Evaluation - Part Two, In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms of conventions of real media products?

The ways in which our media product uses, develops or challenges forms of conventions of real media product is mostly with conformity. Our British Social Realism has the traditional genres of violence, teen pregnancy  and alcoholism, like most other British Social Realisms.

My protagonist moves throughout the film in a drunken or disturbed manner throughout the film to clearly display the character's alcoholic lifestyle to the audience. The protagonist also never smiles throughout the entire film opening to let the theme of depression be  a shadow cast across the narrative. I was inspired to include the theme of alcoholism by FishTank which has the main character and her surrounding characters drinking even if they are younger than the legal age limit. We exploited this to bring across the real problems of the main character to the audience using pathos to achieve the audience's sympathy. Our decision to exclude a lot of close up shots of my protagonist portrays the main character's solitude and isolation to further the audience's understanding of our main character.

The areas which we chose are traditional, stereotypical British Social Realism locations in which most working class audiences would be able to personally identify with. Our locations are dirty, gritty and rough to give and urban feeling to the film. Our target audience of working class teenagers and young adults would be able to personally identify with the locations in our film. This was a step up from our previous location in a middle class modern area. We realised the location was too hard for our target audience to personally identify with. We realised we had to film somewhere close to home and would look suiting to a realistic working class, British environment.

My film also excludes many effects because British Social Realisms tend not to use them to keep the film realistic, so we decided to conform. We have used a water pane text on our credits and title to keep them interesting however but not to draw too much away from the film. The water pane connotes the protagonists clouded and blurred emotions so that the audience can grasp how the main character is feeling. Our use of transitions are mainly fade in - fade outs to connote the main characters dazed mentality, random jumps in consciousness to show how deranged and broken the lifestyle of our protagonist is. We used another effect of turning the scene into a more blue hue to make the film seem more cold and distant.

The lighting that we used was natural lighting just as most other British Social Realist films would have and we chose specifically dark spots for out filming. The very first scene is of the protagonist in a dark room sitting alone. We chose not to use a smash mouth opening because we wanted to show that the main character is a normal teenager, living a dull and mundane life up until he receives the devastating news from his girlfriend. We were inspired by The Selfish Giant's dark and mysterious lighting to adopt the same method and exploit it for our own film.

We did not use conventional editing for our film because we believe our 16-24 year old target audience will want more fast paced scenes rather than long and dragged on scenes which are traditional in British Social Realism films. We used parallel editing to help the audience understand the thoughts of our main character and to help the audience dissect the narrative. Our narrative is original because there are not many Asian main characters to British Social Realism that do not conform to the stereotype of smart and sensible Asian characters.