Vladimir Propp's Theory

A typical list of characters that show up in most movies

- The hero 

- The villain

- The donor

- The dispatcher 

- The false 

- The helper 

- The princess 

The Vampire Diaries

1) The hero - the heroine of the film, saviour. 

Matt, Stefan and Damon

Throughout the episodes, Matt saves a lot of people being the only human and risks his life to save his friends. 

Stefan saves Elena right at the beginning of the show when her car is thrown off a bridge. 

Damon risks his life for many others and kills the very powerful witch Kai. 

2) The Villain - the one that competes and struggles against the hero.

Kai, Silas etc...

Kai is a powerful witch who kills his whole family and is sent into a mortal hell but releases himself to complete his mission and kills his sister but is defeated by Damon (the hero)

Silas is also a very powerful witch who possesses a number of people and pretends to be them in order to get the blood of the doppelgänger (Elena) who is good.

3) The donor - the one who gives the hero help in order for them to complete a mission

Bonnie 

Bonnie helps the heroes by making a spell in order for them to have a daylight ring so when they go out in the light they won't burn (she gives it to Caroline who is also a minor hero) 

4) The dispatcher 

Klaus 

Klaus sends Stefan off on a quest to turn his humanity off and kill as many people as he can possible in order for him to be a 'proper' vampire. It can be argued that Klaus is also a villain but he changes half way through and ends up helping a lot of people. 

5) The false hero 

Katherine Pierce

She pretends to be Elena because she is her doppelgänger so takes advantaged of this but ends up getting exposed and Elena forces her to swallow the cure to become a human and no longer has her powers 

6) The helper 

Damon and Alaric

They both help find Stefan when he has been taken by Klaus, they help under the order from Elena as she still has hope that she will find him.

7) The princess

Caroline 

Caroline is the princess as she identifies all the villains but also falls in love with the villain Klaus after he changed to a good person, she sees the good in everyone. 

Using conventions of real media texts

Post Production

Research and Planning

Research and planning:

- Looked at different films of the same genre (John Tucker Must Die, Mean Girls, Heathers, Legally Blonde, The Back Up Plan, Wild Child, Bring It On and She's The Man) For the genre codes, soundtrack ideas and title font ideas.

- Also looked at films of a different genre (The Hunger Games) to compare all of the above, found that the mood e.g. the colour of the settings and the weather was very dark in contrast to happy, bubbly teen movie genres. The soundtrack was also very different it was more dark and low toned music to represent the action adventure mood of the opening, compared to the teen movie genre in which the music was very upbeat and high tones for example the opening of Wild Child.

- We also looked at these films for props ideas and found that the girl characters in these films used props like makeup, handbags, phones and diaries etc... again, compared to The Hunger Games where it was totally different as the main characters at the beginning has a bow and arrow to fit with the action adventure genre of the movie. (MISE EN SCENE)

- We did audience feedback videos of teenagers and children who our target audience was and gained a lot of feedback about what they liked and how we could improve however, we could have asked people who weren't our target audience to see the contrasting views.

- We had quite poor organisation skills as we completely forgot to include one of our characters in the
storyboard and wasted a whole filming day trying to improvise and it turned out really poorly so we had to film her part at school after we did a decent amount of planning.

- We forgot the back up battery and didn't have a charger for the first one, luckily Sophie had her own camera which we used however, if it wasn't for her camera we would have been another day wasted without a decent camera.

Creativity

Digital Technology