Evaluation 1

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

Through the creation of our production, we managed to develop and challenge the conventions of real media products which I will discuss in this question, demonstrating this with the use of screenshots as a form of comparison to other films.

As a group we looked at the film ‘The 6^th Day’ as we thought that the conventions in this film’s opening sequence were very similar to the ideas that we wished to portray in our own product and so therefore inspired us to create some of the  concepts that we had in our final production. DNA and the biology of the human body was a concept that all of us very much enjoyed as it linked to our film particularly because it is about clones.

From the screenshots you can see that a wave design was used to facilitate the symbolism of DNA which will show our audience that the 4 clones in the story are genetically linked together.

The film we researched ‘The 6^th day’ use a similar idea as they have DNA particles to symbolise the occurrence of cloning taking place. Particles were used in our own production also to further incorporate the idea of the genetics of the human body.

The titles in our final production also showed our development of real media product conventions as we looked at another film called ‘I-Robot’. This opening sequence had similar ideas to what we wanted to convey in terms of the scientific edge to the production as the titles were shown moving under water.

As we very much enjoyed this idea we thought that we should develop it to our own concept and have the titles shown over our film rather that cutting to a black screen.  This was very effective as it didn’t corrupt the flow of our opening sequence and just added another layer in drawing our audience’s attention.

We followed the conventions of sound in our final production although we had some problems finding a track to go alongside our dystopian drama genre as we found from our first class feedback some people didn’t understand the French song used in our film . This was due to having a French speaking member of our team who found a perfect song to fit with the theme, the song was about society and linked with our film as it showed how all four clones had such an impact on the society around them. We ended up using two different audios to counterpart our film which meant we could broaden our market to two different audiences, French and English.  The second song was a non-vocal sound track that was more upbeat and stayed constant throughout the film to help resemble the genetic bondage of our clones. The futuristic twist on the instrumental helps to convey the dystopian drama genre and that the clones are also different mentally and visually as they have been socialised differently.

Researching the film ‘S-Club 7: Seeing Double’, we found that their use of mise-en-scene to help portray the concept of clones was to use the traditional, generic idea of where people would think clones were manufactured. We decided to show this through mise-en-scene with different costumes worn by the same actor and various props to show how each clone has their own identity and distinguishes them from one another.