Evaluation Question 1 - Ella

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

Before choosing the genre for our 60 second media trailer we did a lot of research in to different themes. Most of which were gang and Teenage Behavior related. We knew this was probably the grnre we would choose but to be sure we came u with 5 ideas that stepped away from urban dramas and gang culture. The 5 we came up with were: 

• A girl has a family member die and suffers from depression

• An abusive relationship

• A social media stalker

• A girl being haunted by herself

• A boy that has a bad upbringing and has to fend for his self and his family. 

We also researched topics such as Kidnapping by looking at real life kidnapping stories a deconstructing the kidnapping scene from taken. We found that many shot were close up which we knew we could recreate with ease but we found that the in-depth mise en scene of this scene would be extremely hard to recreate and execute professionally. 

After a lot of research and planning we finally decided that we would create an urban drama teaser trailer that used the story of 'a boy that has a bad upbringing and has to fend for his self and his family'.

We have stuck very closely to the common conventions of the Urban Drama genre within all three aspects of our coursework. The main conventions of an urban drama film are iconic urban locations such as estates or the less wealthy parts of London and also to follow the harsh lives of teenagers trying to overcome hardships. The conventions shown below are the ones in which we decided to sick closely too in order to create a professional trailer.

• Usually a main character, either part of a group or just a single person.
• From a dysfunctional home
• Usually features rival groups/people (although we didnt use a gang as a feature in our trailer we used them a superior figure that is not seen in the trailer)
• Deprived areas; inner-city/ghetto era that contains negative aspects such as drug dealing etc. Use of council estates, alleyways, broken buildings, night-clubs, bars, prisons, drug houses, squats and gang territory. 
• Establishing shots to show environment.
• Cross cutting and jump cuts to jump from scene to scene in tense moments. 
• Mise-en-scene;
• Hoodies
• Trainers
• Tracksuits
• Guns, knives, weapons
• Cars
• Sound;
• Diegetic sound; 
• Colloquial
• Loud
• Not RP
• Non-diegetic sound;
• Hip-hop
• Grime
• Bashment
• Garage
• R&B

Trailer

Urban dramas are known for being very character orientated which is something we stuck to very closely to in our trailers. We did a lot of research into in to urban drama trailers and did many deconstructions on different aspects of them. We started with general trailer deconstructions of 'Fishtank' and '4, 3, 2, 1' . This helped us figure out and understand the stereotypes of trailers from our genre and also gave us ideas of camera angles and shots we could use within ours such as over the shoulder drugs shots, low angle stamp shots and mid shot punch shots. Here are some of the shot se recreated from trailers we deconstructed. 

We then went into deconstructing them for sound and titles. From this we had a pretty good idea as to what direction we wanted to take with our trailer.  WHAT CAN I SAY ABOUT TITLES? 

For sound we knew that we wanted a slow song to start and end with an urban sound that creates suspense to finish. We decided on a piano hip hop instrumental and Choong Family's 'Adrenaline'.

We decided that we would use a black male as our protagonist (to conform to conventions) that would join a gang to help his struggling family. This way we could include drugs and violence in relation to the gang and then use a run down estate for his struggling family scenes. We decided to conform to the idea of a gang but decided not to actually include shots of them in our trailer and instead use the as a looming figure of a danger in our trailer. 

Poster

We then had to think about our poster. We researched and deconstructed posters to get an idea of what we should include. We as the urban drama genre is very stereotypical we should once again stick to the stereotypes of the poster. These included having it landscape, including the location and protagonist and then also making it dark.

These four posters are the main ones that we used for inspiration. From these posters we made the decisions that we would have a landscape poster, an urban location (an estate or London skyline) and our protagonist (because the film are character orientated). The main thing we noticed in these posters were that they all had very detailed mise en scene regarding the costume and the objects implying violence (guns and baseball bats). We decided to focus on the costume for our detailed mise en scene and dressed our protagonist in jogging bottoms and a hoodie.

Once we had made a plan for this we started to shoot the photos and putting each part together. We chose to use the estate with our protagonist out side and also a London skyline to link London and the estate together showing the audience where the film would be set. 

PICTURE OF PLAN AND ACTUAL POSTER COMPARE

We also used the golden rule when it came to placement of our tagline and title. Instead of placing them in the middle of the poster with the tagline underneath the title we put it toward the top of the poster in the center and had the tagline above the title. Wen taking into consideration the rule of 3 it meant the audience’s eye would be taken all around the poster.

Website
We then moved on to the website and after looking at many websites and deconstructing them. One that we found particularly interesting was '1 Day'.  

We liked this website as it subverted the convention of having dull colours for the website and even though it is colourful the characters are still the focus of the poster because hey are black and white. I liked the way that the ratings don't take up a a lot of space but are still placed so they are easily seen. We were inspired y this website typography and tried to recreate something similar for our own. 

We decided that we would conform to the dull and dark sereotypical colours of an urban drama and use black, white and red as our colour theme. We decided to have our location as the main focus and have our protagonist closer to the camera at the side so it is still evident that the film is character orientated. This is very conventional of urban dramas as they are simple, to the point and effective.