Evaluation Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Within our opening, the two social groups that we have clearly represented is gender and age. Within the social group age, we have specifically looked at young people. It is clear to the audience within our thriller that both our protagonist and antagonist are young people. This is because as we are young people ourselves, we felt it best to represent this age group as we have experience of it and how to portray it. Due to this experience, we were able to able to properly portray how young people would act in this situation. We also felt that we wouldn’t want to give an unrealistic representation of other age groups which is why we avoided including them. This would just lead to stereotypes and unfair representations.  We also believed that representing a group such as young people would allow us to in some way avoid any stereotypes and conventions that surround young people in the media (Kevin and Perry).  We believe after looking back at our opening that we showed young people as realistically as we could.

We also presented gender. In this case, we did conform to a main stereotype of the feminine character being subordinate and the masculine character being the dominant. This was done through the antagonist and the protagonist. Although we did not have a male as our protagonist, we did have a masculine female which undertook the role of a ‘male’. We thought that we would have this stereotypical idea to conform to the conventions of a thriller because we believe that because it is in so many thrillers consistently, it must be popular. We felt that having a male as the protagonist would also conform to the typical dominant stereotype. Although this doesn’t challenge typical conventions, we again felt that we should have a feminine character as a ‘damsel in distress’ and a masculine character as the ‘bad guy’, because it makes for popular viewing among film fans.

For our thriller opening, we did not have a specific target audience and decided to instead, try and target to population wholly. We done this by using a variety of skills and techniques within our opening, taken from a range of different thriller films that appeal to different age groups and genders. Firstly, we followed typical stereotypes of a gender. We done this because, like previously explained, we believed that this makes for popular viewing. We also then decided to use a lot of popular cuts when editing. This would include quick cuts, and longer cuts to build suspense. This would also include long drawn out sounds and quick high pitched ones when there were quick cuts. We used a variety of shots such as long shots and close ups to show the character and the facial expressions of the character. We also used point of view shots to allow the audience to get into the opening more, creating more suspense as they feel like they themselves are being effected.