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

Genre Conventions:

Drama - A drama is a film that deals a lot with human emotions. They are usually very serious, tense and portray realistic characters, of which the protagonist is usually in conflict with themselves.

Romance – A romance is a film that deals with relationships. They are usually between two people, a man and a woman and portray one better off than the other, of which causes problems but resolves itself at the end.

Trailer – A trailer shows the key moments from the film accompanied by music, captions and voiceovers explaining the plot of the film and introducing the director and/or actors to the audience with the title of the film and release date near the end.

Poster – A poster has a large title, showing off the name of the film with a picture and colours that draws the attention of the audience accompanied with names of famous actors or director and persuasive language from critics to intrigue the audience.

Magazine – A magazine has a mast head for the name of the magazine, an image and colours to attract the audience with text to show articles and larger text to show main articles and possibly other images to accompanies these to attract an audiences attention.

By using the codes and conventions used in Trainspotting, the inspiration to my trailer, it’s easy to see we followed the path they took but made some changes to keep the trailer original for us and the poster/magazine original to me. Both trailers show key scenes in the play and explain the plot of the film. Trainspotting is dramatic-comedy and so explained there film with comedic scenes to entertain the audience, whereas our Wonderland film is a dramatic-romance and so our film explains the story with romantic scenes to entertain the audience. Trainspotting uses the main characters voice as non-diegetic sound explaining why he made his choices to take drugs with a positive spin, keeping it more comedic, whereas we use our main characters non-diegetic sound to explain why he chose to take drugs with a negative spin, keeping it more dramatic. Back when Trainspotting was released, there was no famous actor in the film and so they did not promote Ewan McGregor more than just the main character that is what we did with William Derry in our trailer, we kept everyone as notorious as each other and just focussed on who the main characters were.

In Trainspotting’s poster we see the title of the film, the cast, a critic’s reviews and a promotion to the director. I followed the majority of that but the cast in Trainspotting were separated for the photo and then photo shopped together again, where as in mine I wanted to show my characters together posing for the camera. Also a unique feature of Trainspotting’s poster was to have the characters names alongside there photos and I used that for mine to give the audience more information towards the characters.

Empire’s front cover of their magazine promoting Trainspotting shows the main actor in the film as their main article with text anchoring its purpose. I followed this example because it is the most common layout to a magazine main article. Empire magazine uses Ewan McGregor’s image and covers up their Mast Head because it is such a popular magazine people will still know what it says, the magazine I have created is not as popular and so needs its name to be seen because it is still growing in popularity.