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

Whilst studing titles, I learnt about the order or the titles shown. First, distribution and production companies appear at the beggining of the movie. They appear in order of how much money has been put into the production, for example, 20th Century Fox is usually shown first because they invest the most in movies. Then after will come other smaller idents, eg. Film 4, who usually put the least amount of money towards the production. This is usually followed by the title of the film, however this varies as some films show the title at the very end, very beginning, middle etc, depending on where they decide to put it. Actors names are then shown, some names appearing by themselves or groups of around three. Actors names are usually shown in order of importance as well, the most important actor/tress appearing last. The next titles shown are the casting credits, costume designer, music supervision, music, editor, production designer, director of photography, executive producer, producer, writer etc and the producer/director is usually last.

T.E.A.M Titles

Juno Titles

This is our media product compared to the teen film 'Juno' to show how we followed the conventions in our own teen film opening.

In addition to following the conventions of titles, our film T.E.AM also follows the conventions through:

Sound:
Our music does not follow the conventions of a teen film. We used a variety of music, with each piece of music explaining each character for example, the Nerd is often met with the song 'Wake Me Up Before You Go Go' which is a very upbeat and 90's song, which describes the nerd. On the other hand, the Jock has hip hop and much cooler music with some explicit language, which describes him. In Mean Girls for example, a typical teen movie, they often use rock/pop type songs mainly throughout the film and if they do have a change of song, it will be to describe a situation instead of an individual. For example, at one point in Mean Girls it changes to a hip hop rap song when they were about to have a party.

Camerawork:Our teen film T.E.A.M followed the conventions of teen films as it used a variety of long shots to show the teens traveling and arriving to their destination. Most teen dramas use traveling and arriving in their sequences and use long shots to do this. In addition, many teen dramas use establishing shots at the start, for example, The Breakfast Club. We chose not to follow this convention because we didn't use establishing shots because we felt we didn't need establishing shots to make the scenario/what was happening in the opening obvious.

Editing:The editing in T.E.A.M follows the conventions as most teen films are fast paced, showing each clip for round 2-5 seconds. This is the case with many other teen films, such as The Breakfast Club, to keep the viewer interested and to stop them from wondering. In addition, the main characters for teen movies, as well as most movies, give the main characters the most screen time, which our media product did, meaning we followed the conventions. The Criminal, The Princess, The Nerd and The Jock are the four main characters, and got the most screentime, around the same amount of time for each, whereas the other small characters such as the teacher or the shopkeeper who chased the criminal, only got small amounts of screen time.

Mise-en-scene: Our mise-en-scene is conventional for a teen drama. For example, costume is quite exaggerated. Eg, the Jock wheres a tracksuit, the Princess is glamours, the Nerd is very untrendy with glasses and quite petite and small and the Criminal is all blacked out. It is also based in a school environment, which is made obvious.