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

2. The genre of our piece, ‘39 Weeks’ is drama. The genre of drama is described as the development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes, including; drug addiction, racial prejudice, alcoholism, poverty, crime and characters in conflict with themselves, and others. I feel that 39 Weeks successfully uses the emotional themes used in the genre drama, we have done this by including drugs, strong language to represent social background and the characters mannerisms, and pregnancy. We have shown an extreme side to teenage pregnancy by making our protagonist smoke, which is not only highly dangerous but illegal too as she is underage. We have developed the genre further, as realisation towards a situation, in a typical drama film, usually occurs towards the end of the film, but in our piece we wanted the film more to be about the journey of ‘Jade’ sorting her life out after realising she has a responsibility now.

3. Similar to the film KiDULTHOOD (directed by Menhaj Huda) although we use a female protagonist so we could use the theme of pregnancy. During 39 Weeks when Jade is walking down an alley with low non – diegetic music and her monologue playing this emphasises the genre of drama as we are focused on Jade and she is telling the audience of her emotional and physical journey. This scene is similar to one used in KiDULTHOOD where the audience can see the protagonist walking down a road with up beat music similar to the music we used. We tried to challenge the typical role of a teenager in a drama film by making her personality and appearance contrast from her surroundings and house. We have used a middle class house, with a ‘girly’ floral bedroom, but a lower class costume and attitude.

4. Personally I think that as a group we challenged the typical type of protagonist used in a drama genre, although we included some aspects we felt vital to emphasise how teenagers are represented now days. For example in the film, Thirteen (directed by Catherine Hardwicke in 2003) the protagonist is a thieving, smoking, drug using thirteen year old girl. Again representing teenagers in a very negative way, giving many people false impressions of young adults today. As a group we wanted to show some of these aspects because we then wanted ‘Jade’ to go through a realisation process and change her ways. In the examples I have given the protagonists come from lower class backgrounds, living in council estates or houses. In our piece we wanted to challenge that ideology by making Jade come from a middle class family living in a well decorated, modern house. Her house and background contradict her attitudes towards life and her current situation. We felt that this would also be a successful way of attracting a variety of audiences as we have mixed a middleclass background with a character that has the stereotype features of a lower class teenager.