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

Our media product follows the stereotypical idea of a teen drama, the storyline is much the same as most other teen dramas with a serious twist that sends a message out to the audience. Teen drama’s such as ‘Mean Girls’ focus around the new girl who is evidently a smart girl, trying to fit in with the popular girls at school, to later realise that they were only doing it so they could make fun of her. This is much like our own, yet we have the added twist of things getting out of control and our main character, Fiona, being raped as a result of it. The opening of our film shows Fiona waking up and proceeding to continue with her every day morning routine. Fiona is portrayed as the stereotypical geek throughout the entire film. We first see this in the way she dresses and how she has an organised routine for the morning. Not only does she have teddy bears on her bed, but she arranges them in an order that seems planned. These act as the opening scene of our film, in the form of a montage as it cuts to her brushing her teeth, doing her hair and doing her work, to ensure that we would be able to fit it in with 5 minute limit of the whole film, while making it convince for the audience. We added longer shots of her walking out of her room, or collecting her work and starting her laptop up to break up the jumpiness of the multiple jump cuts within the first scene, to ensure continuity within the film was present throughout all of it.

Our film per the stereotypical teen drama includes a multitude of characters, from the geek to the popular girl. Fiona being the main character is the geek and Alice is the popular girl, who has large groups of friends and wild parties. Much like popular girls within modern films like ‘Mean Girls’ and ‘Wild Child’, Alice has a mean streak that makes her turn on Fiona and drug her. Other characters within the film also follow the stereotypical popular teen that drinks and does drugs at parties. The sense of control within the film is in the hands of Alice, who seems to have the last word with everything, including the drugging of Fiona, since she nods for Kieran to put the drug in Fiona’s abandoned drink. Rather than having a party at a club which would have proved difficult, the use of a house only added to the believability of our film since modern teenagers usually have house parties.




When deciding on how to create our film within the 5 minute limit, we decided that we needed to cut scenes down to make them more effective yet smaller in time, which is how we ended up using the cross cuts of Fiona applying her make-up and walking down the stairs out of the house. This intertextual moment was created after looking at familiar scenes from the film, ‘Wild Child’, where we are shown cross cuts of the girls getting ready and walking down the stairs. Using this sequence allowed us to create an upbeat scene of a girl going from a typical geek, to the glamorous party girl.

When we set about creating our film, our main target was to ensure that it would appeal to our target audience while conforming to the typical teen drama themes and ideas. Using the idea of peer pressure, we were able to both entertain and educate our audience, by sending out the message that drinking alcohol is okay if you are fully aware of what is in and you are among your actual friends, because trying to fit in isn’t really worth it. We were also able to create our film based on Richard Dyer's theory of Utopian solutions, allowing our audience to have a greater enjoyment when watching our film.