Question 1

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

For our film to be a success we followed some codes and conventions of the genre, however we also wanted to challenge the conventions of the comedy genre because we wanted our film to be unique in a way which I think we done that in our ending with character development. The research and planning I did similar to my film was watching ‘’Home Alone’’ films and that’s when I got an idea I want to produce something similar to it. I really liked the prank element it had. Our film has a really simple narrative that is the reasoning why we have such a wide target audience as children can also understand what’s going on. Our story is basically about our main character protagonist Harry going to school one day and he gets bullied by our protagonist Jack and Harry has enough and he gets back at the bully by setting up pranks in school. Our film follows codes and conventions of a comedy because of the pranks as we go feedback by the audience they were laughing at times, therefore we know we have comedy elements also our sound as well as we have slip sound which is funny and to be unique we had animated credits at the end as we really wanted to create something new which audiences haven’t seen in other comedy films. Are main character is similar to the main character Kevin in ‘’Home Alone’’ as they both set up pranks. The other film that relates to are film which I watched in order to get some ideas was ‘’Dennis the Menace’’ the movie which has the prankish element throughout the film which are made by the main character Dennis which helped to develop our character Harry. We also watched ‘’Dennis&Gnasher’’ which has pranks in the cartoon. By watching them media products we seen different pranks, however we couldn’t do something similar to ‘’Home Alone’’ as we don’t have the budget to create them therefore as a team we had to research different pranks we could do and it wouldn’t be expensive. It was difficult to find the right pranks as there are so many and we also needed to think about our target audience because there are some pranks that are more childish and would relate to the younger generation and the adults would find it not funny at all. When we were clear about our pranks we then started thinking what story we going to tell we didn’t want to have something similar to ‘’Home Alone’’ people trying to break into the house. We started of thinking what we could do in school because it was the only location we could use then as a group we came up with an idea to do with bullying as it is a big issue in schools.

The other film I looked at was ‘’Superbad’’ the film helped as it had one of the characters was a nerd so it really helped us with the costume of our character. I also watched short films to get ideas and what I learnt was that idea could be simple but it needs to be shown brilliantly that’s why he chose to do a simple idea but shoot it in a way to make interesting to the audience. The other film I watched specifically to my genre was ‘’Kick-ass’’ however it don’t relate to our film, however I analysed the characters as they relate to Harry and Jack as in the film they had clear protagonist and antagonist and they were from high school which really helped me with our character profiles as we seen the representation of characters in the comedy film stereotypically they have nerd friends, bad dress code and like a girl from the school these are the typical codes and conventions of a comedy film character. The way our film challenges the codes and conventions I think is through the character development in comparison to the other comedies we expect to see a character going from a looser to a popular guy in school, however as our film was about bullying we showed are main character Harry from being bullied to becoming a bully and being able to stand up to a bully where as Jack was going through the pranks that Harry set up hoping he will learn a lesson, but at the end we see Jack is still the same character which we showed by Jack hitting Harry around the head and at the same time we show Harry standing up and squirting water on Jack which shows they have developed through the film, but they still have the similarity as in the beginning of the film. We follow the codes and conventions which is clear to see by the use of props the water gun.

The film I watched to help me with our film was ‘’Jackass’’, however the pranks they have in their film is really high budget and if we were to do something similar we would have health and safety issues of carrying them out. As we used animated credits we had to carry out research, however we knew what we wanted are credits to be and what element to follow we wanted them to be funny and prankish something that relates to our credits. Therefore we watched clips of credits in the cartoon such as ‘’Pink Panther’’ and the latest release computer-animated adventure film ‘’UP’’ which had their credits introduced in a interesting way.