In what ways does your media product USE, DEVELOP, or CHANGE forms and conventions of existing media products?

Daniel JonesCandidate No. 4492Media A2Question 1

Media Coursework Evaluation

Our media products are based on a docu-soap called The Only Way Is Essex (TOWIE) This is basically a scripted reality TV show about a group of men and women who lead relatively boring lives revolved around glamour and money.

We chose to create a parody of TOWIE. We called it ‘REEM’ as this is one of the main, most recognisable word overused in TOWIE. It just means ‘good’ and because its used in the programme so much we decided to play on this convention and massively overuse this word in our trailer.

‘Reem’ will be a well known word for the audience who watch TOWIE and they will all know what it means it needs no explaining.

We made our product into a parody by looking at how the characters in TOWIE are structured for example, there level of intelligence, or how vain they are. And taking these factors one step further and exaggerating everything as much as possible

We tried to make the characters recognisable to the audience so they’d know who we were supposed to be. We did this by following the dress codes and vanity of the original cast as you can see above I was constructed as Joey Essex.

Some of these characters such as Joey or Mark etc who we tried to construct into a parody version, are actually idolised by some of the viewers and will actually go out and fake tan, or get the newest Ray Bans

Throughout the trailer we developed a clear gender divide between the characters, the girls were proper bitches and the men are real manly men, who like cars and getting girls. However we challenged these conventions, for example when I was dressed in the Pauls Boutique leopard print hoody, it isn't normally something one of the characters would wear, more like something a 12 year old girl would wear.

We also challenged the convention of the characters wearing very highly branded clothes, by drawing on an ‘Armani’ logo onto plain white t-shirt that I used scissors to make it low cut as well.

By drawing this logo on it shows that the character clearly thinks he's cool as he has an Armani top on however the fact its so tacky and obviously fake it challenges the conventions of the highly branded smart clothes that are so well known in TOWIE

For our parody, we played on the metro sexual aspect of the male characters and parodied it by exaggerating the expensive clothes with drawn on logo and excessive fake tan smeared on the characters faces, which relates to how the male characters such as Joey and Harry etc like to fake tan

Metro Sexual – A male who spends a lot of time and money on shopping for his appearance, showing his feminine side but is still masculine at the same time

Inspiration Our trailer

REEM TOWIE

Looking at buying a brand new expensive BMW

Looking at really cheap car

This is an example of how our product challenged the existing convention of glamour and money etc as nobody from TOWIE would be seen near a car that is so cheap. This also ties in well with the glamour convention and the fake brands our characters were wearing in the trailer.

We used similar shot types to follow the regular conventions of the programme for the montage edit of the characters getting glammed up and ready for a night out.

We used the regular conventions to replicate shot types, to show the Mis en scene and scenery of the locations we filmed at. As you can see here we used the exact same over the shoulder shot of the girl in the mirror getting ready. However in our shot , the scenery challenges the conventions. Because as you can see in the TOWIE scene, it has cream walls with a dress that has diamonds on it hung up on the wall, it shows how well off and vain these characters are and how they think they are sophisticated Where as our own take on this shot, the girl is caked in makeup stood in a childish pink room with a chandelier painted on to the wall to try and represent the fact these characters are all about their money.

The song we chose for our trailer was at the time a popular well known pop song that the viewers would relate to according to our audience research, the title ‘Sexy and I know it’ also relate to how the trailer is about vanity and glamour