Forms and conventions essay - practice

Explain the most significant ways in which your media productions were informed by your understanding of the conventions of real media texts. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to demonstrate how this understanding developed over time (25 marks)

In year one of my media A-level i created a film opening which followed the teen drama genre. My film opening focuses on a mentally ill teenager struggling to cope with her every day life. There is conflict shown with her peers and teachers whilst at school. In year two of my A-level, i created a cross-media promotional package which included making a music video for the club song 'Hypnotic'. The artist for the video portrayed a psychotic nature therefore we made our camera work and editing highlight this.
For my first year it was very important for me to understand the forms and conventions of my genre drama, when creating a teen drama film opening. The genre needed to be easily recognised, my production group used many real life media texts as inspiration when making our film opening. Typical conventions of a drama film are that they exhibit real-life situations, filled with climaxes to engage the audience. We took inspiration from the film 'The notebook' which has an emotional voice over. We incorporated a voice over into our film opening to portray the emotion of mental illness. In this first year we stuck to all the conventions where as in the second year my group challenged some conventions to make our productions more interesting, but ensured that some were included so the genre was easily recognised.
Whereas in my second year my production group researched further into the conventions of music videos, websites and digi-paks. We looked at real life examples of websites, for example Ariana Grande's website - from this we found that websites tend to have various different pages. These pages were a home page, a gallery, a tour dates page, a news page and a page were customers can buy products from the website. When designing our website for our artist 'Stellato' we incorporated these conventions by using the same page titles. My production group also researched into music videos, we found that there are three different types of music videos. One being narrative - for example 'Shake it off' by Taylor Swift, another being performance based - for example 'Beautiful now' by Zedd. We took alot of inspiration from the music video 'Beautiful now' as it followed face pace editing which is what we wanted to happen in our video. In our video we had around 100 shots which were heavily edited - this was typical of club music videos.
My understanding of conventions developed over the two years due to the amount of more research i did in my second year. This meant that i understood more about conventions and what was needed of my production group for the conventions to make the genre clear. So i could then subvert some of the stereotypes of a typical dance/club music video, to make it more interesting. For example my production group used a location of a mirror maze, at Ripley's 'Believe it or not' museum, but typically these kind of videos are set in a club environment. In year one my production group only used two locations such as a bedroom and a school. The location of a school is classic for a teen drama, as we found from researching locations and watching 'Kidulthood'. Where as in year two we researched into quirky, unique locations and ended up filming in 8 locations. We derived footage from these locations and created a unique dance/club music video, very different from many other real media texts.
My research skills developed as i put more time and effort into researching what needed to be incorporated into the music video, but in year one i just copied the typical conventions with a different story line. This shows that i have become independent and creative in my media productions over the two years.
My media productions were informed by my production groups understanding of the conventions of real media texts due to research into real-life texts and research into conventions. One significant way in which they were informed was when my production group took inspiration from 'It's kind of a funny story' in year one. My production group used simple costumes and natural make up just like the actors did in 'It's kind of a funny story', this helped to portray the idea that mental illness is normal. Drama films aim to enable the audience to relate with the characters and be able to identify with their struggles. So using normal clothing and make-up creates a sense of normality within what is happening in the characters life.
In comparison, for my music video my production group subverted many stereotypes, for example in terms of costumes. In dance/club music videos the typical outfit of a performer would be bright costumes, where as the artist 'Stellato' who performed in my music video wore dark clothing - a black dress. My production group did this to make our music video original and challenge the stereotypes.
In conclusion it is clear that real media texts and conventions were a huge part of my understanding over the two years. Also its clear that in year one i conformed to the stereotypes of conventions and took a lot of inspiration from real media texts. But in year two i subverted many stereotypes of conventions this shows i have developed in my understanding of conventions and am creative enough to create media texts that are original and not conforming.