Q1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Ident

The image to the left is our ident for our trailer, the one on the right is the ident for ‘Revolver Entertainment’, and I got this from the Kidulthood trailer. We used this as inspiration as a revolver is a type of gun, and because guns are generally linked with violence and death, using the word revolver in the ident suggests that the films will be quite violent and may involve death. ‘Rock Island’ is also a brand of guns, so we decided to use this as it is similar to revolver, however we developed our style of the ident, as revolver is more sleek and not very bold. We made our ident more bold and gritty compared to the revolver one to show further the type of films related to this company.

The scene to the right is from the film ‘Love, Honor & Obey’, as you can see our film develops the way they use the black and white effect on their shot. They made the whole shot black and white whereas we made some colours stand out. We did this as we wanted to make the trainer stand out from the rest of the shot as a trainer is an important item relating to our film, as the image of a trainer represents the main character trying to become an athlete, while it also represents the gang life, as they care about their appearance and having nice trainers is an important thing to them. The narrative of our film challenges conventional hood films such as Kidulthood, 4.3.2.1 and Love, Honor & Obey. This is because most of these films are revolving around characters in a gang and their lives being a part of a gang. Ours is about someone deciding whether to leave the ganga and become an athlete, which is not very common in British hood films.

The titles to the right are from Kidulthood, as you can see they are slightly similar to our as they are white with a black background, they are all capital and are both bold. However we as a group felt that the titles in Kidulthood were quite plain, so we decided to develop them and make ours a more unique font which is more faded and resembles graffiti in a way, which fits in well with the setting of our film, which is an urban city.

This is a screenshot from the trailer to Kidulthood, as you can see both shots are very similar as they both involve 2 friends looking at something on a mobile phone and laughing. This is used to show the unity and the bond that people have with each other in the film.

In Todorov’s narrative this could be seen as the state of ‘equilibrium’ before anything happens as the people seem to be enjoying themselves and having a good time, suggesting that nothing is wrong at the moment, however in our scene you can see that the shot is a lot brighter than the rest and is blurred around the edges, we did this to suggest a flashback/dream type scene. This shows that the event being shown was in the past, and that something happened to the two characters which results in them being different from what’s shown in the shot.

The two shots show characters running away from something, the scene on the right is from Kidulthood and in the previous shot you could see the characters attacking someone and they are running from his house, so the audience knows what they are running from. However in our trailer, the event that is making them run is left out, making it more mysterious and tempting the audience to watch the film to see what happened.

This shot shows the disturbance in the equilibrium in terms of Todorov’s narrative, as the characters are running from something, suggesting that an event has happened that has made them run from someone or something.

Both of these shots show conflict between people in different ways. The shot from our film shows the main character pushing away the other character, who was his friend in one of the previous shots where they were looking at the phone showing that something happened between then and now. The shot on the right is from Adulthood and shows a more direct form of confrontation, as this is a sequel to Kidulthood, anyone who is a fan of that film will realise that these two used to be friends in the first film, and will want to watch what happened to them to become like this towards each other.Our shot has developed upon this one as ours has a darker feel to it, the Adulthood shot is in daylight in front of a station, ours is set in a darker tunnel instead, suggesting that the overall feel of our film will be quite dark.

The shot from our film shows the main character being thrown his running shoes by his sister to remind him about being an athlete and not being part of a gang, you can see by the characters faces that they are upset and the main character has his hand in his face which suggests regret at his decisions and that he is sad about how he is making his family feel. This would be an effort to fix the disturbance in the equilibrium by the sister.The shot to the right is from adulthood and shows the main character crying with the caption ‘nowhere to run’ showing that he is alone and upset, which is similar to our however, instead of making our character feel alone we decided to change this and give him another character that would try to help him, unlike in Adulthood.

At the top is our title and 3 other titles from similar films. As you can see our title challenges the regular conventions of hood films, as all of the other title have a dark background with bold white writing which is pretty plain. Ours is different as we have a white outline on black writing. This blends in with the darkness of the background while still making it visible, our font is also different from the others as it is more graffiti-like and it is not big block writing like the others.

These two shots are similar in the way that they both represent TV’s. The shot to the left is from our trailer and shows two characters in a fight on CCTV, this is shown by the way it is more black and white with a hint of green, similar to how a real CCTV camera would be. It also has a static effect on it while playing, which is similar to the shot to the left, which is from the trailer of 4.3.2.1. In this shot it is showing a new report about stolen diamonds, the screen is quite static and lines are visibly seen going across the screen, and our shot has the same effect so I feel that we developed this type of shot to suit our need in the trailer.