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

The title of our film is 'Consequences'. It is a British drama film focusing on the protagonist 'Dan' and the struggles he faces being a teenage boy in London. The other character introduced in our film opening is Dan's girlfriend 'Lucy'.
In order to produce a successful product, we had to research into the drama genre for the four concepts of film production; genre, narrative, form and style.

Genre
Our film is a British drama, mainly focusing on teenagers.
Here are some films of similar genre:

Kidulthood

Attack The Block

This is England

We used these inspirations in order to find out more about the forms and conventions of our chosen genre, and then chose to focus on specific conventions based on them.

Conventions of similar films:

• Urban British setting
• Male protagonist
• Relationship between male and female
• Protagonist caught up in disruption 
• Themes of trouble/crime
• Realistic appearance (lighting, mise-en-scene)

This is how our we created our characters and setting according to the forms and conventions of a real British drama film:




Form and Style
We wanted our film's appearance to be of a similar style to that of the TV drama 'Skins' and British film 'This Is England'.
The intended effect was to make our film opening as realistic and relatable as possible while satisfying the audience's expectations of quality as well as forms and conventions.

We did this through the use of:

• varying shot types:
  
  
  
  
  
  • diegetic sounds eg. footsteps running, knocking on door
  • natural exterior lighting:
  
  
  
  
• plain simple titles; plain white fading in and out:

This Is England titles vs. Consequences titles

Consequences running sequence

Trainspotting running sequ

The content of our opening
was supposed to be shot in the style of the British drama film Trainspotting; using the same sense of pace, movement and action through the running sequence.

Narrative Structure
Often, films conform with Todorov's theory of narrative structure:

However, our film will challenge this theory by beginning with a flash-forward of the disruption, before returning to the equilibrium that would come chronologically first.
This is similar to the way that 'Battle: Los Angeles' begins by throwing the audience into the action leaving them asking various questions about how and why this sequence happened. This creates intrigue and interest which is what we intend to do with our opening sequence.

In order to create a build-up of tension, leaving questions unanswered, we used Barthe's theory of enigma codes. We started the film with the disruption of Dan running away, leaving the audience to question who he is, what he's done and where he's running. We continue to leave questions unanswered, leaving the opening on a cliff-hanger in order to engage and interest the audience.