This document discusses how a media product conforms to and challenges conventions of typical teen dramas. It conforms through choices of upbeat pop music in openings to set the tone, and using school corridors and bathrooms as settings. Costumes suggest character stereotypes. However, one character, Tee, challenges conventions by having braces and a masculine haircut despite being a cheerleader, subverting expectations of perfection. The cultural topics focused on include social cliques and implied drug use, conforming to common themes in teen dramas.

1. 1. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms
and conventions of real media products?
One way that we conform to codes and conventions of typical teen dramas is
with our music choice. A lot of teen movies and high school set dramas have
upbeat, pop punk genre songs in their opening sequences. This sets the tone
of the film and lets you know that it is based around young people. This is
exactly what we chose, because this way the audience knows exactly what to
expect from our film and genre, because they have basically seen it before.
Another way we conformed to the codes and conventions was with mise en
scene. One part of mise en scene is the setting. Most of the characters in high
school dramas are teenagers. For this reason they are usually set in schools.
We used corridors to conform to these codes and conventions, so you could
tell what our films narrative is going to be about. Also in teen movies you tend
to get the girls hanging out in the bathroom. We conformed to this and
showed the cheerleader character doing her makeup in a bathroom. Also, we
showed the alternative girl in the bathroom, but we decided to challenge the
codes and conventions by implying that she is an outcast, and to emphasise
this we suggested use of drugs. Costume is also important because it is
typically the same, but varies slightly to suggest different identities of
characters. We used costume to suggest our characters stereotypes.
However, with Tee's character we also challenged the forms and conventions
of real life media products. The cheerleader trope usually is a perfect looking
female, with long blonde hair and a short skirt. In a lot of ways we conformed
to this, but Tee also has braces, showing she isn’t quite what the audience
would perceive as perfect. Also, her hair is blonde but it is a very white
blonde, and she has what you could call a more masculine hair cut, very short
and choppy on one side, and this challenges the forms and conventions of
typical high school movies, where the main characters usually have long
flowing hair (like the majority of characters in mean girls).
Another typical convention of teen dramas are the cultural topics of the film.
These often include proms, parties (with alcohol and drugs) relationships and
social groups and cliques and all the sort of coming of age types of things. We
focused mainly on the different cliques, with the contrasting characters, and
we also touched on drugs, with the implied drug use of jenni’s bathroom
shots.