Using conventions of real texts

With my foundation portfolio our chosen genre was black comedy which proved quite difficult to research. Myself and my group analysed films that fitted within our genre of black comedy. These included 'Mr and Mrs Smith', 'Bad Santa', and 'With nail and i'. Through the use of the World Wide Web we researched the plots of these films and used different characteristics from the films to interpret the conventions. For example we found through our research that most black comedy's tend to have a significant occurrence that disturbs the 'happiness' of the film. This in turn means that the 'disasterous' event is flipped to be seen in a funny side. Furthermore, dark comedy tends to use dark, depressing and serious themes that in turn are made to be quite humorous. The mise en scene of black comedy tended to be quite naturalistic and not too specific. For example the setting of a home or outside in a garden. In our production we used this convention of setting the scene in a home where the main character lived. Also, we included the satire of having a serious event turned into something quite funny with our protagonist clearly lying to our interviewer. Another main convention that we discovered during our research was the personality of our main character. We found that there is a big emphasis on the character being clueless to how they are being portrayed and often being the centre of attention for humour. With the camera angles we used interview style approach towards the characters ( taken from Mr and Mrs Smith), and a lot of medium shots so the shoulders were shown upwards. We also used a high and low angle at the top and bottom of the stairs to add the humorous angle for the audience when our actress fell down the stairs.

Where our advanced portfolio was concerned we researched into similar videos that fitted our genre. These included Eminem, Tyler the Creater's 'Yonkers' and most importantly, Tupac's 'Ghetto Ghospel'. These gave us conventions for the mise en scene and a common location that came up were the streets or places of religion. Therefore, we used both of these conventions to keep our piece strong. Furthermore, we found that the conventions of hip hop were very strongly based around religion. Tupac's video helped us thoroughly with this. There was a strong pattern of religious symbols and places of worship, alcohol, drug usage and an emphasis on struggle in life. We applied all of these conventions to our piece especially the use of struggle and religion. This can be seen prominently throughout our music video piece. The use of religion in our video was reinforced with regular symbols of cross necklaces, cross gestures and Jesus statues. Similar conventions were seen in Tupac's video as a church and a priest was used.

With AS foundation portfolio we used the conventions of black comedy much less than we did with hip-hop at advanced portfolio. With our advanced portfolio our researched conventions actually shaped the piece with locations, characters and characteristics and plot. Whereas with our black comedy conventions we used the characteristics of the convention very loosely. For example we didn't use specific characters suited to any convention, it was just fitting with the storyline.