Q2) How does your

media product represent

social groups?

-Iolo, Nathaly, Arbrie, Ana

First of all, what does representation mean?

Representation is understanding the choices that are made when it comes to portraying social groups a mass media text. It's impossible to portray every aspect of an individual in a photograph, or even in a feature film, so certain features of their personality and appearance get highlighted, and are often enhanced, when it comes to constructing the representation that the audience will see. When representing a person, media texts often focus on their:

Age

Gender

Race/Ethnicity

Financial Status

Job

Culture/nationality

Representations..

Representation is all about the producers interpretation of things, they have the power to decide how characters are going to be portrayed to the viewers e.g. you would want a princess to be wearing pink clothing if the audience should understand who they are.

Our character Ana’s emotions are all internalised, she tries to repress what has happened, and due to this she avoids the normal social stereotypes. She isn't a recluse, her character is meant to portray the majority of young people who don't actually it into social groups as obvious as in High School Musical. We wanted our short to have a genuine, easy to relate to character, she goes to parties, has a boyfriend but doesn't have a millionaire aunt and wasn’t born into royalty. This was to increase the target audience and have a bit of a more mature viewing age by having a realistic everyday character.

Teen social groups

The teen social groups we have represented in our teen movie are teenagers. Stereotypically teenagers are in relationships, they have a partner they devote their time too, therefore we used this stereotype to our advantage and done the same thing. Ana and Corey were coming back from a party during the flashback in the road scene. Teenagers like to enjoy themselves by going to parties, therefore we wanted to use this stereotype and replicated it to our own version. An example is Project X where they party, another example could be American Pie, 17 again, beastly etc. We did not use any type of other social group as we didn’t need to. It’s based on only Ana’s perspective and the flashbacks are her memories of what happened, therefore other teen social groups weren’t necessary to involve.

How did we present them?

The way we represented Ana was in a negative aspect as we showed how violent and aggressive she can be. However, the way we represented her in a negative aspect isn’t because she intentionally wanted to hurt Corey, she was fearing over the possibility of her boyfriend cheating on her. Females can relate as it’s all their biggest fear. Ana seems to not know how to handle certain situations as her We are creating a more sophisticating character by showing a characters fears, worries and concern.

Typically the media represents female teenagers as being bad, ‘hood rats’, smoking, involved in gangs or set up other people, they are loud, wear clothing that reveal a lot of skin, seen to be ‘bad’ and ‘. We didn’t want to represent our movie where these stereotypes match Ana and Corey. We have a real life example of the Riots that happened in Tottenham on August 2011 where teenagers were vandalizing buildings, breaking glass windows etc. This is an example where it heavily influenced people’s opinions on teenagers and we therefore wanted to create a sensitive reputation rather than negative. Although Corey dies, it was an accident, not deliberate which doesn’t necessarily portray Ana’s character as being much of a horrible teenager.

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