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

For our main task we chose to do a film within the fantasy genre. We thought about the conventions of this and how well we could stick to it. Fantasy often includes mythical or medieval looking scenery, such as forests or castles, and has narratives and characters, who are always on some kind of quest our journey for a main reason, or each character for their own reason. Propp’s archetypes help to describe which characters are often included in fantasy films, for example; hero, villain, helper/donor/ princess. We watched several fantasy film openings just to get a rough idea what they include. This included Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Labyrinth. Each had good use of mise-en-scene (mountainous areas, mystical trees) and the characters were often well spoken. We did notice however that in most fantasy films the setting is very bright, and we wanted to show a darker side to fantasy. In our main task we were influenced by other films, i.e. Narnia, as our main character fell asleep in a wardrobe to wake up in a fantasy world. In our main task we used similar language to what is used in fantasy films, and tried to recreate the scenery - we made our own forest, which took a lot of time, due to the cameras microphones not being suitable for a real forest. We thought this helped us get the grittier fantasy feel, like with Pan's Labyrinth and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. We followed Propp's archetypes during the two minutes of our piece. We had the hero mixed with a princess as our main character and our helper was the ‘Hung-helper’. We stuck to the conventions of most fantasy films, with our speech, character archetypes, setting, and narrative. However we did break some conventions in a few ways. The main character is often male, whereas with ours it was a female. We also had a slightly darker full story. This isn’t uncommon in fantasy, but not exactly seen often. We did this by including darker things, such as abusive parents and death (the death would have been included in the whole film, had it been made). Also Propp's archetype wouldn't normally see a princess mixed with the hero, as it is usually the hero’s job to save the ‘damsel in distress’ which is often the princess. In our piece the hero has to save herself in order to escape. This is conflicting not only Propp's archetypes but also fantasy conventions.