2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?

By Grady Wing

Representation of social groups

It is important that film directors make it easy for the audience to get their head around what social groups are in film. This is mostly done by what the characters are wearing as that’s the easiest way for social group to be shown. But you can also do this by personality, setting and general attributes of the character. They do this by using light clothing to representing innocents; this allows the audience to react to the character as protagonist.

My ClothingIn our opening sequence I played the victim as we all thought he was best for the job and that it would be easy for the audience to understand what social group it was, this was 16+. For my clothing we decided that I would wear a Jack Wills jumper to show upper class and youth. We chose bright colours as it shows innocents and purity and these shows that I’m the protagonist. We also used an IPhone and headphone to show that the youth are all up to date with all the latest technological dependence and that they can’t go anywhere without it. Black Vans are very popular these days as so many young people wear them so this would also show the youth and make the social group clear to the audience. I’m shown as an upper class teenager.

Jacob’s ClothingIn our opening sequence Jacob plays the role of the attacker, the antagonist. Dark colours represent evil so we described that Jacob would wear all black and dark blue clothing as you can see in the picture to the left. This would help to audience spot that he is the antagonist straight away. You can tell that he is lower class from wearing tatty old clothes and that he is poor and needs money; this would be why he would need to commit this crime. We decided to use the mask of Lenin as this would hide the identity of the attacker so the audience wouldn’t be able to tell who it is. We made it so you would never see his face within the opening sequence as this builds up suspense. We made Jacob the antagonist wear gloves to make it seem more like a crime as most people would wear gloves when going to commit a crime to hide all the finger prints.

My media product represent particular social groups?

In our opening sequence we want to make it clear with the different social groups in it, to make it clear that Grady was the youth social group and Jacob was the strange and weird guy with no friend’s social group. We showed this with the different colours of clothing and different props that suited that character and made him look like the common stereotype of what teenagers wear. We did this to connect with that social group.

Jacob’s characters doesn't’t really have a social group as he is a strange character so we didn't’t target this at anyone. So the main social group we target throughout the sequence was teenagers from using the costume that I was wearing during the sequence.