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

Our screen grabs from our titles are following the conventions of real media products. At the beginning we inform the audience of the distributing & Production Company, we then incorporated the title of the film in at the end and then the Director’s name follows that.
We made a decision as a group not to include the titles in alongside the action as we felt that it detracted from the action and it would create a pause in the tension in which all anxiety of what is going to happen next is lost. We also experimented with putting breaks in with black screen with titles on them in-between the action but again it detracted from the sequence and gives the audience ‘time-out’, which breaks up the tension we wanted to build up.

Ace is similar to real media products of this type as we chose not to put the title over the film itself. This is also true in ‘Casino Royale’ and ‘Smokin’ Aces’ where they have put the title sequence in a cartoon sequence. The reason we decided to keep our thriller plain with just black and white was because we did not want to give too much away, so that as the sequence moves on the audience begin to understand what the films about and gain more information that they can piece together as the films plot unfolds.

In conventional media products gender representation is usual steered towards the controlling male being in charge of the situation. We decided to challenge this in our media product and go against the conventions of society. We therefore made the controlling powerful boss, a female. This can be seen as we placed her so she is sitting at the head of the poker table, surrounded by men. Simple gestures such as a ‘click’ suggests a powerful figure and the way the other male, poker players act towards her and react to her entrance also suggest they see her as a powerful, important and influential character.

In our media product Ace, we have incorporated the a 'highlighted' character, or character of interest that the sequence is mainly focused on. We have chosen to make the highlighted character an attractive male, as this is a Unique Selling Point (USP). The audience therefore will be instantly more inclined to follow and watch this characters progression throughout the sequence, without realising it.