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Wednesday, 9 March 2011
1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
In our film we tried to incorporate a number of forms and conventions from real-life media products that we looked at before filming, such as Bullitt and The Taking of Pelham 123.
The obvious convention of any film opening, which we were obliged to have in our film anyway, was titles. Because we knew this convention had to be in our film we had a lot of time to think about how to use them. After some deliberation we decided to push ourselves and try to integrate the titles in with the film. Originally we looked at the possibility of the titles being diegetic; for example we considered calling the film ‘One Stop’ as this is the name of a shop in my village of residence, but this wasn’t a legitimate possibility as it would have proved impossible to find ways of incorporating all the titles we wanted. Another notable consideration was having the titles in the newspaper that features prominently in the opening. Here we considered putting a film review with the main credits next to the newspaper article that gives you a bit of background information about the plot the film is to follow. We didn’t however, want to spend hours just producing material for our shoot and so we decided to add in the titles as you can see in the film.
Looking in more detail at our genre, Crime Thriller, one of the perhaps most expected conventions of this genre, that the opening takes place in a city or isolated rural area, when there is little or no daylight, we challenged. There were a number of reasons for this. Firstly, we did attempt a night time shoot, but on playback the visibility of what was going on was poor and so we felt we had no option but to shoot during some considerable daylight. Secondly, we would have had to travel quite an inconvenient distance to do a proper city shoot. Whilst we probably could have shot in a more isolated area, we felt that, as we were already being forced to challenge this common convention, that we would go the whole way by shooting the film in quite a public area. We felt that by doing this we capture the attention of the audience. I would also argue that we did this through a slightly unusual use of sequences, as you never actually saw a crime being committed, and you never actually saw a scene in which an arrest was made, which are typical conventions of Crime Thriller films. Another unusual convention of ‘The Betrayal’ was that the hero was a criminal. Normally a typical film from this genre would have a straight forward protagonist and antagonist. In our film however, a criminal is the hero as the audience is made to take pity on him because of his partner’s betrayal. This again helps to maintain the interest of the audience.
Despite challenging a number of conventions, there were some that we used and developed. We took the typical storyline of following a criminal through their life and made it into a film which followed the life of two criminals. The character types were also rather typical of a film from the Crime genre, with an air of cockiness and self-assurance surrounding each. The use of music to create tension was another common convention we chose to follow. We used music that got progressively faster and progressively louder, which complemented the viewer’s uncertainty about the challenged conventions. Our film also looks at the theme of Gender, by considering the male’s desire for dominance and independence, another typical convention of a Crime film.
Transcript
ReplyDeleteIn our film we tried to incorporate a number of forms and conventions from real-life media products that we looked at before filming, such as Bullitt and The Taking of Pelham 123.
The obvious convention of any film opening, which we were obliged to have in our film anyway, was titles. Because we knew this convention had to be in our film we had a lot of time to think about how to use them. After some deliberation we decided to push ourselves and try to integrate the titles in with the film. Originally we looked at the possibility of the titles being diegetic; for example we considered calling the film ‘One Stop’ as this is the name of a shop in my village of residence, but this wasn’t a legitimate possibility as it would have proved impossible to find ways of incorporating all the titles we wanted. Another notable consideration was having the titles in the newspaper that features prominently in the opening. Here we considered putting a film review with the main credits next to the newspaper article that gives you a bit of background information about the plot the film is to follow. We didn’t however, want to spend hours just producing material for our shoot and so we decided to add in the titles as you can see in the film.
Looking in more detail at our genre, Crime Thriller, one of the perhaps most expected conventions of this genre, that the opening takes place in a city or isolated rural area, when there is little or no daylight, we challenged. There were a number of reasons for this. Firstly, we did attempt a night time shoot, but on playback the visibility of what was going on was poor and so we felt we had no option but to shoot during some considerable daylight. Secondly, we would have had to travel quite an inconvenient distance to do a proper city shoot. Whilst we probably could have shot in a more isolated area, we felt that, as we were already being forced to challenge this common convention, that we would go the whole way by shooting the film in quite a public area. We felt that by doing this we capture the attention of the audience. I would also argue that we did this through a slightly unusual use of sequences, as you never actually saw a crime being committed, and you never actually saw a scene in which an arrest was made, which are typical conventions of Crime Thriller films. Another unusual convention of ‘The Betrayal’ was that the hero was a criminal. Normally a typical film from this genre would have a straight forward protagonist and antagonist. In our film however, a criminal is the hero as the audience is made to take pity on him because of his partner’s betrayal. This again helps to maintain the interest of the audience.
Despite challenging a number of conventions, there were some that we used and developed. We took the typical storyline of following a criminal through their life and made it into a film which followed the life of two criminals. The character types were also rather typical of a film from the Crime genre, with an air of cockiness and self-assurance surrounding each. The use of music to create tension was another common convention we chose to follow. We used music that got progressively faster and progressively louder, which complemented the viewer’s uncertainty about the challenged conventions. Our film also looks at the theme of Gender, by considering the male’s desire for dominance and independence, another typical convention of a Crime film.
Excellent evaluation.
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