Evaluation question 1

Question 1)In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

I think you can recognise that our video is an opening title sequence firstly because of the titles. Our titles are shown in a more artistic way than mainstream chick flick title sequences, we used things around us to create them. This is similar to the titles in Napoleon Dynamite.

Also i would recognise our video as a title sequence because we are introduced to each character and we find out a little bit about them and about what kind of person they are. Similar to the opening title sequence of Raising Helen when we are introduced to the main character and we are shown what her life is like.

Our film genre was chick flick, we looked at other chick flick title sequences to find out how the genre was established. We showed our genre by revealing the main characters to the audience,as they were all girls it was very obvious that this film was centred around females and this would show that the film was a chick flick. In the title sequence we showed all the four friends getting ready to go out, slightly showing their life. This is regularly done in chick flick title sequences.

We challenged the conventions by the way we displayed the titles, most chick flicks have simple, formal, 'girly' text but we made our titles from things around us. We did things such as writing on mirrors with lipstick and putting labels on clothes. We thought this would make our title sequence more interesting. So the mise-en-scene in the title sequence was very important. Also we showed all 4 main characters usually you would just see one main character but we wanted to show the contrast in character we felt this made the title sequence more engaging.

Our title sequence does support Levi Straus' theory of binary oppositions. In our titles it is the girls who are popular and pretty vs the girl who doesn't really care and is the outcast of the group and we tried to show this through attitude and mise-en-scene.  We felt it was important that the audience understood the binary opposition in the first scene as this was the main synopsis of the film. We felt this was also what made people want to watch the movie, so if we could establish the difference people would continue to watch to see how it would progress and what would be the outcome.