How does your media product represent particular social

groups?

Tom Astle

Representation of social groups

In the modern film industry, is it important to help the audience to identity the different characters social groups and status, to allow them to get their heads in to the film. This can be done by, the use of costume, personality, setting and general other attributes of the character. By doing this the film crew are trying to make the audience react and understand the characters in a certain way for example by using dark clothing the audience will understand the character to be evil, as black has connotations of evil and corruptness, this allows the audience to react to the character as the antagonist. We have tried to follow these conventions as to make the audience react in the way we want.

In our opening sequence, Jacob plays the main character in the film, the Antagonist( pictured right), we used dark colours for Jacobs costume as dark colours have connotations of evil and corruptness. By doing this, the audience would instantly think that he is the Antagonist as his costume causes this kind of reaction from the audience. As well as using dark clothes we tried to use old tatty clothes as well, to illustrate that the character is lower class and bellow the poverty line, adding to the depth of the characters personality, and maybe providing a motive to why he is committing the murder. We also decided to use a mask, as this would show to the audience that he wants to hide his identity, something that people who are about to do a bad thing in films usually do, we used a mask of the USSR leader Lenin, as this is mysterious and adds to the personality of the character. We have used this character in the film (who doesn’t have a name) to play the antagonist, but he also represents insanity and evil, the audience can tell this from his costume, mask and the way he doesn’t talk to his victim before he kills him, showing that he has no morals and is a truly evil person.

We also tried to make it so that the audience wouldn’t understand him completely as a character, as this added to the mysterious personality of the character. We did this by making it so you will never see the character without a mask on, and never not in dark clothing. We wanted the audience to react to this character by wondering who he/she was, what they wanted, and why are they so clearly insane.

Jacob’s costumeMask to hide face

Dark clothes to show evil

Gloves to hide fingerprints

In our opening sequence, Jacob plays the main character in the film, the Antagonist( pictured right), we used dark colours for Jacobs costume as dark colours have connotations of evil and corruptness. By doing this, the audience would instantly think that he is the Antagonist as his costume causes this kind of reaction from the audience. As well as using dark clothes we tried to use old tatty clothes as well, to illustrate that the character is lower class and bellow the poverty line, adding to the depth of the characters personality, and maybe providing a motive to why he is committing the murder. We also decided to use a mask, as this would show to the audience that he wants to hide his identity, something that people who are about to do a bad thing in films usually do, we used a mask of the USSR leader Lenin, as this is mysterious and adds to the personality of the character. We have used this character in the film (who doesn’t have a name) to play the antagonist, but he also represents insanity and evil, the audience can tell this from his costume, mask and the way he doesn’t talk to his victim before he kills him, showing that he has no morals and is a truly evil person.

We also tried to make it so that the audience wouldn’t understand him completely as a character, as this added to the mysterious personality of the character. We did this by making it so you will never see the character without a mask on, and never not in dark clothing. We wanted the audience to react to this character by wondering who he/she was, what they wanted, and why are they so clearly insane.

In our opening sequence, we got Grady to play the victim. We used Grady to play the character as we thought he best reflected the target audience which was 15+ males, by reflecting the target audience it would appeal more to them as they can see themselves in the character. For Grady’s costume, we wanted to try and represent the modern day teenager, we used a Jack Wills jumper to show that he is upper class and young. We made sure that this was a bright colour as well as his other clothes, as bright colours have connotations of innocence and purity, showing that Grady is the protagonist. We also used a iPod as a prop, we used this to show the technological dependence that many teenagers (even including me) heavily rely on technology in their every day life, and can’t simply enjoy walking the dogs and the scenery with out music being played.

We also showed that Grady was from a rural background, as it is common for rural people to walk their dogs in the woods/fields. We thought that using common factors that related to our target audience e.g. Designer clothes, similar age, MP3 players. That they would feel as if they could relate to this character, we wanted the audience to react positively to this character as the protagonist, and feel anger towards the antagonist when he kills Grady, setting the audience up for the remainder of the film.

Grady’s character also has certain cultural signifiers which are certain attributes that people from different cultures have, for example we can see Grady is English from the fact that he is walking his dog through the woods, something that in other cultures isn’t seen as completely common.

Grady’s costumeBright designer jumper

Headphones to show technological dependence of teens

How does my media product represent particular social groups?

Whilst planning we had a clear idea of the different social groups we wanted to include and represent in our opening sequence. We represented teenagers by the use of Grady, we used his costume, props and appearance to represent this. We used designer clothes to represent teenagers as this is a common stereotype that teenagers always want/ wear the latest fashions. Teenagers were also involved in our target audience, so by representing their social group they can see themselves in the characters and will want to watch it more.

With Jacobs character there isn’t really a social group represented as he is a very strange and unique individual character. So the only particular social group we have represented is the teenagers, who are also our target audience, we represented teenagers through the use of Grady’s character and costume.