Evaluation Question 1 - Seyi

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

Teaser Trailer

Urban Dramas have very specific conventions and in order to make the viewers know that what they are watching is an Urban Drama. The use of Urban Youths is extremely important, as this is the main way that real media products can represent the reality of Urban London as the majority of crimes committed in these areas are by young people. The mise-en-scene is also a very important as the characters need to be dressed in the type of clothes that you would see on Urban Youths in real life in e.g. tracksuits, high top trainers and hoodies. Secondly the environment that the characters are shown within is incredibly important as you need to show the hardship that the characters are facing, this holds a good foundation to build the narrative on.

I believe that our trailer conforms to real media products that have been created, especially due to the fact that Urban Dramas that have a similar narrative to us e.g. involving drug or gang related crimes, these have all been inspired by recent moral panics in society. Firstly by the use of a protagonist who is of an ethnic minority and is still a teenager which is also used by many real media products for example Kidulthood and Adulthood. Secondly the Mise-en-scene of the protagonist and other characters within the trailer all conform to real media products and even urban youths and areas within real life situations. We clothed our protagonist and any other young characters within the trailer in items of clothing more associated with teenagers within London e.g. hoodies, tracksuit bottoms etc, we did this to make our teaser trailer more believable and for it to have more of the conventions of real Urban Dramas as it would have been impossible to accurately represent Urban youths in inappropriate clothing. The surroundings of the shots taken were extremely important too, they would normally incorporate high rise flats and run down areas, without these we wouldn’t be able to show the viewers the harsh situations that our protagonist has to grow up in, this was another part of our trailer that we believed conformed to the conventions of real media products as the establishing shots of the surrounding areas had many similarities to real media products as they show poverty in surrounding areas in the same way.

Genre 

The main conventions of a film website include the use of the teaser trailer, the critics reviews, a user friendly layout and an effective image of either a member/members of the cast or where the film is set. We didn't want to stray too far from the conventions of a film website as the conventions are set in stone and they serve a purpose, so we made sure we conformed to the conventions of a film website while still sticking to our Urban Drama genre.
Our website conforms and subverts to real media products; it conforms as it has aspects of Urban Dramas within is e.g. the picture of the high rise flats in the background which has the protagonist in front of it, as a media group we believed this to be very effective because as soon as you enter the website you get a gist of what the trailer is about. As our media product is about a single character rather than a gang, placing only the protagonist on the website was needed and extremely effective as we couldn’t afford to move away from this, for example real media products such as Shank which follows a group of people incorporate the whole group of people on the website, showing that even though there is a main character, each other character has an important role, so as we are doing a trailer which revolves around one character we only placed the protagonist onto the website. This subverts real media products as the websites they use for these media products rarely revolve around one person as they cannot illustrate the narrative in the website by showing the protagonist, however, as our trailer is centred around the one character we need to. The text on our website conforms to real
media products as we tried to go for an eroded effect for any text that was going to go on our website, this eroded effect can be seen on many other Urban Drama websites as if you want to show the viewers the ‘gritty’ side of London, all aspects of the website must portray this. This text which was used for the title on the website was also used within our trailer as we knew that we needed to have a sense of continuity between all parts of our media production.

Our poster conformed to many real media products as we used ever stereotypical convention that you would find within real media products and placed them within our poster. You have the protagonist standing in front of a block of flats, with the protagonist dressed menacingly and standing in front of a building which is associated with poverty we soon began to dive into the story behind the protagonist situated in front of the block of flats. As we are setting our story within London we believed it was important to conform to the use of the London skyline or an urban skyline which showed how populated and dense the protagonist’s surroundings are. By knowing this we used a picture of an Urban London skyline in the background, in doing so we have layers of images which conform to real media products and use their conventions to strengthen it as an Urban Drama. Our storyline once again causes our media products to subvert real media products as our poster just like the other products doesn’t show anything about a gang, Shank for example shows a background image of a menacing gang behind the group of protagonists, Kidulthood also uses a group of protagonists as the image for a poster, so due to the fact that our trailer is character centred we can only portray the protagonist. We used newspapers and magazines local to London and UK to provide our star ratings to allow us to be as close to real media products as possible.