The document discusses how the opening title sequence for a romantic comedy film challenges some conventions of the genre while still following others: - It introduces two female main characters rather than a male and female, challenging expectations. However, the sequence still establishes the film as a romantic comedy through other cues. - Elements like the pinboards showing details about each character's life were inspired by Stepbrothers and help audiences learn about the characters without dialogue. - The sequence could be initially interpreted as depicting a lesbian relationship rather than a traditional romantic comedy pairing, further challenging expectations. - Overall it balances challenging conventions with still clearly identifying the film as a romantic comedy through cues like the music and bringing the two main characters

1. In what ways does your media product develop or challenge forms and
conventions of real media products?
Conventions of an Opening title sequence
We have followed the conventions used in an opening title sequence, such as the
length of the whole sequence, which should be between 2-3 minutes. We also
thought about the order of the titles, even though we added the main title of the
film in the middle of the sequence as we feel it fitted best here.
Ideas for opening sequence
We have developed ideas from Catch Me If You Can title sequence (even though
this is not a romantic comedy). This is because they have used after effects and
created a sequence, which is all animated. Although ours is not animated either,
we have still used special effects in the same way they have by using different
camera movements and green screen.
Genre conventions used
We have created the opening title sequence to a new Romantic comedy. A lot of
rom-coms are distributed by big companies such as Universal, Sony, and Warner
etc and so are high budgeted and use famous actors. They can be set in the city,
which is the case most of the time, but can also be in the countryside such as The
Holiday.
We got quite a lot of ideas from Stepbrothers. They
introduce the 2 main characters at the beginning who are
both male. We found this interesting as this in a way
challenges the convention of a
rom-com already. This is why we
decided to also introduce 2 girls,
however it did not seem to have
the same effect as Stepbrothers
did. You learn a lot about the 2
males at the beginning such as
what they like to do and you

2. immediately know that they are not the typical 40-year-old men. We liked how
much you got to know the 2 characters, involving very little speaking so we took
most of our ideas from this. We wanted to tell the audience as much about our
two characters, Tia and Maya, as much as possible so this is why we created the
pin boards for each of them.
Challenging the Convention
We have used an all female cast in our opening title sequence. Usually in an
opening title sequence for a romantic comedy you get introduced to both the
male and female character and in fact sometimes just one character with a voice
over of the other sex.
For example, in Definitely, Maybe you get introduced to the main male character
and get a brief introduction about who he is and you get a slight idea of what his
life is about and what he is going through. You can also tell a lot about this
sequence from the music and the mise-en-scene (the area he is in- NY). Although
this seems similar to our opening in some ways, we have challenged it a bit
because you do not hear any of our characters thoughts and you get introduced
to two characters and learn a lot about them in different ways.
Our opening title sequence also could be viewed as being a lesbian film, which
challenges the convention of a romantic comedy massively. Although it is not a
lesbian film and you would see that if you carried on watching the rest of the

3. film, the music and the way you see two completely different girls come together
may give the audience a thought that it is.
For example, in The Holiday the first clip you see is a man and woman kissing.
This is what people expect when watching a romantic comedy. You always know
that there is going to be a man and woman who fall in love and then have some
kind of argument and end up getting back at the end of the film. Whereas you
cannot guess that from our film at all as it gives mixed messages about the
sexuality of the entire film at the beginning.
In my film you see the 2
girls appear separately
doing complete opposite
things, hence the name of
the film, and you do not
get any idea as to what is
going to happen next. The
music also makes it seem
like these two girls have
some kind of relationship.
Conclusion
We have challenged quite a lot of the conventions of a typical romantic comedy
during the process of making our opening title sequence, but we still stuck with
the main conventions in order to make sure that the viewers immediately know
what type of genre the film is and I believe we achieved this.