Teen films target teenagers by featuring topics relevant to their lives like education, relationships with friends and family, and discovering their identity. Teenagers watch teen movies because they can relate to the themes of puberty, romance, and problems portrayed. Kids and adults also watch teen movies to understand and learn about teenagers. Common genres in teen films include romance, comedy, horror, and action. Conventional themes include rebellion, love, family conflicts, partying, and achieving the American dream. The film opening challenges some conventions by focusing on a pregnant teenage girl, with binary oppositions around happiness, love, and fantasy versus reality. Costumes and music are used to set mood and tension.

2. In terms of the target audience, teen films feature subject matters
relevant to teens. Teens everyday lifestyle involves their college lives
/education, relationships with friends, the opposite sex and parents. To
add to this, meeting new people, fitting in a group of friends/cliques
becomes their concern. This is the time where most teenagers find who
they are . They fact that as teenagers we go through the stage of puberty
results in us finding our true identity. Furthermore teens watch teen
movies because they can relate to it and they go through exactly most
of the things/problems teen movies portray. They can also get ideas/
learn to deal with relationship problems with people around them.

3. Teenagers are not the only ones that watch teen movies. Kids can find
themselves watching teen movies out of curiosity and because of the fact that
they are nearly approaching the age to become teenagers .They can get ideas
and learn from those movies about how to dress, how to deal with
relationship problems and how to cope with parents when going through
puberty. Adults however watch teen movies in order to perhaps understand
teens and know how to deal with them when they are going through puberty.

4. Our media product uses, develops and challenges forms and conventions in
numerous different ways. For example through music, costumes, locations
and binary oppositions.
When it comes to teen films the common sub-genres of the movies are:
love/romance/sex, violence, comedy, musical, horror, supernatural/fantasy, thriller,
regional, action and sci-fi.
Secondly the conventional themes and topics are mostly about teenagers rebelling,
love, romance/ sex between them, relationship with boyfriends and girlfriends,
friendships, family problems (teenagers and their parents in conflict always arguing).
To add to this, teen movies portray teens drinking, doing drugs, in gangs and being
violent/ aggressive therefore a common theme is gang deprivation or in other words
crime and fighting.
Conventional themes for teen movies also include sexuality, dramas, race, ethnicity
and American dream( being successful). Happiness, music, dancing,
singing, entertainments, competitions, sports are also involved in the themes for
teen movies.

5. Our film opening “ Cain” conventional theme is love/romance. The main characters were
Leah and Cain. We did not include a lot of conventional characters such as the pretty girl,
the ugly girl, the brain , the jock and other typical conventional characters in the opening
of our film which challenges the normal conventions of teen films. However our main
character Leah is a very interesting character as she is pregnant and I believe that lot of
teenage girls will relate to her character as in the society we live in now there are many
girls that become pregnant at a young age. Due to this our film is only target to teenage
girls in Leah’s situation.
Additionally the binary oppositions in our short film opening are:
• Happy vs sad
•Love vs hate
•Not pregnant vs pregnant
•Fantasy vs reality
•Past vs present
•Male vs Female

6. In terms of costumes , costumes can portray a lot about how characters
feel. For example Leah was feeling happy in the flashback therefore as
the costume designer I thought that it would be good if she wears bright
colours which will show the viewers how that she is happy. On the other
hand in the present she was sad so I thought it was a good idea for her to
wear at least two clothing items that are black which will enable the
audience to see the contrast of mood taking place. The fact that she is
feeling down and sad.

7. Sound/ music is really important because it sets the mood of a film. For
example in our film we used a soundtrack that start off slow with a low
beat and toward the end the beat gets faster and louder building tension
and allowing our film viewers to be interested to watch more of the film.