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

In choosing the Gangster genre we were subscribing to a very iconic and powerful series of conventions, archetypes and devices. This was encouraging for us, not because we necessarily had a basic template ready to use, but because in creating our trailer we would be able to conform to, stretch, and outright break them.

Because the genre focuses on several fundamentals, such as group psychology, relationships, sacrifice and hierarchy, it is a very interesting genre to play with. Renowned directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese were of much inspiration to us because of the footprint their films have left on Gangster films produced since.

We produced a short theatrical trailer, a magazine front cover, and a promotional poster. We researched and annotated several crime and gangster trailers, posters, and magazine covers.

We quickly gathered that gangster films are anchored heavily to the alpha-male characteristics of competition and violence. This phallocentricity is something we found very interesting. When we look back at one of the earliest 'gangster' texts, Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet", both the main characters have equal parts to play in the war between their families. Since our plot had similar themes to R&J, we wanted to take this a step further and thus we chose to have a woman as our protagonist.

Whilst not resisting theinevitabe primarily male audience, we hoped to attract more women by the main character being faster, stronger willed, and more intelligent than the male gangsters.

Many gangster films are of Italian-American focus. While we were keen to have a British setting (being better known to us and more achievable), the strong Italian views on 'family' were something we wanted to draw on from other films. An example of this can be found in the Godfather, a famous '70's Italian-American gangster film:

As is convention, we filmed in urban areas. This is visible in the skyline on our poster and the trailer itself. Guns are also a powerful symbol or 'action code' in films of this genre, so they featured in all our tasks.

We cast my father as the father, who in Italian-American (IA) gang films tends to be the leader. We used him for his age and build, similarly to what we had seen numerous times in our research.

The genre tends to be characterised by large male casts, special effects, and specific props and sets. Since little of this was available to us, we had to improvise a bit but tried to keep it as true as possible to the genre.

In our characterisation of the assassin, we decided that although he was a conventional and ruthless hitman, he would have compassion and treat the protagonist with a certain amount of respect. This was not particularly visible in the trailer, but would have been present had we produced a feature-length film, and would have challenged convention.