Evaluation Questions 1 - Mollie

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

For our media products we had to follow certain conventions and challenge forms in order to make them look professional and reach out to our audience. By thoroughly researching and deconstructing existing media products and their narratives it helped us have more knowledge of conventions of genre that my group were going challenge and recreate. When deconstructing we chose certain areas of these trailers that we needed to look at to source inspiration for our own media products.

These included looking closely at how London was represented in films such as 'Ill Manors', and we found there was often iconic shots of London streets. Transport was also shot in a way that was identifiable to a London location. 

We knew that in Urban Drama's there would be a large amount of scenes that focus on gangs as Urban Drama's are very character orientated. After deconstructing 'Ill Manors' with their variety of gang scenes within a montage we decided this was a convention that we must use within our own trailer to create a realistic nature to the audience. 

We also looked at other film trailers and openings like 'Panic Room'. Giving us a different side to research that we used within our trailer. We liked the idea of someone being taken and the effect that this can have on the victims families. 

TRAILER

Throughout looking at existing products, it highlighted the fact that our narrative was the most important part of our urban drama genre. We can support Hodge and Kress’ genre theory that states genre only exists in so far as a social group declares and enforces the rules that constitute them. Therefore we could easily locate realistic actors and locations in our London based area.

Youth Relationships

We can see this conformation with my deconstruction of the film ‘Adulthood’, highlighting the London setting and youth relationships. From chase scenes using the two shot as shown I have highlighted the tense relationship, but we can infer the youth are always ahead of the police in these genres of films. 

Characters 

Out of the deconstructions, I found this film to be most realistic to social norms, and the characters were relatable to an audience. Therefore we decided to develop on this in our own media trailer by having a main character of the same age and ethnicity as our target audience. The young black stereotype is a common convention of urban dramas.

Montage

In addition to this we used the common convention of urban drama trailers by having a sequence of montage shots used throughout the trailer. Through this research we knew which common scenes were shown, more commonly, violence and drug use.

Voiceover 

We noticed the narrative of the film is usually set out via a voice over with the combination of text. I researched this further with the 'Fishtank' deconstruction as well as the opening credits researched. In our media product we challenged this by having our tag line as a voice over, and therefore relying heavily on getting the narrative across via text.

We used Logic Pro 6 and recorded a deep male voice saying our tagline 'Sometimes when you're stuck between a rock and a hard place, the ends can give you the only answer' 

We then edited this to make the voice sound really realistic and sound as if the protagonist is in the room with you

POSTER

We had to outline the conventions of a film poster before we could start planning and creating out own poster. Therefore we narrowed them down to the image being important, as well as the typography, the production company, and the tagline. We therefore included these in our final poster. As our film is character orientated, we placed the main protagonist in the centre of the poster. 

For our own film poster, I followed the basis for these conventions that were set. I knew that the image was important so our group kept taking the picture of our protagonist on set, before we decided we had the perfect image. 

I erased the background of this image on Photoshop before replacing and merging - using layers - with another image that I had edited to make lighter. 

After much editing I added a billing block and a production company at the bottom of our poster. Something I saw on a variety of previous film posters.

Colour Scheme 

Our main poster inspiration was from the film 'Shank' we liked the use of the colour scheme as well as the eye catching image that met conventions of an urban drama, yet added an action film twist to it. We also decided that using the combination of colours, this made the audience infer the British flag. However in our media products, the red connotes danger and works well with the black and grey colours we used to make it appear more gritty. 


Typography 

I used photoshop to create a variety of  typography recreations. I used YouTube tutorials to expand my basic knowledge of photoshop. When we first thought of an urban location, graffiti seemed to be a common convention and area that was featured. I wanted to expand on this and see if I could create a bold and eye-catching typography that used this graffiti background. 

I used layers on photoshop and put the basic bold font that we wanted to use on the background picture. 

The position of the text on the background was very different as I moved it around. I wanted a gritty typography, so I chose the area on the background that didn't use such bright colours, and ended up with this as our final piece. 

We had to picture them on our final poster, and this seemed to bright for our final poster and contrasted the background image that we used. 

I decided to explore the gritty nature of the genre further and create an eroded typography as our final piece of typography to use in our media products.

Using this YouTube tutorial I was able to follow this method to create my own.

I found a basic grunge background that I knew I could work with. I then followed the tutorial further to work with layers in a different way that I knew would help me achieve my final product. 

Like the process I did before I had to create text on top of this background. it was vital this was big enough so that the highlights (the white parts) came through on the final piece of text to create the eroded effect. 

My group were happy with this typography.

However to keep with the colour scheme, this had to be altered further. I used the pain splatter tool on the red text to create the final typography that we decided to use. 

WEBSITE

After exploring the conventions of a film website it was vital we met these in order to appeal to a certain audience and to create effectiveness. 

Colour Scheme 
We kept to the conventions that we saw on other websites such as the same colour scheme is used throughout, and the combination of this is effective. We used this in the creation of our website. This is clear in our own website, as we used our main colour of red effectively for the typography as well as links and the tagline. I also found a production company that used red so we included this onto our own website. 

Character 
As we have a character orientated film, it was vital to include our protagonist on the website, as this was what we found on other urban drama websites.We used a similar idea of that from our poster and placed our protagonist in front of the block of flats onto our final website, which was what we found on other websites such as Shank. This made the website more visually pleasing and was again easier to navigate around, whilst giving the audience the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the before watching the film and it links to the narrative. 

Time Lapse

We decided to add a time lapse onto our poster that appeared similar to the one in our trailer.  Our time lapse did not look professional when we first filmed it, so we developed on this before deciding a larger contrast between light and dark was more effective. 

User Friendly + Critic Reviews 
Like all the other film websites that we explored, we had to make it user friendly so that the audience could navigate well on the screen. We chose the specific links that we could find on other sites such as soundtrack and gallery as we felt these were more relatable than offering links such as games. It was vital to include critics reviews on our website from a magazine of a similar genre so that the audience would be more trusting to this.