Question 1

In what ways does our media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

 Below is a list of conventions of film openings, a film will not always include all of these, but these are just a few things that are conventional in film openings.

We have used travelling and arriving in our teen opening sequence that is a conventional film opening, as we were inspired by the film ‘The Breakfast Club.’ This allowed us to introduce our 4 main stereotypical characters: jock, nerd, princess and criminal. For example the princess was wearing a pink top, which stereotypically is the first colour that comes to mind when the word princess is mentioned, which is why we decided for her to wear that coloured top.

We have used a technique that ‘hooks’ the audience and might make them want to carry on watching it. In my opinion the first shot which is a close up of the criminal creates an enigma, as we see the criminal receive a phone call, but we don’t know what it is about, as we don’t hear any dialog. This introduces an event on top of the main narrative, which is the 4 main characters arriving at a summer camp.

The opening sequence sets up a comedy genre because of the nerds characteristics but because of the shots including the criminal there seems to be a cross genre of comedy and crime.

Binary opposition is another convention that we included in our opening sequence. As there are 3 male characters that can be compared to each other. There is a clear difference in the characters through what they wear and look like and also how they arrive to college. For example the jock drives a car whereas the nerd rides a bicycle, this reflects on their personalities. The amount of screen time can also relate to which characters are seen to be more important.

In this clip I have included the order of titles from our film ‘T.E.A.M’ and from ‘Ten Things I Hate About You.’ The titles that can be seen in the corners that are much smaller are from ‘Ten Things I Hate About You.’ I made this clip to show the comparison between our opening sequence and how we used titles compared to a real film.

The titles that are included at the beginning of films are the most important members in the production