Question 1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

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

In order for our film to seem like a real ROMCOM, we had to ensure that we took cues from other short films that shared our genre, as well as following the codes and conventions of short films in general.

One of the first things we did was to ensure that we didn't have too many different locations, the reason for this was because we only had 5 minutes and the audinece wouldn't have enough time to understand if we added several different locations. The audience would need more time to gain an understanding of the narrative for us to add more locations. We also wouldn't be able to have a lot of dialogue to help us tell the story, so things like costume were vital to ensuring we told the location well. Fortunately we had the characters all in their school uniform which meant that the audience could clearly see this was set in a school, similarly, in a short film I had researched myself, 3x3, the fact that the janitor is dressed like an actual janitor and has a mop as a prop illustrates the type of character and the setting of the film.



Our use of sound in this shot helped to portray the girl as
someone who is desired a lot by the boy in the class room

The soundtrack we used also mirrored the persona of our characters which was essential for us to get right as we were trying to use minimal dialogue so for example, by using the sensual type of music we did when the girl walked in, it helped to show how she was portrayed by the other characters in the story, and in essence this conveyed over to the audience.

By having 2 male characters at the centre of the story , it
opened up more dynamics between the two

We also however tried to challenge the stereotypical codes and conventions of a ROMCOM. Normally a ROMCOM has two central characters whom are played by usually a male and a female actor, however in our film we challenged this and not only had three characters, but also made the two males a more integral part of the story. By doing this we could diverge the story a lot more as there were a lot more possibilities about the interaction of the two boys with one another. This would also help to entice a slightly more male dominant audience as it would allow us to exploit this side of the story which showed the friendship between the two , known by some as "bro love", which a stereotypical alpha male would be quite fond of.