1A- Conventions First Draft

In your experience, how has your understanding of conventions developed through creating your productions.

A convention can simply be defined as the way in which something is done. The use of conventions has had a massive influence on my media productions over the last two years since I started the subject in year 12. I have learnt how to utilise them in the most effective way, and from this have perceived the various benefits they create. This has proved very valuable to me and its worthiness can be seen in my finished products.

In year 12, we were set the task of producing a film opening, ours was named Outlaw. The chosen genre was that of an action movie. Straight away our group decided that the routes of this genre, with all of its stereotypical conventions that were asserted with it, and this made a clear narrative appear that was suitable to the task. For example, we sustained the idea of having a very hidden storyline that didn't reveal its purpose until the final scenes, also a secretive character was introduced so that the audience could question this persons objectives in our film opening. We knew these conventions were stereotypical to the genre because of our research and planning that was carried out revolving around this. A very big influence to this defining research was the James Bond film Skyfall, which had similar ideas to the ones I have illustrated in this paragraph. However, we decided to challenge conventions too by never revealing the main enemies identity, this sustained our image of a mysterious character.

Firstly, we found it important to include enigma codes in our work so that it kept the audience guessing and interested in the film opening production. These enticed the audience to ask interesting questions about the concepts in the video, such as, why was the main protagonist searching for something or someone?. Where would this end result take place? and why has he gone down this particular route?. All of these were utilised so that our target audience found our film opening intriguing and it gave them an interesting film opening to watch, also we attempted to create some mystery to the characters and the plot line of our chosen film opening. Although, we were enforced to include the regular conventions like the titles and exponential shots, we also chose to challenge conventions of a action movie by never revealing our enemies identity, but still the typical good vs bad was the chosen storyline, so in this way it was coherent with the convention. This worked well when filming the shots, this idea didn’t come across very well and it meant that it was we had a great comprehension of what the general shots would involve, this was an essential part of our planning process.

In year 13, we had to create a music video and my group chose the genre of alternative rock and adapted it to fit our vision of a hallucinogenic and trippy video, so that it created a unique element for our target audience. We did this by utilising a bunch of effects that created a certain trippyness to our video, similarly we chose to shoot our video in locations that were always surrounded by nature; and we did this because we thought that hallucination and nature could correlate and coincide in a way that was appropriate to the lyrics of our chosen song drugs. Whilst researching into the this unique element we stumbled upon the music video 'Lamborghini high' by Asap Mob, which turned out to be one of our biggest influences when producing Paleme. This helped us massively as it showed a general outline of what we should include, and it also demonstrated the importance of transferring the words of the song visually in the music video, this is so that the audience can perceive a link between the two when watching it.

In addition to the music video we also produced a digipak and a website. We took influenced from Kendrick Lamars album cover for Damn as we liked the shot of him on the bench plainly on a half and half color split which was black and green, it was simple but suited us perfectly, thus we decided to replicate this in our own image. We also made all of the titles with a black and green color scheme to incorporate our ideals of a nature related synergy . These ideas were also used in the website where we used them as our text colours and the back-ground colours. We included more photos from our photo shoot of the natural background locations as well so that it brought all of our products together. 

Concludingly, my overall improvements have been considerable in the transition from year 12 to year 13, particularly my ability to understand conventions and change them at will, and this has played an important role in my productions.