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

“They have many typical features and are often set on rugged rural terrain with a central plot revolving around conflict between good vs evil or rich vs poor. Some typical elements in them include guns and gunfights- often on horseback, shootouts, horses, human massacres, open landscapes and the characters wear distinctive western clothing (denim, jeans, boots, cowboy hats etc). The heroes are generally local lawmen, cowboys ranchers or army officers that are both courageous, tough and moral and independent. They stand alone against danger (often outlaws) and display physical skills such as horse-handling and gun-play.”   (From a previous post)

We tried to use what we’d found out from our research to make our western opening conform to the conventions of others. We tried to incorporate some of them into our opening like the chase and horses.

 Doing the research and having the list of conventions to follow gave us some initial ideas which we then developed during filming. Some aspects changed dramatically like the way the horse scene was filmed as during filming we discovered that it would be harder than we first thought. As a result of this our final product differs in many ways to our initial storyboard.  I found out that there are three main types of westerns; Classic (shooting Indians, back hat bad guys Vs white hat good guys), Revisionist (different representation of white cowboys, fighting each other etc) and Post Modern (looking at change in woman’s role, made with audiences’ knowledge of previous westerns in mind). I had thought ours would fit into the classic sub-genre as its good Vs bad however when thinking about it further I realised it fits better into the Post Modern sub-genre as its made in modern times and the role of women is shown differently with the woman being the character stealing the money instead of the man who would have typically done the bad deed in an earlier form of western.

Although we used, developed and conformed to some we also challenged some of the conventions. When watching our finished piece we realised that we had broken the 180⁰ rule. We did think about re-filming this however it was brought to our attention that we were not the only ones to have broken this rule. John ford also broke it many times in one of the first western films Stagecoach (1939)

As a result of this it meant that we had accidentally challenged a generic convention of filming yet also inadvertently conformed to a convention of one of the first westerns.

Other than this we do not particularly challenge the conventions of westerns. One difference between our opening and other westerns is that in the openings we watched it was clear from the beginning who the antagonists are where as in ours at first the consumer would assume that the woman was the antagonist as she is the one stealing the money. However I think that by the end of the opening it has been made clear that she is not and that (because of the last shot) it is the two men that are.

Finally we chose the name Annex to fit with the western genre s it is the western word for 'To Steal' , we had originaly thought of calling it something like 'Stealing' but this didn't fit with the western feel but we felt that by using the western word for it it fitted perfectly with the genre and our work.

I think that were it to be developed into a whole film following our planned narrative structure it would have been clear to the audience from early on who the antagonist are (considering that our opening is only 2 minutes long).