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

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

I have chosen a selection of screenshots from our film 'Parallel' that demonstrate many forms and conventions. 

1.

The first screenshot I have chosen clearly shows the distinction between the two characters, this is what we aimed for throughout.

The two shots show distinction by the stereotypical 'delicate' look of a female where as on the right we see a more gender-role challenging woman.

The right frame shows a more 'free spirit' as such, she does not conform to the typical gender role of women, she does not come off as a submissive, nurturing character. 

Where as the character in the left frame seems to radiate a more loving, compassionate temperament. By doing this, she does in fact conform to the stereotypical role of women in the media. However - as well as conforming to the typical role of women, she does in fact still challenge it in a way. The fact that we see a young woman attempting to pursue her possible dream causes her to inherit a stereotype from a man, she is independent.

2.  Sound

The sound for our film begins just after the paramount logo, we chose to do this as we believed that fluency throughout was vital for our film. Continuity needed to be on point and as well as this, we wanted the music to help drive the narrative forward. This, I believe we accomplished.

As well as our main score, we chose to use children's laughter to introduce the first two frames. By doing this, I believe we created a slight eeriness and a sense of the unknown as well as a sense of happiness.

We thought that the children's laughter would also cause the audiences attention to snap onto this and question what may happen in the upcoming shots.

3. Titles

Our titles do not in fact include many elements, we wanted to keep them simple. 

We kept to the white writing on the black background to enhance the titles, however - this does not enhance them so much that the audience forget about the actual film itself. To create our titles we simply used the 'titles' tool on Adobe Premiere. 

4. Props

In this shot we decided to use two different types of trophies, on the left; carnival/beauty queen and dance trophies (the more stereotypical female items) and then to challenge the stereotype, on the right we have football trophies. This was done in attempt to pose a question in the audiences mind and to try and make the audience take notice of the different items in each frame as well as what this could mean.

In this shot we chose to use the obvious binary opposites of water and alcohol. The frame on the left features water and the frame on the right features alcohol. We chose to do this as we felt as it would hopefully show the two very different paths the two young females follow and how the film is to play out in the near future.

5. Narrative.

Very early on in the production of our film we chose not to show the faces of the two characters until the very end of the opening as we believed it would leave the audience in suspense and cause them to question if in fact they are the same person or if they have any links to each other at all. 

Once the final cut occurs, the shot reveals that the two women are in fact twins. The two are always running along side each other - this sparked the idea for the name of the opening 'Parallel' which was originally to be 'ON POINTE.' however once we made changes to our synopsis, this name no longer fit.

We believed by doing this it would cause the audience to react in a way where they may want to see more of the film and question who the two females really are, why they are identical in what they look like, but not what they do and finally, who is on the other end of the phone calls?