Evaluation Question 1

Evaluation Question 1

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

Challenge:

• Our main character 'Red' is a young girl, in most people's minds a young girl is typically quite innocent and unspoiled, often quite emotional. In someways the character Red challenges this as even though you could argue that she is quite emotional she is not innocent, she is balls crazy as a result of a traumatic past. I myself can only really think of one other young girl that is quite so crazy and that is 14 year old vigilante Hayley Stark(pictured to the right) from the 2005 film 'Hard Candy' who is also balls crazy.
• Another convention or form that our product could be seen to challenge is the obvious difference between antagonists and protagonists, generally these two can be differentiated by several physical appearance based stereotypes such as Flash Gordon(protagonist) having blond hair and a shaven face whilst Ming the Merciless(antagonist) is bald with an oriental beard reminiscent of Fu Manchu. Whereas in our product there's really no way to differentiate between antagonist and protagonist in this way as they are both the same person, physically at least. 

Use:

• Our product uses several of the forms and conventions of other media products. The camerawork follows the rule of thirds as to keep the framing of each shot looking professional and well done.
• Another way that our product follows conventions is by having titles during the opening. Most films ever made have had titles at the start of the film, though there are no doubt some exceptions I cannot name any of them.
• The way that our titles are done also follows conventions, our product starts with the logos of all the companies that were involved in the production, in our case these are the Heritage Lottery Fund, Fox Searchlight and Terrasomnia. These are then followed by the jobs and people who carried them out during production, such as Dan being credited as editor, over shots in the opening with the director being the last name credited.
• The font of the titles is also an example of us using the conventions and forms, the font(pictured above) is the same as that of Danny Boyle's '28 Days Later' which is a San-serif typeface which is easy to read, as most titles are done, but with some decorative fading and in our product is coloured a deep red to match the title.
• Our product uses the traditional use of flashbacks, to provide back story and context to events. Our flashbacks show Red's past and establish the back story to her unstable state of mind.

Develops:

• At an earlier stage when we had music the music used was a development on the forms and conventions. The first song used was 'Little Red Riding Hood' by Sam the Sham, which is quite a corny sounding country song about Little Red Riding Hood, this was used to create an eerie feel to things. When it was decided that Sam the Sham's version was too corny we changed to Amanda Seyfried's version, which still created the eerie atmosphere but in a different way. I put this under develops as it still achieves the eerie thriller/horror vibe however it does not do it in the traditional way of having slow deep music which suddenly becomes high pitched staccato as is the standard in this genre.