final draft

Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or
Challenge forms/conventions of real media products.

'Genie' is based on the colour gold. This is how we started getting ideas for our film. The way we saw it, is that Genies and magic are usually involved with gold. We see this is the film ‘Aladdin’. This allowed us to play around with the colour gold and to see how we would use the Genie in our film. ‘Genie’ is about a geeky boy called Luke who likes a popular girl who has no interest in him, he does everything to get her attention but the popular girl Olivia shows no interest. Through this, a genie comes to help with his troubles and he ends up liking the genie. The genre of ‘Genie’ is a family fantasy which can be seen in films similar likes ‘Matilda’ as this also has the idea of magic.

The themes in ‘Genie’ include of magic, friendship, love, popularity, confidence and acceptance. Magic can be shown through the genies character when she snaps her fingers and Smartie’s appear. This follows conventions of family fantasies as it uses the use of magic to show its genre of the film. In Aladdin the genie also use’s magic through wishes.

Within the plots and characters, genie is usually a man in fantasy films, for example in Aladdin, however we chose to go against this convention and have a woman. This allowed us to explore and develop a new and different character in which our target audience may or may not enjoy. However we still kept the ideology of genies with wishes the same. In fantasy films the Plot is usually the genie helping someone whereas our genie gets with boy. Genie comes out of lamp.
The way in which the plot uses’ conventions from other fantasy films is in the way Luke doesn’t believe the genie at first but is convinced and fascinated when he sees her snap her fingers’ and chocolate appears. Other films that show this is ‘Matilda’, her teacher never believed she had powers until she saw it for herself. This use of convention will give our audience feeling of familiarity as they would have seen it in other similar films. However ‘Genie’ challenges the conventions of a fantasy drama as Luke and Genie become a couple where as a genie is usually there to help their caller. For example the in ‘Peter Pan’, Tinker bell likes Peter but Peter likes Wendy. In our film Luke likes Olivia but Genie likes Luke, however Luke begins to realise that Genie is so much of a better person than Olivia and falls for her instead. This creates suspense in our film as it never usually happens in a fantasy. This gives our film the unpredictability factor.

Camera and action develops our film to be a fantasy as it shows the development of Luke and Genie and the building of their relationship in scene 3, the makeover, playing on the audience’s emotions as they later feel sorry for Genie as she looks sad when Luke goes off to talk to Olivia. The close up of Genie in scene 4 plays on the audience’s emotions, therefore it develops the theme of love. The sound also develops the feeling of a fantasy film as it plays recognisable instruments such as violins, drums and other soft music that relates to a genie based story.

The Mise-en-scene settings challenge fantasy films as they tend to be set in desserts or fantasy places no one has ever heard of. Whereas our film takes place in a place everyone is familiar with, a school.

In conclusion our film follows the basic conventions of a fantasy film which will make our audience familiar with the themes and so on, but it also has different plots and twists to it, giving our film a different flavour.