to hit that sweet spot

of around two and a half minutes to keep my target audience of teenage hopeless romantics both

entertained and informed. The short length of the trailer though did limit the amount and type of

information I could exhibit to my audience. The process of selection and omission of content to

fit within the short time limit of my movie trailer was something I grappled with for a long time.

Nevertheless, once I made use of Elbow’s (1986) “conscious, directed, [and] controlled” (p. 55)

second-order thinking, I became more aware and could finally focus on the important details in

the research paper, as well as depict them in a way that would best fit a romance movie trailer.

My depiction of the statistics from the research paper in my movie trailer was one of the

major obstacles I had to overcome during the development of my genre translation. When I

initially started to plan out my movie trailer, I decided that I wanted to omit the statistics from

the original study. This was a pretty big decision for me to make because the majority of the

study’s analysis was based on numbers. But at the time, I felt that including statistics in my video

would seem rather abrupt and would most likely spawn a haze of confusion for my audience.

Moreover, statistics are generally not part of the standard romance movie trailer genre

conventions. But, as I made my trailer I noticed that the absence of statistics made the movie

trailer more confusing. The ideas of the research paper were lost in translation. As a result, I

employed the wise advice of author Kerry Dirk (2010) and “figure[d] out how to change that

particular genre to fit with the situation” (p. 259). Instead of trapping myself inside the movie

trailer “box”, I altered my thinking to become more open-minded in the different approaches that

statistics could be used in this genre. Consequently, I ended up putting a few statistics in the
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trailer and utilized them as a tool to navigate my viewers through the love stories of the two

couples.

Movie trailers are multimodal and therefore utilize the senses of sight and sound as tools

to communicate with the audience. I for one struggled a lot with finding an optimal balance of

both. Since the original study did not disclose what the participants wrote when prompted to

describe their falling in love experience, I had to create fake narratives based on the most

frequent precursors mentioned and how they were further defined by the researchers. I originally

wanted to only use vocal soundbites to portray the narratives, but I found that the combination of

the overlay of music and multiple soundbites in the background essentially formulated chaos

within the audience’s ears. Furthermore, the chaos ensued from the audio also took away from

the visuals. One of the choices Scott McCloud (1993) emphasized in his comic strip, “Writing

with Pictures”, is the choice of word. The main goal of this choice is to communicate the “ideas,

voices and sounds” of the piece “in seamless combination with images” (p. 37). To equalize the

viewers’ aural and visual senses -- and thus clearly convey the ideas of the research paper -- I

decided to highlight the vocal soundbites instead of making it a regular attribute in my video.

Through the elimination of numerous vocal soundbites, I managed to better represent the

different ways people experience romantic love. Likewise, I achieved a more transparent

experience for my audience and served as a better guide for them by employing an optimal

balance of both text and voice.

By doing this genre translation, I learned that although two genres appear to be vastly

different from each other based on length and form, a slight modification in the way one thinks

can open the individual’s mind to the endless possibilities and similarities between the two.
FROM FP TO THE SS: A GT

Though movie trailers are made for entertainment purposes, they can also be made informative

through the careful manipulation of text and images. Moreover, both movie trailers and research

papers have to constantly keep in mind the audience’s perspective; they have to make sure they

convey their findings or storyline in the most clear and cohesive ways. Both genres aim to guide

their audience through an experience. If it weren’t for the hardships I experienced storyboarding

and the difficulties I had to overcome when editing my movie trailer, I wouldn’t have been able

to think about my choices more carefully and make the most effective decisions. It was through

this creative process that I not only successfully applied what I’ve learned, but gained new skills

and became more thoughtful with the choices I made.

FROM FP TO THE SS: A GT

References

Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. (1998). Literacy Practices. ​Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in

One Community.​ 6-13.

Dirk, K. (2010). ​Navigating Genres.

Elbow, P. (1986). Teaching Two Kinds of Thinking by Teaching Writing. ​Embracing

Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching​. 55-63.

McCloud, S. (1993). Writing with Pictures. ​Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.​ 8-37.

Riela, S., Rodriguez, G., Aron, A., Xu, X., & Acevedo, B. (2010). Experiences of falling in love:

Investigating culture, ethnicity, gender, and speed. ​Journal of Social and Personal

Relationships,​ 27(4), 473-493.

Genre Translation Link​: ​https://youtu.be/A54_TnvAD7w