Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

GENDER, ETHNICITY, REGIONAL IDENTITY &

CLASS

• In the main task it clearly gives a stereotypical representation of a young female, as they are often portrayed as vulnerable and innocent. Through the use of long shot in the stairs scene you could see how isolated the area was and how vulnerable she is to whatever danger is to come forth.

• Furthermore her clothing if not anything else, throws her right into the stereotypical traditional feminine woman or in this case girl. They are often shown as being girly, needs rescuing, scared etc and the medium long shot shows the signifier of a pink jumper but it signifies innocence and purity which is the key thing in the opening sequence because it makes the audience want to know what will happen to her. It’ resembles the protagonist in when a stranger calls since they are both females and have similar outfits and isolated areas which connote something.

Usually the female protagonist is a white blonde haired woman or girl which is mostly seen in horrors e.g. Drew Barrymore in Scream. Although our thriller is not of the horror sub-genre we wanted to incorporate that sot of element into our opening, and pushed the stereotype into an archetype by using a black dark haired young teenage girl. The use of mid shots, long shots and close ups show this clearly.

Furthermore, the detective in our thriller is a male. Our audience can recognise that the typical male profession is seen in the opening clip with the medium close up shot. Detective is known as a males job which means our opening did not challenge any stereotypes because we also used a male to portray that profession. This is similar to the detective in Law abiding citizen which Jamie Fox played the detective Nick Rice.

Detective Nick Rice in Law abiding citizen and Detective Morris in our thriller

The detective will mainly be of white ethnicity and they are seen as good, pure, heroes or strong. But because the population in Britain has become much more diverse recently and current society is much more used to mixing with people from all different cultures and backgrounds, we used & developed the stereotype slightly by using a black male as the detective. Below is the detective in our thriller and Mark Whalberg in ‘The Departed’.

To the right is the antagonist in our thriller opening, teenager Shakilus Townsend part of a gang who killed another teenage boy and Jay from ‘Kidult hood’ who are all representative of the stereotypical male youths in north, south and east London.

The middle picture is a news report from 2009 about the Honey trap killing in south London. In addition our antagonist is young and carries out an attack on the protagonist. This presents a stereotypical negative view of youths in today’s society so our audience can relate to what is happening.

When we were choosing the gender that we wanted for our antagonist, one of our original ideas was to use a female as the antagonist and a male as the protagonist because we wanted to challenge the stereotypes but we decided to stick to the stereotypical view and use a male as the antagonist. Our antagonist is the negative stereotypical view of London youths today because they’re all seen as violent & mischievous. For example ‘Kidulthood’ the males are represented as troublesome, aimless youths. This shows through our antagonist and his clothing which are black combats and a black bomber waistcoat. But we know that not all youths are like that, some just fall into that category because of clothing.

• Within our opening, three classes are represented. • Middle class: Detective• Lower middle class: protagonist• Working class: antagonist

We used only Middle class, working class in our opening. The detective is of Middle class because of the way he is dressed which is smart and he’s in a authoritarian position in society. Whereas the protagonist is of lower working class because he looks rough and results to crime which usually comes from people who are struggling. The antagonist is of higher working class because the technology she uses which is seen as luxury items, which young adults and teenager could relate to because its the trend of society at the moment with young adults/teenagers.