Evaluation Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our film follows the life of a 17 year old girl called Lola, who experiences the negative affects of drug/alcohol abuse and how this leads the deterioration of friendships and family relationships. The main focus of our film is the breakdown of the connection with her boyfriend Marlon, and how her friends try to get her back on track.

Form

The typical features of an opening sequence are;

- introduces the main characters and gives a brief insight into their character traits
- presents a clear genre
- shows the film production and distribution companies in the titles
- sets up a narrative that will continue in the rest of the film

         

Hot Fuzz uses the typical features as it introduces the main character (using images and voice-over), presents the film as a crime and comedy, shows the production and distribution companies just after the title sequence and suggests that the narrative will be about Nicholas Angel's experiences as a police officer.

Our film opening follows this typical format as it introduces Lola and includes shots of her friendship group in the party as well as using titles throughout. It is obvious that the narrative will be based around Lola's life and captures key moments such as her hitting Marlon and a breakdown in the bathroom. Also, the montage party scene helps denote the indie teen drama genre that we were aiming for.

Genre

'Adolescents' mainly fits the typical conventions of an indie teen drama as we wanted to appeal to our target audience and so needed to focus on aspects that successful real media products have used. The main film that we looked at to gain a better understanding of our genre is 'Kidulthood' - this contains many negative stereotypes of teenagers as it pays close attention to the use of alcohol, drugs and violence. Following along with this theme, we also included these aspects of teenage lives in our opening yet portrayed them more subtly so that it didn't look obvious and forced.

USED CONVENTIONS

Lola is seen to be consuming alcohol whilst her friend is preoccupied with her phone (social media) which is a typical convention of teenagers - antisocial behaviour

In Kidulthood, the opening captures lots of school kids hanging around the playground in groups, with many of them absorbed by their phones

Narrative structure

In our film, the use of Todorov's narrative theory wasn't essential as we wanted our opening to be slightly ambiguous and be open for interpretation. The audience are left unaware as to who the closer friendships are between in the group and if there has been any previous conflict between Lola and Marlon (although they do find out as the story unravels). Our film doesn't follow the idea of an equilibrium being disturbed, setting in a chain of events which eventually leads to equilibrium again. Also, we didn't want to create audience gratification, so we ended our opening sequence with Lola pouring pills into the sink and breaking down. This creates a more disturbing anf unsettling feel which is true to real life, as nothing is left fully resolved. We did however, make use of Claude Levi-Strauss' binary opposites as the audience realises who Lola's 'good' friends are that want to help her, and who the 'bad' ones are that lead her to making  immoral decisions. This theory is often adopted by films even if it is unintentional as the idea of  'good' and 'bad' is unavoidable.

 

This is a prezi to show some of the narrative techniques we used in our sequence

Style

In order to create the British indie style that we wanted, we made specific use of music and pace. The soundtrack that we found on Soundcloud (Conducta - Felt This Way) has a strong beat is quite fast pace which helped to create the party atmosphere. It allowed for the dancing shots in the montage to fit in well and served as a diegetic sound during the party as it is what the characters would have been playing on the speakers. We used slow motion shots and real time shots in order to make the scene seem slightly distorted and this reflects the characters distorted sense of reality as they were drinking and consuming drugs.


                     

Similarly, in Human Traffic, slo-mo is used to reflect a word of distorted reality, as well as using a voice-over to explain the characters feelings and emotions