Q1) What ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our media product was a film called 'Pulled From the Rough'. Our film is a romantic drama that explores features of mourning, recovery and friendship. We used the stereotypical conventions of a film and the romantic drama genre as well as challenging the conventions.

Genre:


Moves away, keeping distance

 Since our film genre is romantic drama, the main conventions  we stuck to included:

 - Conflict between the main protagonist with themselves or  another character.

 In our case, the conflict is what challenges the main, which is  the death of her boyfriend. This controls her feelings, causing  her to feel separate from the world.

Many romantic drama films explore different types of love, including; 'love at first sight', unrequited love and tragic love. In our film we explore the love of past relationship (Jess towards her dead boyfriend) and unrequited love (Alex's love for Jess).

We used Claude Levi-Strauss' binary opposite theory in our film to emphasise the differences between the two characters:

Alex                                                                                                                       Jess

-Optimistic                                                                                                             -Depressed

-Boy                                                                                                                      -Girl

-Energetic                                                                                                              -Apathetic

Narrative Structure

We followed the classic narrative pattern of Todorov's Theory:

Forms and Style

Comparison between Remember Me's film opening(Allen Coulter, 2010) and our, 'Pulled From The Rough'

The music we used as the background score, helped convey the emotions of the sequence.

We used 'Up'(Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, 2009) as a reference. Despite it being a cartoon, it was able to make their audience feel the emotion of the characters without any dialogue, which we wanted to do in our film opening.

(start at 03:21)

In terms of editing;

-For our titles, we used a simple font to make sure the audiences attention was not directed away from the drama going on in the sequence. As well as following the independent film style.

As for the final title of the film, we used a font called 'Noir-Et Blanc'. The way the font extends at the tips connotes a reach for something. In our films case, a reach for help or a reach for love. Just having the outline white, instead of with a white fill still emphasises it as much, it also subtly hints a sense of coverage of emotions.



-For the grading, we use David Mullen's 'The Quiet' as a reference.

Dark grading in our film opening

The Quiet

In the dark night scenes in our film opening, we wanted to indicate a sense of Jess' emotion via the grading. We had to tint it blue to show that it was in the dark but also to connote her depression as well as using the music to back up the feelings.