Question 1- In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our film includes stereotypical conventions that you would expect to see in Crime/Dramas whilst also challenging these generic conventions in other ways.

 Most Crime/Dramas tend to have a good guy and a bad guy. Usually, in the end we see the ending come without a definite conclusion on what's happen. They are often very good at building tension and grabbing at the audience in order to make them want to watch on. Ours, also includes the majority of these things, besides having a bad guy in it. Our piece is aimed at young adults, because of this we have incorporated an expensive well known car, nice house and nice clothing. This enhances our audience because they can relate to this as they are at the point in their life where they are every interested in these things and want these things too. By being able to relate to things, it means the audience engages better with the film. Title sequences in our piece are very standard, meeting the requirements expected.

Another common convention of Crime/Dramas are for them to connect deeply with the audience and catch their feelings and allow them to relate to the text. This goes hand in hand with the uses and gratification theory that I spoke about in a previous post. By using this it means the audience is constantly looking for something from the text that they personally can relate too, meaning they are always active and aware of what's happening. By using this theory, and making our piece very relatable, people are more likely to want to watch it.

Also stereotypically we have a male as the main character. This is very common in Crime/Dramas as they are portrayed stereotypically to be the stronger gender hence playing the lead role, opposed to woman who are often made out to be seen as being venerable.

The camera work and shot types make our piece look verisimilitude. Again, a very stereotypical generic convention of Crime/Dramas is to make the scene very believable and realistic. By using establishing shots, which immediately show the location of the film and set the scene for the audience, it makes the piece seem very lifelike. Set in a large house, it is a stereotypical rich persons house, and the Jaguar car that Xavier the main character then gets into also is very stereotypical and what you would expect from a character like him. Again, enhancing the pieces realism.

A tension building piece of music is also used throughout, the idea is that it builds tension and almost works in harmony with the scenes as you see them. This means the audience will be more engaged as they are using more of their senses. This is a generic convention too.

Overall, our piece uses conventions that you would expect to find in a real life Crime/Drama product. This therefore makes people more interested in watching it as they are fooled to believe it could actually be a true story and could happen, therefore making it more believable and not so unrealistic that they switch off and don't pay attention.