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

Our character Guy getting ready for his first date

Our Film's Plot

The Life Of Guy is a rom-com film which follows the life of a university student called Guy. The film is set in a flashback as the character looks back at how he used to be and reflects on how much his life has changed. It starts of with him looking back at his first date fail and then the heartbreak that followed which led to him sitting in his room 24 hours a day. He then meets a girl called Lindy who soon becomes his best friend. She guides him through life and teaches him how to get girls, how to be popular and how to interact with people in a normal manner. After a while of this we now come out of the flashback and see him walking down the corridor with his girlfriend!






Form - the typical features of an opening sequence

Our opening sequence both conforms and challenges typical features of an opening sequence. Here is how:

Here is the full move of John Tucker Must Die. However, the opening sequence lasts until 3:40. If you watch up to there you can see the features.

Titles:

For titles our main inspiration again was John Tucker Must Die. They used a simple white font which faded in and out and most of them were overlayed. Similarly, in our film opening we used a simple white font which faded in and out and most of them were overlayed as well. 

John Tucker Must Die Titles

The Life Of Guy titles. 

Challenges to common stereotype:

• In our film opening the title of our film, The Life of Guy, appears at the end of the opening sequence rather than the the front. This is breaking the typical form of an opening sequence as majority of films introduce their film with its title right at the front. 

Genre - Romantic Comedy



Challenges to common stereotypes:

• In romantic comedy's the main character who needs to be helped and ideally 'saved' is usually female but in our film we decided to make him male. 
• The reason we did this is to challenge another stereotype that rom-com's are mainly targeted at females. We wanted our film to have equal appeal to both male and female characters and so we decided that our main character would be male. 

Narrative Structure:

Most films follow Todorov's classic narrative pattern of equilibrium, disruption, resolution and new equilibrium. In the diagram below I show you how my film and another film called 22 Jump Street follows this theory: 

             Todorov's Theory                                          22 Jump Street                                       The Life Of Guy

Specific Narrative Techniques that we used:

• Flashback - our whole opening is a flashback which is shown through our voiceover as Guy is looking back on himself and reflecting back at what his life used to be like. 
• Narrative Ellipsis - we cut out certain unneeded scenes such as him walking back to his room from the bathroom in order to speed up the action and the audience can fill in the gap themselves.
• Enigma Code - What will happen to Guy after? How will he handle the break up? Will his life ever change? 
• Cross Cutting - We used cross cutting to show Guy running down the street and then cut to Bella waiting outside the take away place for him and then back to him running. 

Style:

Lighting/Colour

We wanted to create all the shots with high key, warm tone lighting as this is a typical genre convention of many rom-com films such as Legally Blode. 

Legally Blonde Lighting

Legally Blonde Lighting

Legally Blonde Lighting

In order to get the intended colours that we wanted on our film we had to use the grading technique on Adobe Premiere Pro which allowed us to change the lighting to suit our needs. However, since we filmed using spotlights and natural lighting, not much grading was needed.


Here, I have shown some scenes from the film Legally Blonde where they use high key, warm toned lighting similar to the ones we used in our opening sequence.

Soundtrack and dialogue

Many films of the rom-com genre use really happy upbeat music for their opening sequence as this sets the atmosphere for the rest of the film as although there may be serious underlying themes, the lighthearted take on it will make it quite entertaining and happy. We used a soundtrack called 'Life of Riley' as this fit in with our genre and set quite a happy tone for the film. Here is the soundtrack that we used:



The sountrack for a similar film called 'The Other Woman' is quite similar with quite an old song being used to describe a baby with words like 'beautiful' and 'happy'. Our soundtrack however, does not include vocals.

For the dialogue in opening sequences, most films have either a voiceover, dialogue or just the music with quiet action on screen. However, our film challenges that stereotype as we have mixed voiceover and dialogue together. We feel that for our film this works best as it is a flashback sequence as he remembers who he used to be. A real film which also challenges this stereotype is 'John Tucker Must Die' as the opening sequence consists of both voiceover and dialogue as she is having a flashback as well near the beginning of the film.