Evaluation part 1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

For our main piece, we chose a fantasy genre. We thought about the conventions of this and how well we could stick to it. Fantasy often includes mythical or medieval looking scenery, such as forests or castles, and has farfetched narratives and characters, who are always on some kind of quest our journey for a main reason, or each character for their own reason. According to Propp's archetypes these characters are always a certain way (although they can be combined) for example villain, hero, donor/helper and princess, to name a few. We watched several fantasy film openings just to get a rough idea what they include. This included Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban, Pirates of the Caribbean - At Worlds End and Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers. These all had fantasy settings - vast mountain ranges, forests, and well spoken characters. The settings can at some points seem very bright and we didn't want this, we wanted a slightly grittier feel, as seen in Pan's Labrynth. One could also say we got elements of our narrative from The Chronicles of Narnia, as our character falls asleep in a wardrobe and wakes up in an alternate world. In our main task we used similar language to what is used in fantasy films, and tried to recreate the scenery - we made our own forest due to the cameras microphones not being suitable for a real forest. We thought this helped us get the grittier fantasy feel, like with Pan's Labrynth and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. We followed propp's archetypes even though we just had the first two minutes of film - We had a hero/princess (the main character in this case) and a helper (the Hung-Helper). We stuck to the conventions of most fantasy films, with our speech, character archetypes, setting, and narrative. However we deviated slightly in a few ways. The main character is commonly male. With ours it was a female. Also we had a slightly darker full story. This isnt unseen in fantasy, but not exactly common. We did this by including darker things, such as abusive parents and death (although the death was cut out of the 2 minutes, it would have appeared in the film, had we made it all). Also Propp's archetype wouldn't normally see a princess kind of character mixed with the hero, as it is usually the heroes job to save the princess. But this time it is the heroes job to save herself, in a way. This is deviating not only propp's archetypes but also fantasy conventions.