How does your media product represent

particular social groups?By Brook, AJ, Amy, and Harriet.

What are social groups?

Social group example number one• Teenagers are often stereotyped as being thugs in hoodies that

participate in activities which are not good for health (e.g. drugs), and also committing crime.The media is the main way these stereotypes are put across. They portray teenagers in articles as yobs, and only include stories which put the teenagers in bad light.

SOCIAL GROUP EXAMPLE NUMBER TWO• MUSLIMS ARE PUT ACROSS AS TERRORISTS, THROUGH THE MEDIA. THE

JOURNALISTS WRITING THE ARTICLES SEEM TO ALWAYS HAVE MINIMAL KNOWLEDGE ON THE SUBJECT OF DIFFERENTIATING MUSLIMS FROM TERRORISTS/ISIS. THEY THEN WRITE THE STORIES ON THE BASIS OF THEIR SMALL KNOWLEDGE, AND CONFUSE THE PUBLIC. THUS NOW A LOT OF THE PUBLIC BELIEVE THE WHOLE ISLAMIC CULTURE IS ISIS, AND IT IS A POPULAR OPINION THAT THEY SHOULD BE RID OF.

• STEREOTYPES AFFECT MUSLIMS MASSIVELY, WITH EXAMPLES OF HATE CRIME, RACIAL ISSUES, DRESS CODES (PEOPLE WANTING BURQAS TO BE BANNED BECAUSE SOME TERRORISTS HID BOMBS IN THEM), AND THE PUBLIC WANTING MOSQUES TO BE BANNED.

Comparing a social group to what we represented in our media product

Samuel Loch is a schizophrenic man; mentally ill people often are represented as crazy people who are locked up in asylums, and are more likely to become psychopaths. Schizophrenic patients, such as Sam, as often put across as violent.

In ‘Friday the 13th’ a murder is committed by an ill man, and in The Silence of the Lambs an unstable man is extremely violent. Most films alike these give the sudden images in your head of someone in a straitjacket trying to escape and screaming, whilst locked in a padded room.

• We portrayed mentally ill people with reality. At the beginning of the film, Samuel Loch seems like a normal guy with no illness – alike this, most mentally ill people do not come straight off the bat as ill, in fact most of the them seem normal until you come to notice slight differences. An example of a difference is when we see Ellie Loch on the swing, and then she disappears. You stop seeing things from his perspective and see the reality, which makes you realise not everything is as it seems.

• Sam is presented as a tense character with something underlying in his memory. We know he’s tense from how he often clenches his fists, and the music suddenly becomes full of suspense.

Mise-En-Scene

Costumes play a big part in differentiating social groups, e.g. teenagers, if portrayed as thugs, wear black hoodies that cover their faces with dark tracksuit bottoms. Sam wears casual clothes which are used to show the reality.

Another big thing is the props, most of which are in Sam’s home. The props in the kitchen make it seem messy and unkempt, which, to an extent, shows mentally ill people are disorgnised.

The lighting in the product is quite bright, and coupled along with his facial expressions of smiling in a few scenes, it brings him across as a normal everyday guy you might see in public. However, bringing in his tense faces that occur every once in a while, it casts a shadow over his normality. This poses the idea that mental illness is a shadow that follows someone around everywhere they go, but sometimes when the light is brighter than ever, the shadow appears darkers; as the person realises they’re not ‘normal’, and there is something wrong. For example when Sam was in the sunny park looking tensely over the lake with Ellie in the background, he is trying deeply to forget something that keeps following him everywhere. Mental illness takes over the person, leaving the person to become a silhouette of who they used to be – they look like the same person from the outside, but the inside is muddled.

SOUND/MUSIC The music is quite often deep and slow, giving across the tense

feeling. This gives the impression that mentally ill people are troubled on the inside. It’s like a piano being played on the inside of them, and each note played sends a spiral of thoughts around them that no one else can see of hear.

Cinematography

• Some of the shots are [extreme] close ups which show Sam’s expressions in a clear manner. They are quite daunting shots which make him appear hollow and scary in the sense of ‘Is he okay? What’s he going to do? What’s wrong?’ – it makes the audience feel mentally ill people are stuck on one path; when they go one way, they act non-violently, but they can turn. They feel this because it seems Sam is going to do something frenzied when he stares into the void.

CONCLUSION• We presented mentally ill people in a realistic way, which shows how they

honestly are. This is a good way or presenting them because the audience get the message across that they are normal but have a few problems. It is less harmful for people that have mental illnesses because they do not have to explain why they aren’t going to hit someone.