Evaluation Question 3

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

We decided to use a lot of typical codes and conventions of the social realism genre in our trailer. For example, when looking at other real media texts such as Kidulthood and Fish tank we saw that they were both set in council estates in London. We liked this idea as we felt it fit with our main characters background and therefore decided to also locate our film in the back streets of London with council flats.

This is a shot of  council flats from the trailer for 'Fish tank'
which inspired us.

This is a shot from our trailer for Jack Miller
where we have displayed our use of council flats.

This is one of the main characters from Kidulthood.
He is wearing a typical grey hoodie which is made by
Nike. We felt that this look was quite thug-like and so we wanted
to avoid this look with our main character as we wanted our
 audience to sympathise with him instead of feeling
intimidated.

However, we also decided to challenge certain aspects of social realism. For example, the characters presented in Kidulthood and Adulthood all seem to be dressed in tracksuits with brands such as Nike and Adidas. We decided to challenge this and dress our main character in jeans and a baseball jacket. We felt this would help portray that not having much and being poor can happen to anyone. We also thought it would help create more sympathy for our main character as he looks like a normal teenager. 

This is our main character in his outfit. We chose a
baseball style jacket and jeans to take away any
intimidation that our audience may have felt if he
was in a tracksuit. His clothes are not a mainstream
brand to reflect that he has not got a lot of money.