How does your product represent particular social groups?Adam Lancaster – Media Studies

What characters have you included in your film and what social groups do they represent?

The female character in our opening represents a young English teenage girl who is studying at college, who is of a middle class. She is shown to present herself in a good manor by dressing up nicely and doing nice makeup, looking to impress.  She is shown to be on her phone like most teenage girls and the majority of the opening scene is her on it. Our female character is innocent and has been made to look this way as it is a common convention through Phycological Thrillers and we thought we would use that convention in our work and make our female character innocent and helpless.

Our female character being on her phone and trying to look nice represents the majority of teenage girls that are attending college of this era. This makes our opening relatable to many teenage girls and to our target audience.  

Our first male character in our opening, represents a dark and evil character of a stalker. He isn't a relatable character however this is our aim to make him someone that you can not relate as he is such a strange and weird character.  We made him out to represent an evil character so that it shows the opposite to the innocent female, and is a Thriller convention that the male character is the creepy and scary one.

We decided to dress him in a way that it wasn’t too obvious that he was a bad character at the start to create suspense and so that it didn’t give it away to soon, however by dressing him in all black helped the audience suggest that he is an evil and bad minded character. 

What characters have you included in your film and what social groups do they represent?

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

We manipulated the audiences perception of the male character, me by wearing black clothing making the audience think that I am a bad and dark character. This was also perceived by the use of the lighting, which was made dull and dark so that it gave the effect that he was spooky.

However with the female character, was shown in a happy light, with good and bold lighting showing that she is positive and is meant to be perceived as happy.

We used the idea of Mise en scene to create our bathroom so that it relates to the characters by using props such as makeup brushes and mirrors so that it is like a stereotypical teenage girls bathroom so they can relate.

Editing also played a huge role in portraying ideas behind our characters, whenever I, the bad character was seen on screen we use dull and dark lighting and at some points used effects to create spookiness. 

We represented the girl as a middle class teenager as she is dressed well and stereotypically to this gender at this time.

To what extent are your character representations typical of your film's genre?

The characters in our film opening deviate from real life films of the same genre. 

With our genre of Phycological Thrillers it is typical for the male characters to be scary and the evil one and if so to wear dark clothing to show that, perhaps with sometimes a mask or even a full scary costume, however we did not use props like these with ours as we felt that it did not suit our beginning however films of the same genre do still do that. 

In what ways do your representations reinforce or challenge social stereotypes?

Our opening of our final piece shows that there are stalkers out there and that it is mostly because of social media and phones. We used the idea of Text messages as a creepy and spooky effect as we thought it'd be relatable and is scary. We represent stalkers in a negative light using dark lighting and eary music to show that they are not nice.

Our female character is represented well as stereotypes, as the way she dressed and acted is relatable to teenage girls. We used upbeat and high-key lighting when filming our female actress to show this.