Evaluation 01- In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e. of film openings)

1. The title, font and style of the film
Here we chose to create our title in a serif font, in the texture of clouds. We wanted our film opening to put across there a variety of options, decisions in life that one can take, you're never stuck with only one option. Along with this comes opportunities, doors open up to you through the decisions that you make, and for a teenager this is a prime time when this happens. With school, college and even university teenagers are constantly making decisions about there future, that being what GCSES they take to even going to university in the first place and just jumping straight into work. Within Teen angst movies stereotypically you will have the convention of teenage drama, this being between friendship groups, boyfriends/girlfriends, etc. This comes with the decisions on who to exclude, ignore and unfriend, which then stereotypically leads to a fight or disagreement between two parties. This is the convention we were trying to portray with this title, font and style.

2. Setting/Location
I chose this screen shot simply because it displays our stereotypical setting for our teen angst opening sequence, this being a high school. From previous research majority if not all teen angst films that I had looked at took place in the setting of a high school. As our goal was to include as many stereotypical teen angst conventions as possible into our opening sequence, this felt like an essential to include in our own.

3.Costume and props
Here you can see the character of Darcy holding an IPod in her hands, with earphones plugged in to her ears, and casually gazing up around her to check her surroundings. This is very stereotypical of a convention of the teen angst genre. Teenagers are very up to date with their technology knowledge, and will use it and have it on them either in their hands or pockets in most situations. Social media plays a large role in what happens in teenagers everyday social lives. Take 'The Duff' for instance, videos were posted up on social media of Bianca messing around with mannequins in clothes shops. Also, Bianca as a 'dig' at her friends un-follow them on most social media sites, which they responded to really hurt and disbelieving that Bianca would ever do such a thing to them. After we had recognised that social media plays a huge part in teenagers lives, we quickly made the decision to include this convention into our own.

4 + 7.Camera work, editing and how characters are introduced
I chose this screen shot because it really explores our use of editing. Here is where we would have frozen the footage, and using a transition made the title ' Darcy White Ash's best friend' slide onto the screen. We recognised that from previous research into teen angst films such as 'Easy A' that each main character had a separate introduction, to really distinguish their social status in the school, and their relationship with the main protagonist. This seemed to be a repeating convention for instance in 'Angus, thongs and perfect snogging' with  Georgia's introduction to the 'Ace Gang'.

5. Story and how the opening sets this up
I chose this screen shot because, our story centres around a very depressed teen called Ash, it follows how she hates her life, her school and everyone in it apart from Darcy. However, how one competition and how she wins it changes her life forever, she overcomes her battle with depression after years of fighting it, she realises that actually the 'Mean Girl' that she always hated and thought badly of was actually a nice person and was only trying to help Ash. This I think completely turns the stereotypical convention of the 'Mean Girl' on its head as she was never mean to Ash, she was never a horrible person inside like stereotypically the 'Mean Girls' are like the 'Plastics' or 'Slaggy Lindsey' she genuinely wanted Ash to feel better its just Ash's depression clouded her judgement of her. I think this screen shot just starts off the story nicely because it shows we get a slight insight into Ash's depression and her hate for school, also stereotypically teen angst follow the main protagonists walk to school for instance in 'Juno'.

6. Genre and how the opening suggests it
Here we have a extreme close up of Ash plugging her earphones into her ears. Stereotypically teenagers will much rather listen to music then listen to people they don't want to socialise with. They will also do this to help entertain themselves during a boring journey, such as in Ash's case her journey to Sixth Form. I think that this really helps to suggest the genre of teen angst as the extreme close up displays Ash's  annoyance with going to school, due to the fact that her eyes are focused of an area of the ground, and her head is titled towards it. She also looks as if she is in her own little world, which stereotypically teenagers are known for being in.

8+9. Special effects
I chose these two screen shots to explore the special effects because screen shot 8 is when we decided to overlay the image of the PowerPoint presentation over Ash walking up to the white board to read the message. We thought this was a very interesting shot to create because it's means we get to see Ash's facial expression straight on right before her life is about to change. Screen shot  9 I chose because we decided to get a non-diegetic sound effect of a type writer and made the letters appear on screen one by one. These two shots I don't believe are stereotypical of the teen angst genre, however, non-continuety editing is something that is stereotypical in the teen angst genre, with the flashbacks of what happened previously, little nights out that went wrong, or why the main protagonist stereotypically the 'unpopular girl' is actually unpopular, and the '24 hours before' screen really sets this up.