2. When developing our original plan we started with some audience research as most industries will do
before bringing out a new product.
we first put out a questionnaire for 20 students in St Edmund Arrowsmith high school. This gave us the
basic ideas for what we were going to create, knowing it would appeal an audience.
After the we got the results back we found out that our main results were with male, 13-15 year olds,
that like dramas that like poppy indie music who watch TV between 5-7 and that over 50% of them
watch TV everyday.
Once we knew what our potential audience was, we started to research the genre of TV shows that
this audience tend to like. Shows like Glee, Ned’s declassified school survival guide, Waterloo road, Big
Bang theory and Inbetweeners. We realised that some of these shows were aimed an old audience
than ours would be but they include similar character that we wanted to use in our project.
We then began research on the actual projects that we had to make and found the magazines that
they have out and see what the conventions are between each one, we also did the same with the
opening clips and DVD covers
3. We did follow the conventions of real media products, starting with the main title. We chose a text
that can be associated with high school, though seen more as an American high school it does give
the a high school feel. Like with the inbetweeners and waterloo road it also starts setting the scene as
you can clearly see that in the back ground they are in some kind of class room. We also get
introduced to our main characters.
We also have individual credits for each characters real name like in Ned’s declassified school survival
guide, we have also used their idea of the text looking hand written, but we decided to take this a
step further and perhaps challenge the conventions by having the viewers physically see a hand
come and write the characters name.
we also have the final credits where we see the name of not stars but people who make the show,
e.g., Casting, Directing and written by. This is more like the Ned’s declassified school survival guide in
the sense that it is hand written but is on a white board not a piece of paper, we have also have some
small drawing and it bubbled round to make it seem informal and will appeal to a young audience
that we are targeting.
4. We used a verity of locations to film in, one to show that there is different surroundings in the show, but
as well all the locations do show that they are in a school. This could be sometimes hard to work as the
lighting in some of these areas do have an effect on the quality of the film. As you can see on our
project we struggled with some lighting issues, especially in the PE hall, even after editing we struggled
with the colours of the scene.
When filming Amy’s scene we tried to use the male gaze, a theory set by Laura Mulvey, this comes
from the idea that a camera is from a male point of view and that to go with conventions of other
television shows and have the lead girl or the “popular” girl as pretty blond girl that is dressed in a short
skirt and is not wearing her uniform in a formal way.
We only used one camera for the majority of the scenes, unlike most professional who would use a
variety of different cameras giving a number of different angles for the shots, where we had to choose
our angles first and if a clip would need more than one angle then we would have to film it in separate
actions. What we did the same as the professionals would is hold a casting session where we had a
number of different people try for the parts so we could chose who we thought was best for what part.
5. Before we had chosen the song that we were going to have for our clip we had already chosen that
we wanted an upbeat poppy rock song that not only goes with the convention of all the other shows
that we were inspired by like inbetweeners and waterloo road. The song give the audience the first
idea of what the show is going to be like , before they start watching it. We also did not want to have
the dialogue in clip as this is not a convention used in most tv openings
We then narrowed our decision down to three different songs, between “should I Stay or should I go?”,
“Are you gonna be my girl?” and “here it goes again”. We didn’t chose should i stay or should i go
know because although it is a well known song we believed it to be out of date and not as popular
with our target audience of younger people. We then decided it would not be “are you gonna be my
girl” although it is up beat and catchy we thought the song was slightly to heavy for a children's show.
Leaving our final choice to be “here it goes again” by Ok Go. We thought this song is new enough
that it would appeal to our key demographic while at the same time has the catchy up beat feel we
wanted to the film. And with it having 9,000,000 hits on Youtube we knew it was popular.
To end the song we cut the end of the song off and placed it where we wanted so that the song
ended on a logical point not on a random die out of the song.
6. When starting thinking about characters we had a look at what characters are normally found with in
these types of shows. We found that the usual types of characters that are found are geeks, chavs,
jocks, bullies emo’s and a lot of other social groups.
Instead of sticking to the convention of having a group of all these different social groups of people in
one show we decided to just to focus on one social group geeks, with some cross over in to other
social groups.
Although we have gone against most conventions of just focusing on a group of characters that are
all pretty similar, but we have gone with the convention of what people think of geeks, by which I
mean the uniforms done smartly, funny hair cuts, glasses. Another convention we followed was to
have an ethnic friend, this is to do with political awareness. The other stereotype we followed was the
popular girl who the character all like. She had to be blonde to follow the stereotype of other shows
A conventional character we choice not to include in the end was the character of the bully, only
because it would divert attention away from the main characters.