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

When creating our film we had to concentrate on a certain genre to focus our planning and development. We reviewed many films, and sitcoms and used elements from them to stimulate our ideas. Films such as ‘Borat’ use some similar conventional elements, such as the narration of the protagonist, in some ways Borat is like Anoop, as he is telling the audience about his own life and narrating the events. The comedic documentary style is a rare theme but has been explored in some media products. We tried to make our film have theme of 'social realism', meaning we want the audience to feel sympathy for Anoop and the challenges he faces, but also feel pride in his ambitions to become a film maker. Sitcoms such as ‘come fly with me’ helped us to model our characters and we used elements of the style and structure, such as the voice over introductions, to aid our production and help to develop our film with similar conventions to real media products.

We also reviewed lower budget films such as ‘Anita and me’ (with a budget of £3million) to take elements of the cost cutting production and insert them into our own film, as we wanted to make our film have a low budget, debut film feel. We did this in our titling, where we used titles such as “India productions” which showed that this is possibly a lower budget production, with an unknown production company which is not a part of any big conglomerate companies. We wanted the ethnic theme to seem as though it was a film produced to raise awareness about different ethnic minorities and challenge racial stereotypes by mocking them, which shadows real media products such as the film 'four lions'.