Evaluation Question 1

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

Continuity is essential when making a film as it could have a negative impact on the film if there are lapses in continuity such as making the story not make sense. To make sure that we did not break continuity in our film we tried our best to stick to the 180° rule, where the camera is always at the same side so that it does not confuse the audience into thinking that the characters have switch positions. Also, we used shot-reverse-shot whilst filming conversations so that the audience could see who the characters where talking to.  With our film being set in multiple locations, such as an office, house, train and car park, we had often broke the continuity to show a passage in time. To do this we put an effect such as a fade, or dissolve, onto the end of a shot to show the audience that time had passed in between the last scene and the new one.  During editing we often discovered errors in the continuity of our film such as the time being wrong on the mobile phone as to what time the scene was supposed to be set in, or when we were outside some scenes were shot at different times of the day so the sky was darker, causing us to have to re-shoot some scenes or make colour corrections on the shots on premier pro. We also encountered the problem of the main character shaving his facial hair which meant that we would have to delay filming so that we could avoid making continuity errors.

 

 The genre of film that we originally chose to make was comedy as it was the complete opposite of the serious drama that we did last year. Whilst we were coming up with ideas for the story line of our film we decided that we would be focusing on the sub-genre of Black Comedy as we felt that as we were focusing on a white collar working man's life it would be easier to fit the codes and conventions of a black comedy. We decided that we would set our film in a office environment as most black comedies are set in places where people work (for example Hot Fuzz) and we felt that an office was the best way to denote a work environment to our audience.The music we chose for our film was based on the fact that we wanted to turn the serious matter of attempted suicide into something that the audience could find amusing and we decided that the best way for us to do this was by including an upbeat song in which the lyrics are "It ain't right" as we want the audience to emotionally connect with the protagonist. We decided to use music which juxtaposed the events taking place as this is often found in black comedies for example in Train Spotting. The protagonist, Ross, sticks to the main conventions that we found in black comedies as he is depicted as being miserable at work. The story line mostly sticks to the conventions of a black comedy as it starts with Ross being bossed about at work and then finding out that his girlfriend has been cheating on him with his boss which make him want to commit suicide but is then helped by another character to overthrow his boss. However, after the credits end the story then takes a twist as we see Ross dressed in the same clothes as Hooper (his boss) standing over an employee he doesn't like. 

Throughout our film we actively acknowledge our films influences from other black comedy productions, the main one being the phrase "you betcha" which is taken from Fargo a very popular black comedy film. We also took influence form Edgar Wrights use of props especially from his film Hot Fuzz (2007) in which a cake is pushed in front of the protagonists face in a scene where he is not happy. We decided that we would take this scene and reinterpret it so that we could make it fit in with our story, to do this we had Ross sat on a train in a foul mood, as he had to go to work early, when a stranger pushes his hand through the gap in the seats and offers him some sweets much to the annoyance of Ross.

Overall I believe that our film stuck to the main codes and conventions of a black comedy.