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

Looking through the different types of British Gangster films we came across many different conventions. The first main one was the voice over that we came across in many of the films I watched, this would be ‘The Business’. The voice over in the films spoke about the life the gangsters were leading, or bad things in which has happened to them. We decided to use a voice over in our piece and ours was telling the audience about the loss in which the characters had experienced. This was the loss of everything they had. The conventions of crime in British Gangster films was high and came up in the opening sequences of all films I watched. If it was showing the killing of someone or showing a fight between two characters there was always conflict being shown. Our media product showed crime when one of the characters was shot in our piece. The conventions of language in British Gangster films was high rated and a lot of unnecessary swearing was being used. This is where we began to think of where swearing would have to be used effectively, as a group we believed that swearing had to be put in as ALL British Gangsters films we see had a lot of unnecessary language.

Music in our media product was hard to find, Music in British Gangster films we realised as a group was music from artists that are big, and not music in which is just music from a musical instrument. As a group we decided to challenge the music of a traditional British Gangster movie and used music that was from a musical instrument. As a group we decided this still worked pretty well and it fitted in all ok. We challenged the music so that our media product would be that little bit different from other British Gangster films.

The conventions of characters in British Gangsters were that ‘Men’ were the leading characters and women were either the wives or girlfriends. We challenged this form of convention and had a women who was playing a lead as a gangster. This changed the convention and made our groups media piece very different. Women in British Gangster films I see as lower in social class and there husbands were the ones who earned the money and they are represented in a way in which I see them as always with their friends and always spending the money. Changing the conventions of characters, as a group we was able to see how it would come across in a bigger film if a women was a main gangster. It was very different as we as a group always see women as nothing in British Gangster films . This is how knew that showing the end of our piece would work. We decided to show the bank scene which was the main reason the gangsters lost everything they had as they managed to mess it up. An introduction to the characters was shown so the audience would be able to know who was who. The end of our film was shown with the killing so the audience were wondering why did they kill him. This challenged the original conventions of the sequence in which the film is shown. Our main task sticks to the main conventions of our genre British gangster as the way in which the crime is represented the killings and the violence is all shown. On the other hand our piece does move away from the main conventions of British Gangster as in our media product we have a women as a main character which goes away from the main convention of British Gangster movies.