Main Post 12.1

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

Genre
The genre of our opening sequence is ‘Comedy’; it is a school based comedy, the reason why we chose this is because being  a teenager ourselves, we already know what is funny and how people will react to it. In the footage, one of the things that we had done to make the whole film comical is when  the bully ties the characters shoe laces together  without her knowing, resulting in her falling over.

Structure of sequence
After looking at our opening sequence, the structure supports the conventions of real media products as it successfully establishes the whole comedy theme, we even used an actual comedy genre time line to make it as realistic and conventional as possible. Also at the beginning of the footage, we faded it in, which is conventional as most comedy genre films seem to fade in, and then continue from there.

Style/colour of font
The font that we used was a white san serif; we displayed the credits on dark backgrounds. The font was very soft and almost handwritten as it matched the theme of the whole school comedy based film. The font suited the typical comedy conventions as the hand writing presented a cool, young normal, ordinary school.  

Style of presentation

Our film as a whole was presented and aimed to be a typical Americanised school based comedy; therefore we had to do the complete opposite to a normal British school, which meant that the 9^th Graders (Year 8) had to wear non-school uniform. The colour and font we chose was a white sans-serif as it looked childish and very teenage; this connotes the idea of the school being a typical teenage high school.

Narrative enigma

The narrative enigma is conventional and aimed to suit a teenage audience. The whole plot of our opening sequence is about a girl who’s always getting bullied, this straight away raises the following questions: ‘why is the girl getting bullied’ or ‘Is she going to stand up for herself’. These enigmas are conventional as a normal teenage person do go through some of these issues so therefore the audience will understand the whole plot and making the film successful.

Introduction of characters

When introducing the characters we immediately had a long shot of the main character running in to school late, very unorganised and nearly tripping over whilst pulling up her socks the represents the character as being nerdy and clumsy. For the next shot we had the bully tying the main characters shoe laces together, and the audience can straight away see that it’s a normal typical school based comedy.  

Camera
In two of the scenes, the opening sequence had been ‘hand held’, we did this so the audience will feel that they are part of the film and feel like they are following the main character. When watching some comedy genre films we realised that most of the shots were medium close ups and ¾ shots, so we did use them shots so that they could be easily established by the audience.  

Sound

In our opening sequence, we did not have any dialogue however we did add an uncopyrighted song, which plays from the beginning and fades out until the end of the video, the song develops and forms conventions of a real media product as it is a rock music an genre and teenage Americans are particularly being labelled as ‘young cool punk’ teens.

Editing & Special effects

As we were working in the school we didn’t really have any choice but stick to an easy simple opening sequence and most of our footage was already in chronological order so we didn’t had to rearrange. We used a range of stationary to create the title of the film ‘9^th grade’ for this we placed the pens and pencils on a cling film, throwing it towards the camera, we then used the editing by reversing it and forming the title of the film.

Mie-en-scene
The opening sequence represents the main character as a ‘geek’; this is shown by her wearing high socks, big glasses and a minimal amount of make-up. The character is also very clumsy as she falls over and this makes the audience want to laugh at her. The Bully however is shown to be tough as he is wearing a dark leather jacket, un-tucked shirt and black trousers; the bully is represented as being a ‘cool popular’ kid in the class.