Re Written Evaluation, Question One

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Before creating my AS 2 minute opening to a film I researched into different genres of film and looked closely at the conventions they follow. By researching into different genres and their target audience it meant that I was able to see the importance of portraying a clear genre to the viewer. By having a clear genre it makes it easier for the audience to follow/understand what’s happening.

Most of the researched 2 minute openings I watched showed clearly portrayal what genre they where. This is so that they can get their target viewers attention right from the start. By understanding straight away what genre the film is it means that the audience can expect to see certain things that are fitting with the genre. This also helps them to understand the narrative early on because of the type of genre it is and what you can expect form it. Because of the short amount of time we had, I thought it would be best to stick to the traditional conventions of the genre we decided to us so that the film was clear to the our target audience. By doing this we can also ensure that we capture the attention of our target viewers.

In my AS film opening because of the group of four girls we where in we thought it would be best to go down the chick flick route. We researched the conventions in ‘Mean Girls’, ‘Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging’ and ‘Wild Child’. When researching into the genre we found that we had the right tools to be able to present this genre well. We were in a school and we all had different styles, which gave us the inspiration to have separate characters that would appeal to our audience. We wanted to create distinct stereotypical characters so that it wouldn’t take the viewer long to recognize what was happening. By creating characters in a traditional representation it means that the audience where able to match this with the genre and narrative in order to understand what has happening in the short space of time we had.

After looking at different genre’s of film and the conventions they had we decided to look into more detail at chick flick films and the conventions they carried. We all made separate textual analysis studies on the trailer for ‘St. Trinian’s’. This way we brought all the ideas that we had from doing so and brought them together to help us apply those conventions to our film. This helped us get an idea of what were the traditional conventions of a chick flick. By looking at the Mise en Scene in detail it meant that we where able to take care of the details when filming and we knew what the correct thing was to do in order to fit to the chick flick traditional convention.

In the slide below there are some examples of the work we completed by taking into consideration conventions and where the inspiration came from.