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

Our chosen film genre was predominantly teen drama, with the main sub genre being black comedy with themes of coming of age running through the film and our opening sequence. We researched films and TV programmes of a similar genre and with similar themes, such as Heathers, Mean Girls and 13 in order to gain some inspiration for what would be in our opening sequence.

Here is a director's commentary video that our group made...

We used:
- Conventional characters, but whom also broke stereotypes
- Iconography that British teenagers are familiar with, helping to target our audience
- A typical narrative structure: equilibrium with the protagonist then causing a disruption
- Themes including: sexuality, revenge, relationships

Many of our narrative themes and inspirations also came from Skins. Skins has many teenage parties throughout the programme and for our opening sequence we agreed to start off in a party and we had to decide what mood to settle for and the type of camera effects to use. Much of our inspiration came from Skins, because it has alot about rebellious teenagers, similar to our opening sequence.

We had to create our party to look as realistic as possible and this involved using a blue strobe light to create a party feel and also because it helped the actors to feel less embarrassed during the shoot, so the whole feel of the party was more realistic. The problem was that the strobe only worked in the dark, and when we filmed in the dark not enough light could reach our camera lens, giving us grainy footage. However we were able to use Adobe After Effects to get rid of a lot of the grain in the party footage. We also threw beer cans, and wine bottles around, as well as a few ashtrays with cigarettes to create the whole mise en scene of a party. This helped to make the genre of our film obvious to the audience as soon as the film started. 


Narrative Structure
 
Our film does overall fit Todorov's narrative theory. Only the first 2 parts of the narrative theory; the equilibrium followed by the disruption are in our 2 minute opening sequence, but the rest is what we planned for our film.

1. Equilibrium - A group of friends hang out together at a party. They are dancing, drinking and some are on drugs. Many are chatting and just having a good time together.

2. Disruption - One girl, Hanna, overdoses at the party which causes her to fall over amongst a group of dancers. People start to panic, some take no notice; too engrossed in the party to realise while others turn the lights on, music off and try and help the girl.

3. Recognition - People at school hear rumours and suspect Eve ( the girl who walked out of the party ) is the one who caused Hanna to overdose and other students at the girl's school begin to take revenge on friends who have also wronged them. The revenge trend that had been triggered by Eve went too far and one boy even began to plan the murder of a girl he fancied.

4. Attempt to Repair - Eve stops this boy from killing the poor girl, who rejected being the boy's girlfriend and the whole school realise what has been happening and the terrible trend that has been triggered by Eve.

5. New Equilibrium - The whole school agrees to resolve their issues with each other in other ways and never let anything spiral out of control quite so dramatically again, however the police circle the school, ready to take students to the station once they heard about the revenge trend that had been going on around the school.


Form

We did research into the opening sequences of films of a similar genre and also researched the conventions and the role of opening sequences and then tried to include the main conventions of opening sequences into our opening sequence. This included:

1. Titles: We made our own titles on LiveType, and tried to use a font and effect that was fit for our genre film, because this is the first thing the audience see and will set up their expectations for the whole film. We did research into fonts in another British black comedy; Seven Psychopaths, in which they use a standard font, with a few added effects to make it look more dramatic. We chose something similar and added the ghost effect when the credits came on and off screen. Here is the font for Seven Psychopaths:

2. Establishing film genre: Our characters and mise en scene introduced in the opening sequence set the scene for the whole film, also emphasising the genre and bringing the audience straight into the action.


Style

When we were making decisions about our opening sequence, our group mainly agreed that we wanted the film plot to seem dark and twisted to represent the revenge trend that takes place within our film. Here is a clip to show how  we tried to represent this through the style of our film:

We created a title sequence that represents clearly the genre it is as the film begins and we have included credits, main characters and themes all in our opening sequence, establishing our film for the audience in the first couple of minutes. This is the role of a opening sequence and we have appealed to what our target audience know about teen dramas, as well as breaking some conventions in order to attract the audience, because they know what to expect, but they are also kept guessing what is going to happen.