Evaluation, Question 1: In what ways does the media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our media product has a typical, convincing opening that is found in many modern films as it features a montage of events that our opening titles roll over. This montage helps to introduce our main character, Fiona, to the audience by showing her morning routine and portraying her as a geek who works hard and just gets on with life. We observed the language of media within this opening montage through editing the titles and certain shots to the offbeat of the music so it had a smooth, consistent feel to it. We also made good use of jump cuts so we could show a passage of time throughout her daily morning routine in a way that looked convincing but was time efficient as we only had 5 minutes to fit our entire film into and so couldn’t waste too much time on our opening montage. However, to avoid the film looking too jumpy, we made sure to include longer shots and make use of continuity in between all of our jump cut sequences, for example, when Fiona leaves the house and gets into her car we obey the 180 degree line rule and make use of match on action.

I believe that our film fits into the ‘Teen Drama’ genre as it has a storyline that reflects that of daily teenage life, however it is dramatised and so makes the story more interesting and have impact. The characters help to add to the believability of our film as they are all based on existing stereotypes, see left: in particular, Fiona, a typical geek who’s quite timid and unpopular, and Alice, a typical popular girl who is pretty, fashionable, has a lot of friends and can be quite nasty. All of our characters are deliberately meant to conform to modern day stereotypes so a sense of social hierarchy can be made apparent to our viewers and so that our characters stay close to representing real life teenagers, and our stereotypes are created through the use of carefully selected costume, make up and personality. The settings within our film also add to believability as houses parties among college students aren’t uncommon, meaning our storyline isn’t too far-fetched.

We include intertextuality within our film while Fiona is getting ready. In our film, there are cross cuts between Fiona applying make up and her walking down the stairs, and in the teen drama 'Wild Child' you're shown a similar sequence of cross cuts of a group of girls getting ready and then walking down some stairs. We believed this scene would be good to reference within our own film as we wanted to create an upbeat, flowing sequence that presented how a girl can go from geek to glamorous in a time efficient manner.  

Our film also makes reference to the short film I analysed, 'New Boy'. However, it makes reference to it in terms of themes as 'New Boy' presents an African boy's struggle with fitting in at a new school and our film presents a geeky girl's struggle with fitting in within her everyday life. Our film could be considered the opposite of 'New Boy' as 'New Boy' has a sinister underlying story and ends positively, and our story appears to have a positive underlying story (Fiona finally fitting in) but at the end there's a twist and the story ends on a negative note, showing the sinister intent of the film throughout. I believe that this twist to our story helps us achieve the audience pleasure we set out to evoke as the audience is lulled into a false positive emotion as things are going well, but are then suddenly shocked by the story's unexpected tragic outcome, which falls into Richard Dyer's theory of Entertainment and Utopia as these highs and lows of emotion help to cure an audience of boredom. As well as to shock and somewhat entertain, our film intends to educate teenagers on the dangers of alcohol, drugs and peer pressure, and I believe that this unnerving ending achieves this.