Question One

O1.

In what ways does you media product USE, DEVELOP or CHALLENGE forms and conventions of real media products?

The Brit-Crime-Comedy genre is what we used to develop our current media product, and with the likes of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, Revolver, Rock n Rolla, Layer cake and The Bank Job, we had a lot of stimuli to work with. The generic audience expectations for Switch were witty comedy, slick dialogue, sharp suits, scams, heists and large gangster types. Using these elements we created a film within that genre but we also challenged it by adding a slapstick comedy twist as we could not provide the witty and slick dialogue due to our ‘silent film’ brief.

Initially seen as an obstacle, the silent film brief later enabled us to explore many different characters, styles, directors and music. Characters like Laurel and Hardy, Delboy and Rodney and Dumb and Dumber were classic comedy duos that we researched and developed upon to create our comedy duo Frank and Charlie. These three classic duo often had one that was cleverer than the other, yet they were both undoubtedly idiots, and this was something we definitely played on. Frank and Charlie are dim-witted cousins who only have each other for friends, and Frank, much like Delboy comes up with all their money making schemes whilst Charlie just plays along blindly. The challenge for us was trying to capture the comedy that Delboy and Rodney deliver, which comes mainly from their dry and witty humour. However, since our film had to be silent it was important that our characters body language had to be very exaggerated much like previous work of comedians, like Abbott, Laurel and Hardy and Chapin, in 1920s silent films.

The narrative structure of our film was changed to non-linear in the post production stages as we thought it would be interesting to show the end of the film at the beginning to give the audience a shock and to keep them intrigued from start to finish. This structure is often used in films of a similar crime/action genre. Vantage Point (2008) is a prime example as it retells an assassination from 8 different vantage points which is part of the attraction as the audience want to find out the ending. Nevertheless, we developed on the structure by lacing slapstick comedy throughout which is often lost in crime/action genre with films like Vantage Point, Reservoir Dogs and Lucky Number Slevin which all had some influence in Switch .

In addition, the sound effects and soundtracks used for Switch were highly inspired by other films within our genre and for research we often watched film and trailers to listen to the sounds used in similar scenes that feature in our film. One scene in particular was a slow motion strutting scene, seen in Superbad (2007)

The funky soundtrack is cheesy and add comic effect as the two characters clearly think they look cooler than they actually are. This was a direct scene that we tried to replicate for Switch but developed on it by actually dressing Frank and Charlie well in smart suits, which is a common accurance in crime comedies. We also used the fast paced action