1. Question 1<br />In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?<br />34239206223000Our film is based around the urban youth drama genre. An urban youth genre usually covers the topics of crime (knife, gun and gang related crime in particular). It generally covers recent news in the other forms of the media that are related to youths of today. In our film the major themes are crime, bullying and loneliness. The crime theme is shown very clearly in our opening sequence because she pulls out a knife while crying. The loneliness theme is only suggested in the opening sequence because we see a picture of her and one friend, but there are no pictures of members of her family, so the target audience would remember the picture as the narrative moves along. The theme of bullying isn’t shown in the opening sequence. <br />Our character follows the conventions of an urban youth genre because the character is realistic in the sense that she would be like any other teenager if she wasn’t being bullied. She gets up every morning and gets ready for school and leaves, but then she gets a knife out and starts crying. This is similar to the film Kidult hood because he starts off doing work in a technology classroom then positions the object he made strangely in the bin as if someone was going to pick it up. These genres start off with the ordinary routine for a teenager and then start to look at the issue in society they want to cover e.g. knife/gun crime, which is the path that many of the yobs in the film Outlaw took. Our opening sequence challenges the conventions of an urban youth culture genre, because the main character that was committing the crime/s was a female. In kidult hood the person/ people committing the crimes were male. Usually the protagonist is in a gang or associated with the ‘ghetto culture’, she is a geek who is being bullied, which challenges the normal conventions.<br />-1733556350000The narrative of our opening sequence follows the conventions of an urban youth genre. This is because it’s about someone getting bullied who ends up killing others. Our storyline is similar to the film Outlaw because they are killing the local gang that is bullying/terrorising local citizens. It is also similar because our narrative is centred around school, home and social issues in school like kidulthood because a girl gets bullied, Stop the yard because a teenage boy is trying to cope at his new school and Outlaw because the teens are terrorizing members of their society. It challenges the conventions of an urban youth genre because the main character committing the crime kills herself instead of being arrested or someone else from a rival gang killing them e.g. In most cases genres like this they use guns, while we used a knife.<br />43821356858000The hair and make-up we used in our opening sequence is the same type of make-up that other films related to our genre use, which is simple everyday make-up to maintain realism e.g. characters in the film 4321 have everyday make-up on and so does the main character from the film Harry Brown. The props were realistic everyday props as well e.g. milk. The costume was also the same because the character was wearing a hoodie, which is what most of the characters wore in Kidulthood because a hoodie is strongly associated with this genre. We challenged the codes and conventions of the genre because the house setting that the main character was living in wasn’t a run-down estate building, which it’s stereotypically meant to be. All the props and make-up was also changed to suit a girl e.g. we put bracelets in the room instead of a football.<br />The sound was very similar to the urban youth genre because it could be categorised in the hip-hop/rnb genre which is the same type of music in adulthood and stomp the yard. I would say the only way we would be challenging the conventions through sound would be the fact that we used violins, which is associated with classical music, which is opposite to our genre.<br /> <br />