Question 1

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

The Manhood / Rivalry and Relationship genre is what we used for our short film. While watching short films that there is mainly just one or two characters in the film, and there will most likely be a central protagonist who will remain centre frame throughout the film. Looking at the themes short films we created I had a few films that I looked at for example Mother, 7 Pounds and many more. These films inspired us as a production group to create “Take the next step”

To gather the codes and conventions of short-films, I used YouTube as my main source, where I was able to find a very useful channel 'Future Shorts' which contains several short films from all genres. The company Future Shorts is a well-known distributor of short films, they are not in the production industry bust instead see their main aim to advance the short-film industry, more information on Future Shorts can be found on my earlier post and companies like this can get our short films out to the world.  Most of the short films I watched only had the one character focused on, for example This Is Me, where the central protagonist was the male in a hospital bed. He always remained centre frame, and there were only two other characters in the film, his wife and the boy with the plane.  Another code and convention I noticed whiles watching short films is that quite a lot use the steady-cam technology to create a point of view shot, this is because short films are mainly a story in a particular characters life, and the best way to portray this story is to see it how the character would see it. A good way of producing a story for a short film is to simply take a normal life situation and simply tweak around with it, for example you could have everyone walking around in underwear’s and socks and acting as though it was normal.

In the same way our main focus in the film is John because he is the one going through the rite of passage and everything revolves around him. What our short film has is a twist to it because after doing research I discovered that all short films have a twist to the storyline like a short film I watched called STALKER is about a young man who is in a deserted industrial area but then some stranger run up on the place and kill him, this is most likely because the films are so short, that without a twist in the story, it would simply not be interesting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmp2gchZEao

Knowing how our genre follows its elements we picked these out and used it in our film but we also challenged it by going to extra mile on adding that twist on how big the dilemma was. In my short film, I only had 3 main characters in the film and the rest of the 5 were only extras in the film. By using to this convention of a short film, I enabled my short film to be much more understandable as there were only 3 characters that the audience needed to follow. Our central protagonist remains centre screen when possible at all times. This helps signify the importance of John.

I used the point of view angle in some shots, but it was mainly show the movement of the central protagonist by showing what he is seeing. I did not use it to the extent that I had seen it used in some short films.  Short Films usually last bout 1-5 minutes- however my short film lasts just a bit over this, this is not me trying to challenge the codes and conventions, it just simply worked out that my short film needed a bit more timing to build up to the twist.

In most short films there aren’t much dialogue in short films- In my film there is only one line of dialogue, I decided to follow this code and convention because any dialogue may have given away too much about the central protagonist and ruined the twist, and created an oppositional reading.

For my locations I chose my house. I chose my house simply because it was easy to access and also I wanted to display a home environment. I chose my living room because it was a large, indoor space which I could also get access to and also had good positions to take shots from when filming. The living room, when filled with people, also gave a good atmosphere which created the image I was looking for and most families’ dramas are based at home.

Looking at films relating to Family- Drama there is a lot of adult features involved however we decided to develop this by just having one adult in the short film and have the brothers as the main focus.  Watching a film called Beethoven it’s all family related and everyone had their role as a whole family but what I wanted to develop is how things run with in the film so I had Colin in the shoes of a father and this would then make John look smaller than he is mentally. During the process of choosing these characters we wanted it to be a White based family because we knew that things like that happened within that ethnicity however after long thoughts we knew that we wanted to challenge our genre so we got a black family without a father in the family. Films that really inspired me to really continue making this film is the Korean film called “Mother” it has a lot of the themes that we have in our film like mother to son relationship, tragedy, action, amusement and love however we use these themes but turn around the way they are portrayed at that’s what makes it a successful short film.  The pursuit of Happyness is another family drama which has a twist to family drama codes & conventions which is that there is only Father and Son throughout the film. We do hear about the mother but never see her so she doesnt play a big role but from this film I learnt that you can create a family drama without the complete mother , father & kids concept.

After doing research on our genre I needed a few ways to challenge our genre and I found out usually in family drama’s there is a father or father figure but we challenged this but taking out that whole concept and just have the mother and 2 brothers this gives it a twist because the stereotypical thoughts is that the mother won’t have control over the boy. Usually in a family drama there is this constant use of love or hate but we did a bit of both and mixed it up by having a favourite in the family which is Colin. We don’t focus on the mother character too much because she is just one of the reasons why John takes the step into manhood. The reason why we decided to use the organ donation as the twist in the film is because we wanted to great a different way to step into manhood. After research on typical ways of proving manhood I discovered that most likely ones were fights, competitions, war, get a female or betting. These different ways were so typical and that wasn’t what we wanted to portray to our target audience so we all thought of an unusual way of stepping into manhood and we came up with kidney transplant and it worked out to be successful because we had a local hospital so we could go and find out information about how these transplants occur and how patients feel about them.