Evaluation

Question 1;How does your media product use develop and challenge forms and conventions of similar products?

Well allow me to tell you!

Short films

Like many other short films, we got straight to the point of the film- seeing as time is a factor. We instantly set the

scene in the film with our first shot, an establishing shot of The Wesley Centre, with a title underneath reading Medical Research Institute. So immediately our

audience is aware of the setting and possible surroundings the characters will face. Just like “Vincent” we took care to introduce our main characters pretty quickly and what they

were generally about. In our case, during the first montage, as each character takes part in the steps of

waking up and getting ready, we included titles swinging into the shots, telling the audience who was playing which

character (Tammy Golightly as Lace Lynette). We also freeze-framed each character and had subtitles below on

which power they possessed.

Special Abilities in feature length films

Many superhero movies feature adults who're very familiar with their super abilities. For instance X-

Men; Storm, Cyclops and Wolverine.Even Spiderman & Superman.

They are all capable of handling their powers and know how to work them.

Many examples of super powered humans are often seen to be using their powers for good, be it fighting off evil or protecting fellow citizens.

There are even teens in this instance who are aware of their abilities, but are often seen to be using them for more leisurely or mischievous activity such as Ice skating or changing channels on the

TV.So the traditional sense and convention of feature

length films I have mentioned, is for the audience merely to observe what the character is capable of accomplishing with their powers and how they solve their problems, such as defeating enemies

etc.

Special Abilities in feature length films #2So the traditional sense and convention of

feature length films I have mentioned, is for the audience merely to observe what the character is capable of accomplishing

with their powers and how they solve their problems, such as defeating enemies etc.

However in the film Bruce Almighty when the character Bruce Nolan obtains all of Gods

powers due to a series of complaining about him. The film features Bruce getting

to know, and in many cases taking advantage of his powers. Many examples

of his power antics include parting his tomato soup like the red sea, making his enemy publicly humiliate himself, house training his dog and changing his old car

into a sports car.

Super abilities in series – Misfits

We move on to series' of Super Human abilities. We see more of characters getting to grips with their

abilities. One example of this is the British TV series, Misfits.

After being struck by an odd electrical storm, 5 teens serving community service begin to experience strange happenings. The series consists of the

youths getting to grips with their powers, for instance mind reading and invisibility. They

slowly begin to discover their abilities as they encounter events in their everyday lives.

One of these includes one of the main characters, Kelly, hearing people around her think good and bad things about her. Within the first few times,

we see her react harshly toward the persons thoughts as if they'd said it aloud. Then she, and her peers soon realise she can read thoughts.

This is constantly shown by one character Nathan thinking certain thoughts, then mentally

cursing and thinking "She can hear that!!" before scurrying away.

Misfits #2

Mentioning again that me and Tammi did not pick our ideas

from Misfits, we cannot help but find many similarities with our

film and the series. Maybe suggesting that we are on the

right line when it comes to popular topics in the media.While browsing the internet looking for pictures from the

series to put into my presentation, I stumbled across

this drawn poster to promote the series. The general drawn, comic

like idea of the teens seems closely related to our Poster to

represent our film.

Super abilities in series – Being Human

Another British series based on the Super natural and Super abilities is Being

Human. This is a TV series based on a Vampire, a Werewolf and a Ghost all living in a house together, trying to

live their lives as normal as possible. Meanwhile trying to hide their

conditions that seperate them so dramatically from society.

While Misfits was about 5 teens discovering and using their newly obtained powers, Being Human is

quite the opposite. The three characters are all adults, trying to more or less keep their abilities

discreet, and remain a secret between eachother. With the exception of

Annie, who is a ghost longing to get noticed by passers by and seek

revenge on her ex fiancé. George and Mitchell however, the werewolf and vampire are rebellious towards their conditions and try to blend in as best they can with the world around them.

Super abilities in series – Pushing Daisies

Pushing Daisies is an American series that meets both Misfits and Being human, halfway in the sense that the main character, Ned is seen in two different tenses. The series is narrated, and through out the production, we are shown Ned in the past tense, as a child, getting to grips with his

new power and his childhood experiences, and we see Ned in the present tense as he uses his power on a regular basis to help his 2 careers.

Our conventionsOur film challenged conventions in numerous ways. It was not a full length film, meaning

we didn’t have too much time on our hands, with this- We drop our audience right into the middle of the characters lives and introduce them quickly. Regarding the paths to take on if they were experienced with their powers we decided to go with the characters all being aware and fairly experienced with their, and each other's powers. We show this by dropping in certain comments which subtly suggest that they have had similar experience before in what seems like, lengthy and repetitive

stay within the Centre. Comments such as;“I’ve told you about this- Now go get changed.”

“Hello mister- You been sent upstairs to change?” Indicating that the characters are aware of whats happening already having it happened

before“Don’t try that emotion changing bull on me!”

“Lets start with you Lace, and no teleporting today!”We hope that the audience will catch on to quotes like these and they will gain a decent

estimate and image of the characters everyday lives in the Institute.

The only power that we do not have discovered straight away is Lily’s. The rest of the group seem to be used to her mindless noises and actions, while they do not know

why she has been made like this- Until they are filled in by gossip. On discovering her power- we see it in ‘action’ within the lat couple of seconds of the

film.

Our conventions #2

We obeyed one of the researched conventions by making all of the ‘gifted’ and main characters teens. So naturally, the characters are probably expected to behave immaturely regarding their

abilities on some level. We show a few instances of this such as Frankie flickering the lights out of boredom, and Dylan trying to

wind up Lily. By showing this, we stick vaguely to the stereotypes of typical teens by having them take advantage of their abilities

for their own amusement.

While we allowed our characters to play around with the powers, we also had them use them towards matters of importance or

relevance to them. Such as Lace using teleportation to get into places that would usually be off limits. Or Lily’s ability to neatly

end the film for both the characters and the audience.

Our conventions #3When it comes to the age of the characters and how we expect them to react,

I don’t think we challenged any conventions in most cases. The typical way of many films is to somewhat ‘under estimate’ the teens, of

clearly which the Staff within the film did as we hadn't placed any precautions to stop certain powers from happening, just mere warnings

were placed.

We challenged one convention regarding the abundance of certain ages. The only characters SEEN are the 6 main teens and the Police Handler who

accompanies Nate. Even so- he is only included in the shot for a couple of seconds and again during the montage as his feet are shown walking Nate

in. The doctors and nurses are only portrayed through muffled voices, conventions similar to the teacher in Charlie Brown & Snoopy

Our conventions #4When it comes to the powers and super abilities themselves, we challenged

conventions and traditional effects for our film. We had to think carefully on which powers we would give our characters and who would have which. This being because our ‘budget’ was obviously not too great, we had to put some thought into how we would pull these powers off due to us not being able to

provide brilliant special effects to represent certain actions. For example, how we made Lace teleport.

Flying seemed to be the most popular ability when it came to our Primary research, but seeing as we did not possess harness’s and discreet cables, or knew

somebody who did, we had to over look our the opinions of our audience of that particular section.

We chose abilities that we thought would be fairly easy and obvious to see if done correctly.

Teleportation – This was achieved by simply stopping the camera and moving the character, and adding a delicate ‘Ting’ sound in editing.

Mind control & emotion control – We came to the conclusion that these did not really require any special effects, except good acting skills from both the possessor and

the ‘victim’.Electricity – Although we could have done with some X-men type lightning rays, we

tried to step gently around this matter by showing the character blinking while staring at an appliance.

Animal morph – Like electricity, powers would have been desired for this but we realised the graphic talents to achieve this were way beyond our current skills. Once again, we shifted past this by not showing the character ‘transforming’

from state to state. We merely showed him changing states in different shots, and after the transformation, we showed him dressing himself again.

Our conventions #5

Another convention we didn’t seem to challenge and pretty much obeyed was keeping the main characters together. Just like the

examples of films and series’ I have used, the gifted/main characters all seemed to be kept together. For example the

characters in X-men live in a huge school, called Xavier Institute for Higher Learning. While in Misfits, the teens tend to all be

seen together in the local community centre doing their community service. Lastly, the characters George, Mitchell and Annie in Being Human are all sharing a house, and this is where

they are normally seen to be together.

We did the same with our film and kept the characters all together in a Medical Research Institute.