In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge

forms and conventions of real media products?

Our media product conveys the main conventions of real media products of the same genre. We researched into title sequences’, magazine covers and DVD covers of the same genre using the internet and‘YouTube’ in particular to form an understanding of our genre, which was ‘children's TV dramas’, and to discover the main conventions that they portrayed.

We particularly focused on and looked at the popular children's TV drama programmes ‘Tracy Beaker’ and ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ because they both engaged us and had a good vibe and atmosphere about them. Also they were very well known and are popular with our demographic.

We all also liked the style of Tracy Beaker so we wanted to see what they used effectively to see if we could try and incorporate it into our title sequence.

The Tracy Beaker title sequence used the layered effect of cartoons and the real footage. This style is what we liked and thought that we could do something similar for our product.

These are screen grabs from our product – they how we have used cartoon backdrops similar to the Tracy Beaker title sequence.

I noticed that the main convention of these videos was that they both connected with the audience to make it easy to relate to and they incorporated evidence that it was a children's programme in the effects they used.

Tracy Beaker did this more successfully as the storyline was dealing with an experience that could be a real life situation. Whereas, Sarah Jane adventures is obviously science fiction, therefore making it harder for the audience to relate to from a real life situation. However from an educational angle you can see that it builds on children's imaginations. Which is supported in its title sequence and the mysterious letters and movement.

This is a screen shot of part of the title sequence of Sarah Jane Adventures – you can see the mysterious colour and letters supporting the sci –fistoryline.

We planned to do something in a similar style to Tracy Beaker, have the environment familiar and we chose a topic that had some excitement as well as dramatising breaking school rules. We wanted to use cartoons that showed familiar settings in a school also using cartoons it incorporates an idea of who our audience is.