Week 5 Set: The genre-fidelity exercise

Fifth set — committing fully to one slop sub-genre's structural beats, then auditing your own draft against them

22 March 2027

Before the session#

Read the screening and pick one sub-genre from it — the AI history explainer, the product demo nobody filmed, or faith-based inspirational content — before you arrive. Come with a rough idea of a specific fake product, historical non-event, or devotional theme; you’ll build it out in the room.

In the session#

Round one — name the structure (15 min). Before writing anything, list the structural conventions of your chosen sub-genre as it actually appears on the specimen shelf: the cold open hook, the tell-don’t-show narration style, the specific kind of resolution or call to action it ends on, whatever else you’ve noticed across specimens. Three conventions, minimum, named plainly — not “it feels inspirational,” but “it ends on a direct-address blessing delivered straight to camera.”

Round two — write the pastiche (35 min). Draft a sixty-to-ninety-second script or prompt sequence that commits fully to your chosen genre’s conventions — no irony, no wink to the audience, no hedging it as a parody. The exercise is pastiche, not satire: the point is to hit the beats with the same sincerity-agnostic precision the real specimens do, which is harder than it sounds, because a script written knowing it’s an exercise tends to leak a joke the genre itself never tells.

Round three — audit it (10 min). Check your draft against the three conventions you named in round one, convention by convention. Where it doesn’t land one, decide whether that’s a gap in your draft or a sign the convention you named wasn’t actually load-bearing.

Afterwards#

Bring the script and the audit to week 6 — not to submit, but because recognising a genre’s conventions from the inside, by trying to reproduce them, is exactly the skill the Slop Teardown asks you to run in reverse on someone else’s artefact.