Alannah Perry Question 1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challange forms and conventions of real Media products?

Forms:

Trailer
Magazine cover
Poster

Genre: dance parody


Our film is a dance parody about a girl who is a “geek” and
is sick of being bullied and so decides to get “justice” by turning “street”
and learning how to dance. This idea of the “underdog” is a common convention
in dance flicks for example in Honey it’s about a girl striving to be a
professional dancing but never getting a break, and in Step Up it is about a
boy who has to do community service in a ballet school and has to learn how to
dance ballet when his speciality is street dance and there is a clash of
classes between the ballerina’s who are middle class and the boy who is from a
rough neighbourhood furthermore we decided that because our film is a dance
parody to make out characters as exaggerated as possible so we enhanced this
idea of the “underdog” and tried to make it extreme by making the main
character a “geek” and we decided to use sartorial codes to exaggerate the
character’s status for example we decided that all the "geeks" would wear big black glasses and supenders becuase from research and our own thoughts we thought that this was a steretypical way to represent "geeks".

Further reasons for our costume choices all link in with the fact that our film is a parody and so we wanted to make everything as generic as possible using stereotypes to portray characters. Link here: Justification of our costume choices

Like in every dance film such as The Step Up triology and Streetdance there are always dance numbers that are featured in the trailers.

(screencaps from Streetdance trailer)

(screen caps from Step Up 2)

From this product reasearch we decided that we needed to add dance routines in our own trailer but becuase the genre of our product is a dance parody we decided that instead of making it good technical dancing like we saw in these trailers, we would make the routines comically bad because our main character is a "geek" who wants to become "street" however we don't want her to succeed so we made sure that all the dance routines are ridiculous so we can pull fun as much as possible, for instance her and her crew mistake "swing dance" as dancing on swings this adds humour to our trailer and gives little hints to the audience about what they are going to see in the film and so this hopefully will make them want to go and see it. we got the idea for dancing in the "rain" from the Step Up 2 trailer and we saw that this is way to make dance moves look "cooler" so our main character decides to dance in the "rain" however again she gets it wrong and dances in the shower instead which the audience doesn't see until the camera zooms out creating a comedic effect. and again showing the audience that she always gets it wrong and it gives the audience expectations about what the film will be about however they will be anticapating whether or not she will get it right and that is one of the reasons they will want to see the film, ffor the comedy and to see if things will ever be resolved and if she will succeed in being "street".

These hints we gave in our trailer and the fact we tried to create some form of unresloved storyline that we portrayed in our film is a common convention in not just dance flick trailers but in many real trailers.