Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or


challenge forms and conventions of real media


products from your genre?

In our media project we tend to follow a lot of the conventions of our genre because it provides the audience and us some familiarity with the genre itself. Our genre which is Social realism needs you to follow the conventions because it can dissolve the barrier between genres and make it all a bit confusing. We use mise en scene and certain camera shots to get the tension and genre across, as well as voice overs and sounds.

We tried to keep the short film as realistic as possible hence the genre Social Realism. We kept the costume to the minimum and to the conventions and didn't use any unusual or unrealistic props. One of the conventions of social realism is the way that they generally look at stereotypes for what they are, without making them unbelievable. This is shown when we decided about a costume for our main character Marcus who is a stereotypical drug dealer who lives a life of stealing and drug abusing.  When playing Marcus I used a hoody to portray the sort of person he is. We also used jeans and scruffy looking shoes to also get across the same sort of message. For props it was quite simple what we needed, all we needed to do to follow the conventions was make sure that all props were believable and could be seen in real life. We used 2 props which were the drugs (flour) which we kept in a 'jiffy bag' and used a fake plastic gun to shoot the protagonist, which we added in the sound later.

When it came to location we decided to consult some real media texts to get a feeling of what sort of location we should shoot at, we decided after seeing the real media texts and also through our discussions about what would look best, we decided we would like to have our whole short film, filmed in a rough area where its quite secluded, were there is graffiti, litter and its quite dirty. We found a perfect lane which ticked all those boxes and helped us follow the conventions.


Once we had decided on props, costume and location, all we needed to do was to get our storyboard right and make sure that our shots were complying with the conventions. By looking again at similar real media texts in our genre we took pointers as to what shots we could use when storyboarding and then shooting. We used a lot of Close ups, Point of view and Establishing shots. This provided the audience with a feel of being a part of the action whilst giving them an insight into our interpretation of what it is to be a drug dealer.

Editing was the last thing to do but was by no means the least important, because this was when we could compile our shots together into a feasible and interesting final project. In this section we did challenge the conventions a little because we used fade to white effects to show that the story had gone back in time to a flash back. Then we challenged it again by changing the lighting in the flashback to show that it was different to the current day. This challenged the conventions but I still feel it did not alienate the final product to any other social realism short film that we had previously used to help us keep to the conventions.