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

Our film is called "26", it is an Action film and it features the three members of our group; me, Anjana and Shobnam as the secret agents Delta, Sierra and Echo respectively.

In order to acquaint ourselves fully with the action genre, so that we were ready to create our opening sequence, we did extensive research into the four main concept areas of film production; genre, narrative, form and style.

Genre

Brainstorm of inspirational characters, themes and film techniques which we applied to our opening

Through our research, we found that character was very important in not just action films, but in the media in general. The inevitable character development and internal, external and interpersonal conflicts that make every film worth watching were something that we definitely had to include in our film, in order to keep the audience on their toes and hooked throughout our opening. We took inspiration from the following characters;

Catwoman from "Dark Knight Rises" - a very
big character influence for us

Alex from "Charlie's Angels" - from the
film that inspired our own opening

Evelyn from "Salt" - her quest for revenge
was a huge influence for us

Convention	Application (Used, Updated or Challenged)
Character
Protagonist is typically male, white and heterosexual (e.g. James Bond, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes)	CHALLENGED · 3 female protagonists; · 2 of whom are Asian, due to serious under-representation of female Asian action heroes. Also, due to the fact that 2 of the girls in our group were Asian, it made sense to play to the strengths of our group. · 1 Caucasian female so as not to stray too much from normality and shock our audience. · However, later on in the film we planned to add a male sidekick, in order for the film to not be completely female-dominated.
Victims are typically female and ethnic minorities (e.g. Rain Ocampo - Resident Evil)	CHALLENGED · Our primary victim, the Guard, is not a stereotypical victim; he is male, strong and white, and looks older than the girls. · We used this character as a victim, in order to establish our heroines as being first and foremost, dominant and assertive.
Female characters are typically sexualised (e.g. Lara Croft, Alice Abernathy - Resident Evil)	UPDATED · It could be argued that the character of Delta is sexualised due to her casual changing in the sequence, however the fact that the camera cuts away before anything is seen, shows that the film is not going to objectify or sexualise women, something which we wanted to have quite a feminist approach on. · Despite the fact that Delta is not sexualised, she is still feminine and shown to be desirable

Narrative

Using Todorov's narrative theory, I devised this flowchart of events in our opening

Our narrative was pretty typical of that of an action film; it included an equilibrium that was disrupted by one of our main action heroines, Delta. Similarly, in "Charlie's Angels", Natalie (played by Cameron Diaz) walks into the workplace of the men and distracts them. We also found out that action film openings usually have more than one disruption; as you can see, our one has 3 (4 if you count "Guard stirs"). We decided to conform to these narrative conventions, as we didn't want our opening to look irregular and unprofessional.

Form & Style

Our Production Company Ident - we wanted it to look elegant and calligraphic, to show our production company as being professional

The font we have been using throughout the entire project - Courier.
We feel that this font fits our film quite well, as it is quite a
military font and portrays the action genre well.

Our film title graphic is quite a binary-type font, showing the
mechanical aspect of the world we have created