Evaluation Q2

2.) How does you media product represent particular social groups?

Representing social groups was always a key point for our group that we wanted to consider carefully. This is because we wanted to target the right audience, but did not want to leave anyone left feeling excluded, overlooked or mis-represented. We closely considered:

1) Age
2) Gender
3) Class
4) Ethnicity
5) State of Mind

1) Firstly we thought about age, and soon decided that as our film was to be targeted at teenagers and young adults, that should be the age of the actors. We felt that this type of storyline would not only work better with younger actors, but it just would not appeal to middle aged adults. Consequently they do not feature as central roles in the film because we agreed that this would be likely to put off a younger audience.

2) Gender was also a big factor, especially with two girls in our group. We looked at many films and found a trend of a male villain, male protagonist and female victim such as ‘Goldfinger’ 1964. This was definitely a stereotype we needed to break. We definitely wanted a female villain, as this has barely been done before and connotes that girls can be tough as well. Our actress connotes strength and confidence. But then we also decided to have a female victim so as not to just show women in a bad light, and it also helped us move away from the typical battle of the sexes theme. Our actress connotes vulnerability and innocence.

3) We thought about class a lot as this determined where we shot our footage. In the first section the road is in a middle class area with pretty big houses. While this was shot at a group member’s house, we realise that this is not the norm for everyone. But we realised this does fit in with our story, as if the mother was living in a very small council flat it would not make sense for her to be sent a ransom, as the villain would know she doesn’t own that kind of money.

4) Additionally we had to think quite carefully about ethnicity. We felt we definitely needed more than one race in our opening. This is because it is set in London, a very multi cultural city, so it makes the sequence more realistic and believable to have a multi racial cast. To stick to conventions we chose Siân a white, blonde female to play the victim. We used a mixed race female as the main character and the villain, not just because she is a great actress but because had a great look that could be adapted to look innocent and vulnerable at the beginning, but also tough and merciless when her true colours are revealed. We used the actresses this way round because we felt that if we had used the white girl as the villain and the ethnic girl as the victim, the audience would immediately presume it a racist attack, which is not the theme of our film.

5) Furthermore we had to represent state of mind effectively in our opening. Samantha obviously has mental problems to want to do this to her family and friends. However we didn’t want to represent her mental disorder with ‘craziness’. We tried to make it more subtle and did this by showing her extreme cunningness, and the complexity of the plan she is trying to get away with.