Media Evaluation Question 1

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

At the start of the project we did a lot of research into the different qualities of romantic comedies, which included films like 27 dresses, 500 days of summer and Wild Child. The biggest plot points are male and female couple, they’ll generally meet and fall in love but something gets in the way which quite stereotypically is normally the male that has to try and get back the women by making her want to get back together and prove his love. As well as this there are sometimes secondary characters that play a large part in getting the couple back together or maybe even creating a sub-plot of their own. By looking at these types of plots we then decided to base ours around a straight couple who have enjoyed the start of their lives together but after getting married the women becomes pregnant, the rest of the story then being about the pregnancy and having the baby, all the things that go wrong and the arguments between the couple that eventually sort themselves out just in time for the baby arriving, creating a predictable “happy ever after” ending.

With romantic comedies the audience has a certain expectation of what they’ll see, which is why we decided to stick to what they’re used to seeing and following a certain plan that to help us do that. By following this plan it meant showing certain things at certain times, but because we only made the opening for a film we decided to make the plot work around the short time limit we had, fitting in as much as the audience would expect as possible.

At the beginning we show a couple falling in love one of the key factors of a romantic comedy, we then developed the opening by speeding up their lives together we show them, go on a date, move in together, get engaged, get married and then finally get pregnant which is where the main film would start and the problems begin. This might be considered as straying away from what a romcom would normally show but by challenging this and showing more to the audience before the film starts I think it gives them a back story to help them further relate to the film.

The credits were also a part of our research, we looked into which order most credits/titles appeared in popular romantic comedy and took note of the most common patterns which we then used as our basic plan of order of credits. The order of credits  made a lot of sense, firstly giving the audience the names of the less known employees working for the film such as the makeup artist and costume design, then working its way up through producer, director and then finally giving you the names of the main stars before taking you straight into the main action.

As far as the music goes we listened to a few samples of music from well know romcoms and decided that we would try to find a copyright free piece of music that would help us link to the way the famous films capture the audience.  I feel that the piece of music we chose fits well to the plan of romantic comedies as it helps the audience to feel the high and low points of what they see the actors doing on screen.

I think that films have structures for a reason, that being to make your feel as popular and relatable to the audience as possible, however I do believe that by breaking this structure and challenging what is the “norm” works very well for certain types of films and target audiences because by breaking the plan it makes it more specific and targeted to a certain group. I feel that our opening does link to a real media product in many ways because we followed a structure but if we were to have challenged it in more ways than one I think we would have had to have targeted a specific audience within the social group we had already chosen.