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

One way that we conform to codes and conventions of typical teen dramas is with our music choice. A lot of teen movies and high school set dramas have upbeat, pop punk genre songs in their opening sequences. This sets the tone of the film and lets you know that it is based around young people. This is exactly what we chose, because this way the audience knows exactly what to expect from our film and genre, because they have basically seen it before.Another way we conformed to the codes and conventions was with mise en scene. One part of mise en scene is the setting. Most of the characters in high school dramas are teenagers. For this reason they are usually set in schools. We used corridors to conform to these codes and conventions, so you could tell what our films narrative is going to be about. Also in teen movies you tend to get the girls hanging out in the bathroom. We conformed to this and showed the cheerleader character doing her makeup in a bathroom. Also, we showed the alternative girl in the bathroom, but we decided to challenge the codes and conventions by implying that she is an outcast, and to emphasise this we suggested use of drugs. Costume is also important because it is typically the same, but varies slightly to suggest different identities of characters. We used costume to suggest our characters stereotypes. However, with Tee's character we also challenged the forms and conventions of real life media products. The cheerleader trope usually is a perfect looking female, with long blonde hair and a short skirt. In a lot of ways we conformed to this, but Tee also has braces, showing she isn’t quite what the audience would perceive as perfect. Also, her hair is blonde but it is a very white blonde, and she has what you could call a more masculine hair cut, very short and choppy on one side, and this challenges the forms and conventions of typical high school movies, where the main characters usually have long flowing hair (like the majority of characters in mean girls). Another typical convention of teen dramas are the cultural topics of the film. These often include proms, parties (with alcohol and drugs) relationships and social groups and cliques and all the sort of coming of age types of things. We focused mainly on the different cliques, with the contrasting characters, and we also touched on drugs, with the implied drug use of jenni’s bathroom shots.