How does your product represent particular social groups?

Characters

Olivia.

Gender- FemaleAge- 21

Ethnicity- white british

Class- middle

Role- Has a condition called anterograde amnesia meaning she wakes up with no memories of the previous day. She is being used for biological experiments but doesn't know about this due to her condition. She is vulnerable but wants to figure out what's going on

Samuel

Gender- maleAge- 32

Ethnicity- white british

Class- upper/ middle class

Role- Samuel is a Doctor that is doing experiments on olivia. His personality is cold and hard. He is keeping her hostage after being the one to cause her to loose her memories, He is very manipulative and manipulates her into thinking he is helping her cure her disease.

1. How have you constructed ideas about your character through mise en scene, camerawork, editing and sound?

Mise en scene

The opening sequence of movie represents very few social groups. Some examples of these are age and gender. Both male and female genders are represented with Olivia female and samuel male. Olivia is only represented as young female (21) as she doesn't know much about her past due to her condition. However, samuel can be represented as a middle age man representing the upper middle class due to a good job as a doctor as represented through olivia's flashbacks. The props and costume used by sammel it is difficult to tell that samuel is a doctor because he is wearing casual cloths when he is seen. In the room scenes, very little props are used, this is because the room is meant to be as plain and empty as possible to represent her memory. However in the flashbacks a lot of scientific equipment is used in samuel's house showing he has the wealth to have this and keep it from everyone.

1. How have you constructed ideas about your character through mise en scene, camerawork, editing and sound?

Camerawork

Camera angles can portray a lot about a character. Through the choice of camera angles we portrayed our character as vulnerable and weak. An example of this would be the opening shot was a birds eye view looking down at olivia. Looking down at someone implies that they are below other people and therefore have less power. We also used a close up of her face showing her shock of waking up. This is followed by her confusion of the location adding to her vulnerability. The fact that little props are used implies she has only very little. This show her character to have no or very little identity. Another example of vulnerability is the over the shoulder shot of samuel looking at olivia showing his dominance over her.

1. How have you constructed ideas about your character through mise en scene, camerawork, editing and sound?

EditingWe show

that Olivia is the main character through editing as she is on the screen the most of the time. Also, as samuel appears in none of the flashbacks it shows that he is not as important as a character.

Sound

Throughout the clip, a voice over of Olivia is used showing she is the main character. Her voice also sounds very scared showing her vulnerability.

Social Stereotypes in film and our Representation

In our film we have a character with mental health issues, reports of mental illness in film claim “depictions haven't moved on from the silent era, revealing that characters with a mental illness are either evil or simple, with nothing in between.” Our film instead shows a woman battling with her mental illness to save herself, when the film started the opening sequence shows her as a confused and vulnerable character and the audience at this point are not yet aware of her mental illness which is late explained.The audience are then able to come up with their own thoughts on how the story will unfold with a mentally ill character as the victim rather than the villain. Villainous characters with mental illnesses in HollyWood (Donnie Darko and Split)

Overall messages our representations construct • Our opening sequence/film suggests that troubled mentally illnesses do not make a person violent or aggressive but confused, scared and vulnerable. It also suggests that people with mental illnesses cannot be left as they vulnerable and need help or it will continue to affect them mentally. However it also has no representations of mixed race or black people which could be represented in a good way as they are not represented as bad and this is represented by a white middle class male rather than the stereotypical black lower class male; on the other hand it is very bad that there is no representation of people of colour in our clip.