1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e. of film openings)

The stereotypes about gender are that men are predominantly stronger than women. From our research we have found out that in the crime genre men are seen as the emotion less, muscle men like the father from Taken or James Bond. While women stereotype are represented, as typical housewife who takes care of the kids. We as a group did not like the way women were represented in society, like a damsel in distress. So originally we were going to mimic this generic convention of having the male protagonist, however we came to a conclusion to make the female the main character because of the way women were represented. Therefore we decided to make the protagonist a woman, who is a respectable individual with a job in a high-class area with money, control and power. The way we showed this is through the Mise-En-Scene with her costume of high heels, smart clothing like a blazer, pair of glasses and even her femininity through make up and lipstick (we emphasised this by close ups). Our character ‘Bobbie’ made her look strong willed as it was dark and she was by herself and in addition her boyfriend gets kidnapped/mugged so the male in this case is reliant on Bobbie to save him. So in our film opening we are subverting the stereotype that women are weak and men are dominant and strong.  

In my opinion I think we made a mistake because during our whole film opening we had the strong female continuously calling her husband and we made her sound worried. If I did this again I would have done one voice mail so the audience know how she is connected to her.

We chose our antagonist to look intimidating and look like people who can be easily represented as the bad guys. We had a theme of subverting the stereotype e.g. women who is independent and strong. But we didn’t realize that black males are stereotyped negatively in urban London so it was not our intentions to have black males as our antagonists. A soon as we realized it was too late as we were very close to film our 1st draft, and we had no time to change the ethnicity of our bad guys because after our teachers gave us our feedback our deadline was very close so we had to stay with our characters because no one else was willing to act for us so we were under pressure so we stayed with the black males. If I was to do this project again and we had a theme of subverting the stereotype I will defiantly choose antagonist who are Asian/white because in society they are stereotyped as innocent civilians.

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our media group represents some social groups due to their stereotype. For example black males in London (urban) are thought of negatively as in the rob and mug people, they are associated with a lot of crime in London with knifes and weapon, but this is obviously not true as this is only a stereotype. In our film opening we tried to subvert the stereotype like making the female have the leading role, female is stronger etc. but our original idea was to subvert the black male stereotype but as the deadline came closer for our film opening we got put under pressure therefore we had to get the next available actors who happened to be black. So if we had more time or we had the chance to do this project again I think I would like to subvert the stereotype of black people particularly black males.  

In addition in 2014 lots of women work in high end jobs in offices in big cities like London, New York, Milan so our protagonist was one of them type of women. We represented her by her smart clothing, props like her glasses and her high heels with the settings being in a city with huge buildings and an office to show her work place. All these features combined show a successful businesswoman.