Evaluation - Question 2 - Amy Homewood

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

There are two specific social groups shown within our film, age and teengers

The two mains charaters we are introduced to during a longshot and close up. This show us this by the different technical codes of media filming (camera work, sound, mise en scene and editing).

Age

lseajh is portraying a teen or young adult if you'd prefer, by wearing casual clothing throughout that fits the 'effortless' look that teenagers have nowadays. Within the ending of the sequence, we presented the protagonist alongside 2 other male characters within a education enviroment. Here the protagonist is dressed in a navy coat. Whilst the other two boys are dressed in hoodies, again having connotations of a commodious attitude. 

the typical teenage look

We also wanted to portray the type of teenager that our protagonist would be. The main idea that we came up with was him smoking, this would show the effects of his mothers death to him and using smoking as a excapism. As in the UK, you cannot legally smoke till 16, we wanted to portray our protagonists age through this. 

screenshot taken from our final piece

Gender

Iseajh is portraying the antagonist as a male. This is genuinely typical for an thiller, this is because they're usually stereotyped. Males are often seen as the bread winners and the dominant gender within society, this is often portrayed through the conventions used in thriller films. Males are often used as both the antagonist and protagonist in films most of the time as it's thought that males are the strongest gender and therefore fitting to be both villains and heroes whilst females need to be protected and rescued. 

both male characters

Status

We thought the use of the older aged male character being the protagonist would insure that there is a status change between them. Which is ever so slight but no enough to pick up on as we did not show it well enough. You can only see the status between the protagonist and antagonist through a low angle shot, to where the antagonist is standing behind but above the protagonist which shows the relationship between the two characters. 

protagonist on the floor- antagonist standing

Improvements

I personally think that one of the factors we could improve upon within our sequence is the use of representations throughout in each social group. The way our particular thriller is done insures that there isn't much representation needed however we could have thought a lot more about it and how clearly we could get it across to the audience by using different actors and different types of shots. 

If I was to do this again then I would focus a lot more on the status difference than we portrayed throughout, I would place the antagonist as a much older man (affecting age as well as gender) therefore could place them within a higher statued circle.