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

There are many conventions of short films which I both used and developed upon. One convention of short films is that they have very few characters, as it would be impossible to adequately introduce lots of different characters into a film which is so short; this is something I implemented in my short. I have very few characters in my film; only the title character, Barbie, and Ken have a back story as it would be impossible to go into detail about every character’s life history, as that would turn a short into a longer film breaking another convention. The length of a short film is probably one of the most important conventions as in order for a film to be classed as a short it needs to be between 3-30 minutes long. My film does conform to this convention as it is only just under 4 minutes long.

Another convention of a short film is that this is a twist in the story; my whole film is full of storyline twists. In order to keep the audience laughing my storyline keeps them guessing adding shock value. It is not the typical Barbie and Ken story, the whole thing is a twist – the atypical Barbie story flipped on its head. The story is the opposite of what you’d expect, just what a successful short film aims to do.

I wanted to emulate a comedy style mockumentary, in order to understand the conventions of this genre I researched it thoroughly. By looking at other films in the mockumentary genre, one in particular being from the creators of “Funny or Die” videos. Many of these videos are mockumentaries or comedy shorts, taking ordinary situations and flipping them on their hear making them unexpected and amusing just like how I wanted my film to come across. One short film in particular I looked at was “Home For Actresses” this is a short documenting a home where actresses go to learn their craft, it is a documentary style short but it is comedic.

As my short is a stop motion film I challenged one of the conventions of this genre by incorporating an element of live action within the stop motion. Most of my film is stop motion however, I made it a film within a film adding the conversation with the Real Life Barbie, this does not conform to other stop motion or mockumentary short films.