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

My production follows usual codes and conventions when introducing the film; this is because we use a title sequence which is used in most films. We decided to make a title sequence to introduce our film because it went with the style that we wanted to adopt. At the beginning of our film we use a typewriting effect in the title and title sequence, therefore following a conventional opening complimented the suspense we were trying to depict.

I was strongly influenced by stop motion and movement photography. This form of genre was implemented in my work throughout all of the stages of production. We used postmodernism as a platform when constructing the mediated views of youth in our production. The fact that we used postmodernism as a platform depicts the style that we wanted to reflect. We used postmodernism because it was unique and it was a way of making our mark on our work, to show that it was created by youth and not by adults. In particular, movement photography was a style that me and my partner adopted. This unconventional style of production made the construction of my work challenging since it was a style that no one else had done in our class. The process of taking over 6,000 pictures to accommodate our five minute film, depicts how challenging and unconventional our film is. We used this stepping stone as an advantage because we were able to experiment with styles, for example creating a shaky camera effect to add to the postmodernism, this is a style that a normally constructed production could not use.

My product develops these codes and conventions by using other short films that I came across and using intertexuality in my film and I developed on these. The animation style that I wanted to adopt seemed daunting, therefore coming across similar products that have worked in a high standard allowed me to realise that my production could work. Also there was a particular short film, made by a university student, which extremely influenced mine and my partner’s ideas. This is because this film used the Post-Modern genre that I have used in my production, it also used pictures to create movement. But I developed on their ideas, this is because it seemed that the way they constructed and gathered  their photographs up (to create movement) was slow, therefore me and my partner took note of this when creating our film.

On the other hand, my production conflicts with usual codes and conventions as we have limited dialogue in our film. This is unconventional in the film industry because the basis of the story line is depicted through what the characters say, but my production was intentionally trying to depict the story line through facial expressions, the mood of the music, and actions. This was unlike most productions on YouTube and BBC film networks, but the lack of dialogue complimented our abstract effect. Another unconventional attribute of our product was the fact I decided to shoot all of our film with pictures and put them together to create movement in itself is very different to other products that I saw in my research. Although there were a limited amount of short films on YouTube that used the animation style that I had, there were some that followed a conventional story line with a equilibrium and disequilibrium. Whereas with my film purposefully does not follow this conventional manner, this is because there are not many films in the industry that are created by the Youth, and because my film is about the struggle of identity for the collective Youth, we wanted to put our mark on it by making it unconventional and less likely to look as if it was created by a commercial company of adults.

I also believe that my production challenges usual codes and conventions, I came to this conclusion by comparing my production to the narrative theory. For example Todorov's view on there being a conventional structure to a story line. But I believe my production conflicts with this idea because there is a disequilibrium in my film that is not resolved, me and my partner purposely chose not to solve our problem that was featured in our film because we wanted to reflect verisimilitude.