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

When we first began the process of brainstorming ideas for our film opening we looked at multiple different genres, we chose the gangster genre because we all felt that it would be a fun yet challenging opening to create. In our planning process we all wanted to try and steer away from typical American gangster films and go more with a British twist. We decided on to try and create a film that did not use all of the obvious conventions as a typical film from this genre in order to create an interesting and original piece that differed from other films already on the market; promoting RAMM productions as a brand that produces things that aren’t typical or already made by the various already established production brands. However in order to make sure that our film is clear of the genre we still wanted to use a few of the expected conventions. We began by recognising the conventions that are typical of this genre and the conventions we found were;

• The gangster is usually an immigrant who hasn’t done well going to honest route (i.e been to school and got a good job) so has turned to crime in order to get a higher status
•  The story usually takes place in the big city-with seedy alley ways and busy streets
•  The only loyalty the gangster feels is to his own immigrant roots
• Success of the gangster is measured by material goods-flashy cars, expensive clothes etc..
• The gangsters antagonist is society and the enforcers of the law i.e - The police, the FBI etc..
• The end justifies a means

To begin with we began to think about what kind of characters we wanted our film to feature, to do this we thought about what age group we wanted our film to be aimed at. Most typical gangster films are aimed at older audiences therefore feature the more typical ‘old school’ gangsters however we thought we would create one that was aimed at people who are of younger generations. To do this we planned for our film to feature characters in which the audience could relate to; therefore we chose to have our film featuring young gang members as the gangsters as opposed to typical Al Capone style gangsters, wearing tracksuits and hoodies as opposed to typical suits and cigars. Our main character (Jay) further challenges the typical stereotype that gangsters only turn to crime as a last resort to achieve a higher status because he has opportunities – goes to a good school, with a strong family, he just is lead astray by his friends and takes the wrong decisions which causes him to end up in the position he is.

By choosing to do a film about young gang members not only does it challenge the typical character conventions of the genre but it enabled us to also challenge the typical inner city location that is usually expected of the genre. By using young gang members we thought it would look more appropriate to use a more urban setting. Being located on the outskirts of London it would have been easy for us to choose a very busy location within the city to create the typical gangster film setting however we decided to use a more urban location based on the idea that young youths who live in many estates around Britain are perceived by many as the modern day gangster; therefore we would try to find somewhere that looked like a place where these ‘youths’ can be found.

We also decided to challenge typical convention of the success of a gangster being shown by material items because in our film, the youths shown clearly are not of huge wealth and do not have flashy items, instead they are fighting for territory and their success is shown by their territory.

Even though our film challenges some aspects of typical conventions is also does use some. The antagonists featured in the film (TAGS) are the enforcers of the law and they are trying to stop the gang warfare on the streets, which is similar to in typical gangster films where gangsters are always shown against police. Also, The only loyalty that the gang members feel that are shown within the film is to their fellow gang members and they fight for their own which is conforming to the typical convention of gangsters loyalty to their own immigrant roots.