Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

As a group we settled on Fantasy for the Genre of our main-task. The main conventions of Fantasy films are medieval or wild locations used (.e.g. forests or castles) mythical creatures (.e.g. elves or fairies), the entrance into an alternative world (.e.g. Harry Potter into the wizarding world) and the characters used. Considering Propp's archetypes, the sort of characters in Fantasy are very clichéd – there is always a guide, a villain, a hero and a helper/ donor. In Fantasy films the characters always find themselves on some sort of mission/ having to complete a task where a whole civilization depends on them. Films that influenced the making of the main-task within my group were Pans Labyrinth. Arguably, it is easy to say we took some influence from Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. We watched the beginning of a few Fantasy films; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Lord of the Rings: The two Towers and Pirates of the Caribbean: At world's end, as a group we noticed that all the Fantasy world's in these films - though engaging in wars, or full of trouble – were rather glamorous. The only film that seemed to oppose this trend was Pans Labyrinth where everything was a lot more gritty and so we planned to make our film a lot less glamorous. However, we found further inspiration in The imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus for our set, rather than filming in a real Forest we made our own setting for a surreal affect, the surreal elements of our forest – being made by hand – completely eliminates the possibility of realism but also makes for interesting viewing and allows more development on the conventions of the Fantasy genre (.e.g. the Forest landscape). Unintentionally, in our film we had the transition from the 'real world' to the fantasy world in a wardrobe – like in Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – however our main character did not walk through a wardrobe but fell asleep in one, this is a development of the idea of an entrance in another world, giving it a unique turn.
Our film sticks to the conventions of the genre we chose due to the location we used (A self-made forest), the characters (A helper/ guide, a 'princess' and a 'villain') and the entrance to an alternative world. We felt it was best to stick to these conventions of Fantasy because these would help an audience identify which genre of film we chose to film. Whilst sticking to some conventions, our film also deviates from them: due to editing restrictions we had no mythical creatures, our fantasy setting was not glamorous (Other than Pans Labyrinth our film – in our research – has been the only one to have a gritty setting). I think the most daring deviation in our film is the enigma, unlike most Fantasy films ours would not include a happy ending, our main character would not have completed her journey and she would not have triumphed over evil (a clichéd event in most films) but she would have been killed by the villain.