Reality Show Iconics - Stylistic Conventions

Here I have print screened some shots from reality TV shows The only way is Essex, Made in Chelsea, The Hills and Big Brother to show some of the similar stylistic conventions of all four. The top two photos show the establishing shots used in Made in Chelsea and also The Hills, as you can see both use text devices to give factual and locational information about where the scenes are set.

In the bottom four photos you can see that a shot has been provided from each reality show and eachone again used a text device but this time to introduce the characters that are in these scenes. The Hills has done this since it's beginning in 2006 and this style was then adopted by the creators of The only way is Essex in 2010 and those of Made in Chelsea in 2011. Big Brother has also only just adopted this technique in its recent series on new channel 'Channel 5'.

These stylistic conventions are therefore very familiar to the genre of reality TV and my idea was to somehow incorporate this in some of the shots within my trailer to again emphasize the theme of reality TV within it. These sort of styles will attract a wider audience than just those interested in a thirller because people who are avid watchers of reality TV will recgonize them and therefore I will have borrowed their interest by capturing it in my teaser.

As you can see the angles are very high, often in the corner and on the diagonal often used in shows such as Big Brother and I'm a Celebrity get me out of here as well as for day to day life in the positioning of security cameras. Therefore these angles hold connotations of unobtrusive camera work often implying that the people being watched are unaware. It creates the fly on the wall documentary style that I want to incorporate in my teaser trailer.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, after looking into the software that is available to me I am unable to add text over images - to stop this from being a problem I will focus on stylistic conventions that I have already looked at such as the Big Brother angles.