Evaluation Question 1

Q1
In what ways does your media product USE, DEVELOP or CHALLENGE forms and conventions of real media products?
Our chosen genre was comedy, challenging and developing the codes and conventions for our genre vital for us to succeed in the making of our media product. We knew this would be hard, as the genre of comedy was very tricky to go for, however with the planning and research we did we were confident in succeeding. In choosing comedy as our genre, we had to choose which style of comedy to choose – weather this was aiming at younger children or adults with the two audiences having different perceptions on their range of comedy. For example, children would find funny pranks and silly characters funny; however adults being more mature tend to find actual jokes their humour.
Eventually after some intense research we decided on the age ranges of 12-21 year olds. We chose these as our target audience because we found creating our own unique mature jokes for a short film. With our target audience decided we carried out research into similar genres in order to gain an understanding into the comedy aspects used.
At first our film idea stemmed from a four character storyline, however given our restraints of the film being silent and the maximum characters allowed being two we had to change this] idea. Instead of scrapping the idea altogether we came up with our main characters being a comedy duo, with the whole film being around them and their relationship.
Most of our inspiration came from ourselves and the films we had seen before, we did not want to copy something that had been done before, and we wanted to be original. The main thing we all notice was that most if not all of the comic duos around were all males. For example, ‘Del-boy and Rodney from Only Fools and Horses’, ‘The Chuckle Brothers’ and ‘Cannon and Ball’. This would be the first idea we would explore to Challenge the codes and conventions of the comedy duo. Changing the main characters to women was a challenging experience however a very exciting opportunity. This was a gamble as comedy is normally associated with ‘male’ comics. We felt that because we would be making our short film with female actresses we would attract more people to watch our film, for the uniqueness. We watched ‘The Hangover’ and again us all as a group noticed that the film contained a ‘leader’ and ‘follower’, where one of the characters would be the main character with a second person closely following.

Again with our film being silent, we had to create our own style of comedy without using dialogue. The ideal person to focus this on was ‘Charlie Chaplin’ himself. Charlie Chaplin is known worldwide for his silent comedy, and he did this using soundtracks and editing. The soundtrack would almost always contain the piano playing, using this against the quick fast paced editing complemented the musical soundtrack brilliantly. After looking through many ‘Charlie Chaplin’ films, we decided that our film would work well if the soundtracks we picked complimented it well.
At the start we picked at 4 different soundtracks which we believed could go with our film, after careful consideration we cut this list down to one, being a drumming beat. This worked with our film better, the quickness of the music would help fasten the film up. With us keeping the same range and style of music we used the current codes and conventions of a comedy films around. We never wanted to shake up and change to many aspects of our film, this would take all of the codes and conventions away, and would make our film tacky and it wouldn’t work.




Again we looked at ‘Charlie Chaplin’ for his fast paced editing, aiming to do this to add another form of comedy into our film. Likewise how he makes the audience laugh without the use of diologe, this would be vital and important for us because we knew we had to make a silent short film. However we focused mainly on Scooby Doo. Where they fastened up the movie when the characters where running down corridors and through rooms.
We developed this code and convention in our seen of our characters running through the different doors. We sped this scene up to show the characters running for longer, and also to show how much our characters are willing to go through to be the holder of the ticket, we used the fastening up of our film to add another aspect of comedy to our film, and it worked.

Overall, I feel we used many of the codes and conventions of a current comedy blockbuster, for it to be classed as a comedy. However with the changing of some of the conventions we made our film something new and current. We kept the audience laughing, even by breaking some of the codes and conventions, and of course the MAIN aim of a ‘comedy’ film is to make the audience laugh. We succeeded in this when showing it to our family members and friends. They might not have expected our film at first, however comes the end of the film I’m sure the film was well received and most importantly gave our audience a laugh and a chuckle.