In your experience, how has your understanding of real conventions developed through creating your productions?
In AS, we created a film opening called Untamed which was in the genre of a teen drama. For this film opening, we put a lot of research into into the conventions of this genre - as we did for A2 for the music video. This music video's song (NAO Nostalgia) was in the genre pop/ R&B. We researched into these genres conventions using Google search, YouTube and other streaming sites.
Our main task in AS was to create a film opening. The genre of our film opening, Untamed, was a teen drama. We researched into our chosen film genre by watching other movies within that genre - such as Mean Girls, Perks Of Being A Wallflower, Juno, and Blue is the Warmest Colour. These films all have one protagonist who has a tragic/ dramatic event or story line which occurs. We took notes on these films of how to make the actor act, the types of music to use, the locations/ props and the narrative. We then made the protagonist act rebelliously, used indie music, a house setting, and made the protagonist dress in ragged indie clothing. To create our promotional website for the film, we researched into other indie/ teen drama film websites, such as Perks of Being a Wallflower one. We used this as a template for our website, ensuring that we included all of the conventions of this teen drama website.
The concept of genre is very important for a film/ film opening. As our Film was a teen drama, we ensured to use all the conventions - such as being set at a high school, a teenage romance, teenage rebellion against the mother/ family. We made the film mainstream by using these conventions.
The importance of using the conventions correctly is to ensure the film will appeal to the target audience of teen dramas.
However, we did challenge the conventions of a teen drama and subvert in a way- by making the love interest another girl - a gay relationship, which usually is not shown or romanticised in teen dramas. Additionally, we only showed one teen in the film opening - usually teen dramas have a focus on teen friendship groups/ cliques, whereas ours did not.
We created our own institution for the film opening, called Night Time Productions. We based this off of other independent film's institutions - such as Warner Independent Pictures which has produced popular independent films, like Slumdog Millionaire in 2008.
For the Music Video in A2, our song was identified by both genres of pop and R&B, as the singer (NAO) creates songs of both genres. We researched into the pop genre, by looking at music videos , photoshoots and websites by artists including Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus and Dua Lipa. We found the typical conventions of a pop music video is the use of bright colours, a performance style video - dancing etc, and one protagonist. We ensured to use all three of these main conventions in our video. Pop photoshoots were very commercial, in comparison to our research into R&B photoshoots, which were more artistic and abstract. Pop websites and R&B websites tended to be the same layout, apart from different colour schemes and fonts.
Whereas when we researched into the R&B genre, using musicians such as SZA and Rihanna, we found the music video conventions were more of a narrative, abstract imagery with use of lighting and props. We used conventions of both pop and R&B in our music video and other ancillary texts that we found in our research.
The websites that influenced us the most were the band Paramore's, and the artist FKA Twigs's. We took inspiration from them by using a similar navigation bar and layout. The digipak inspiration was from the artist SZA, Solange, Rihanna and Dua Lipa. We used Rihannas rose and floral theme from her Loud digipak, and used similar posing and colour schemes from SZA's Ctrl album.
However, we did challenge some conventions of our pop and R&B genres - such as making the video all performance, which is a lot more fitting to the pop genre, but not to R&B which is more abstract and conceptual. Additionally, in the digipak, pop conventions are usually a photoshoot of the actual artist, whereas we went down a more R&B route of more abstract photos rather than just commercial images of the artist.
In conclusion, as a group we learned the majority of what we applied to our own construction from real media conventions. This research was extremely beneficial as we could see actual conventions of of our genres which allowed us to create a more realistic set of constructions/ ancillary tasks.
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