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

Location- In our opening sequence we used establishi

ng and close up shots to show that our film is set in Manchester by including key features of the city such as the shops in town, th

e Printworks and The Big Wheel. This is in similarity to ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic’ as there are many shots

to show New York. We used Mancheste

r as our location in our film as it is very similar to New York as it is a lively and exciting city with a great night-life and many designer stores and shops. American programmes such as 90210 and Ugly Betty also use many establishing shots to show the location. Furthermore in the first few seconds of our opening sequence we included a shot of stores such as Selfridge's and Louis Vuitton in order to hint at the story in our film.

Title- After a group vote we chose the title 'In your dreams' for our opening sequence. We chose this as it perfectly represents exactly what our film is about especially as the first part of our film is about the character dreaming. We decided to use a bubbly font for our title as it looked dreamy and therefore symbolized the story in our film. The title and credits were written in the colour white on a black background as it would make the title and credits stand out, furthermore the colour white connotes a dream. 'Sex And The City' and 'Mean Girls' which have similar themes to our movie also have used similar fonts and colors in the title of their films.

Costumes- The costumes in our media product represent girls from ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic’ and ‘Bratz.’The girls in these movies are trendy and fashion conscious which is exactly what we wanted to portray through our protagonist. However the clothes worn by Hollywood females in American films and programmes are usually from a summer collection but we had to clothe our protagonist in clothes according to the weather in Manchester. The days we filmed it was cold but sunny outside. The sun was ideal but we had to ensure the actor was clothed appropriately as it was cold and we therefore had to put a coat on the actor instead of a dress.

Lighting- The lighting in our opening sequence is similar to many Hollywood type films or programmes as we wanted to convey a Hollywood type of feel in our movie. Programmes such as 90210 use exactly the type of lighting we attempted to create. The brightness of the lighting gives the programme a sense of summer and happiness which is what we wanted to create. This was difficult however due to the resources we had and the weather too but we tried our best.

Camera work and editing- We wanted to keep the editing and camera work as simple as possible to make our opening sequence look professional and also to look similar to the real media products we took inspiration from. We used a varied number of shots in order to keep our audience interested and to avoid boredom. We also included a fade and slow motion in our media product to again increase interest by the audience.