Q.1: forms and conventions of real media products

Q1

In what ways does your media product USE, DEVELOP or CHALLENGE forms and conventions of real media products?

Firstly to understand our chosen genre more in depth we decided to do research on comedy films such as Charlie Chaplin in order to develop our ideas on comedy and what our targeted audience would find funny according to their lifestyle, demographics and social groups. As we are surrounded by a young audience we thought that it would work in our favour so we took a look at what we and other people of a young age would find funny as our targeted audience were to be aged between 12 and 21. This was a necessary step when researching our genre as comedy that adults and younger people would find funny had two completely different viewpoints. So we started looking at TV programmes such as ‘The Inbetweeners’ to see what comedy they used and try to develop those ideas in our own film. One of the main things we saw when analysing this programme was the special connection and relationship between all the characters and that they were also naturally quirky and funny, so when auditioning our cast we were looking for actors which would have a good relationship and chemistry, also have a natural sense of humour on and off the camera as it would make it easier for them to fit the character profiles.

When we researched comedy’s we saw that the character were male dominated. Our initial idea was to have to male leading characters however when we audition the cast the strongest bond were between two females. This caused a problem for our production group; however we decided to challenge this convention of comedy’s by using female characters in our comedic film. We had to think of how we could represent the funnier side of women and came up with a new idea that we should represent them as chavs as this would go against and challenge all stereotypes of young girls. However we did not make them tomboys we shows this to the audience in the opening sequence as they put make-up on in the morning which is stereotypical of girls to do.



Another challenge we encountered was when we had to pick a location to film in. originally we picked an outdoor setting in a park however we had the put into consideration the weather. So we had to think of were we could shoot our film not forgetting the fact that it was a comedy and we had to make it seem real by using cinematography. We realised the by shooting the film inside a school it would be easier for our audience to relate to the narrative.



Also we used and developed forms and conventions from real media products to inspire us for our final product. We studies films such as The Fall, Memoirs of a Geisha and pulp fiction.



We evaluated The Fall and the way the director used different tones of lighting and shots to transfer from reality to a fantasy world, using editing techniques such as transitions to switch between the two. This gave a better insight on how to use and create new shots to make our product more exciting. We added this technique to our cowboy scene, by putting an effect on the shot when editing which showed that the characters had stepped out of the reality and into their fantasy world.