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

Our film 'Consequences' is a British independent drama film with a sub-genre of crime, although this sub-genre is only suggested and not actually shown in the opening. While planning our film, we researched genre, narrative, form and style conventions associated with British drama, and in our opening we both conform to and challenge them.

Genre
In our opening there is a balance between British drama conventions that we conformed to and conventions that we challenged

Convention	Media text reference	Used or challenged?
Themes of crime	Bullet Boy – shows young characters involved in crime Let Him Have It – follows the protagonist through the after effects of his crime and arrest	Used Although crime is not actually shown in our opening sequence, it is made obvious the Dan is in serious trouble after being involved in illegal activity
Themes of Romance/relationships	Brighton Rock – the plot is based around the relationship between a gang member and a woman he meets	Used Our opening shows the romantic relationship between the two main characters
Deals with sensitive issues (racism, sexism, drug abuse, physical abuse, etc)	Trainspotting – deals with drug addiction East Is East – deals with racism	Challenged In our film opening we decided to focus on the main elements of the story which are the characters’ lives and the crime they get involved in, so we didn’t include any of these more sensitive types of themes
Urban setting	Kidulthood – set in west London which can be seen behind the character Attack the Block – set in south London, an urban environment	Used Our sequence is set in a house and the streets of east London
Focus on working class	Fish Tank – Mia lives on a council estate, from a working class background This Is England – characters from a working class background	Challenged Our film focusses on the lives of teenagers from middle class backgrounds

Narrative

Our opening sequence follows Todorov's narrative theory in the following way:

Todorov's theory continues with a resolution and new equilibrium, and although this is not shown in the opening it comes later in the film. This type of narrative is common in many films of the drama genre, such as Attack the Block and Submarine.

Enigma codes were also used in our opening to set up questions like:

What exactly happened to Dan and why is he in trouble?
Who is Dan running from?
Who is Ryan?
Who is knocking on the door at the end?

Similar questions are set up in the opening of Trainspotting as the audience ask questions like 'why are the characters running from the police?'

Opening scene of Trainspotting

Form and Style
The form and style of a film is important for conveying the genre and feel of the film. We established our form and style using grading, titles and shot types.

After looking at other British drama films and TV programmes including Skins, Misfits, and Trainspotting, we decided on the features for our grading (shown below), as they seemed to be typical of the drama genre

Our titles are white, plain and simple, and fade in and out, similar to the titles used in British drama film This Is England. The titles are effective in crediting those involved in making the film, but at the same time to not take too much of the viewer's attention away from what is happening in the film.