Q1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
A convention is something that you expect to find within a film from a specific genre.
Our genre for our movie was a teen drama therefore you would expect to find characters that fit into the stereotypes of typical teen social groups. For example, A popular girl who likes to party, or a geek who is always studying, they are characters which are binary opposites. Props that would be conventional in a Teen drama depend on the target audience and their age group however, typically you would find the use of mobile phones showing the audience that the characters are a young generation or Drugs or alcohol to signify a rebellious teenager (also a very common teen film convention). Costumes can also relate to a genre and make the film conventional.
In our teen opening we decided to adapt to these conventions of a girly teen drama by using mobile phones playing music and being used throughout the opening as an iconic but not immediately obvious prop. The character is listening to music while walking down the road with her headphones in and also receives a text message in the opening. Also we decided to choose our characters costumes in relation to their characters conventional personalities that we created, rebellious girl wearing a party dress and heels (also an iconic prop throughout) and the nerd wearing big glasses which indicate her to the audience as a stereotypical teen character.
We use camera work and editing to show these conventions, we used a match put to zoom into the object that signify the conventions of our teen drama. the match puts to the shoes and phone of the protagonist make the audience link the character with her 'social stereotype' or convention in the movie quicker.
The sound in the opening changes from a teen pop song of the first protagonist (the party girl) when she removes her headphones to a more mellow song which represents the new character soon to be introduces (the geek) we chose to do the switch of music like this to make it evident to the audience the two different personalities of the characters and what kind of music they would listen to. However, we still take into account that the songs must convey the conventions of the movie therefore we use sound which is directly linked to what teen would listen to.
This short slide show is showing how we have been inspired by other teen films when making our own films, we have been inspired by the plot line of Sam and Cat, in this show two girls that are complete opposites who are pushed together by fate and have to live together. We adapted this into our own opening by using the idea of two opposites characters. We developed one of our characters from a show called Skins. Our party girl was inspired by the character Effy, we decided to use the idea of a part girl coming home from a party early in the morning. We also used a few of the same shot types in this scene as you can see above. From this we also were inspired to make our first location an ordinary London road. We also used an areal shot of the geek character much like in Skins of Tony.
Conventions of Title Sequence
We decided to follow a conventional title sequence, so we found a conventional teen movie and followed the title sequence, a starting of a distribution and production icons and then a following to introduce the 4 main actors in the film.
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