Lucy McKenna

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

The aim with our media product (Short film) was to create it intending for an audience ranging from 14-19 year olds. Researching into genres aimed at this audience I found that many are Comedies or Rom-coms (romantic comedies). People in this age group like laughing at features in texts. Our group decided to create a comedy, research showed that it was the genre that the age group we were aiming at were most interested in.

We chose to create our short film as a silent film; this is a typical convention of ‘old fashioned’ films such as ‘The Plank’. However watching many short films I found that the dialogue in them normally enhances the scenes; adding information to what is happening. Therefore we found that we would have to ask our actors to over exaggerate their movements to explain what is happening in the scene. This mime is not a form or convention or short films in this time period or for the audience our product is aimed at.

We are creating a short silent film; after taking away the sound we decided that it was very like the classic films of ‘Charlie Chaplin and The Plank’; we played around with the colour contrast of the film we had shot, it looked really affective and we chose to keep it in the black and white colour contrast. However this does challenge the conventions of a modern comedy, they are not in black and white, but this is very much a convention of an ‘old fashioned’ film. The black and white convention of older films is developed in our product; we are using the black and white contrast but we have chosen to highlight modern parts in our film; (such as the car).

Typical black and white silent films have music running throughout; (normally piano), often climaxing at potent points in the film, this is a convention that we will use in our short film, one member of our group is a piano

Lucy McKenna

player, we will create a piece of music; that like other silent films have climax’s at meaningful points.

Our short film is based in a school; this is not a typical setting for short films; many long films have this type of setting and therefore we are challenging forms and conventions of a short film.

Throughout our short film there is essence of change, uniqueness that isn’t a convention of typical short films. However we are using many forms and conventions of short films, such as the comedy aspect.