Evaluation - TB

How our media product represents particular social groups?

In our film opening all the characters shown are young, white, middleclass males with the exception of a young, white, middleclass female. Our piece does not feature any representatives of a different ethnic background, e.g. black, Asian, Caribbean. Nor does it show any representatives of lower class or upper class. This would suggest our piece does not fully represent different social groups and people from different ethnic backgrounds.

Our main protagonist, along with the other gang member and hostage, are all represented positively, while individually they are all represented with different positions of power, for example, the hostage (me) is a young white middle class male. The gang leader is also a young white middle class male, showing an equal depiction of group stature and how we have not used a minority to depict the person in need of help. This could be seen as either racist or sexist (depending on who we used to depict the theoretical hostage). However, with this said the young female has the phone hung up on her in our opening, and is slightly marginalised in terms of exposition. This could be seen as gender stereotyping, with the males being shown in the main role with females used as side characters, being objectified to the males. This would mean our opening piece is re-enforcing current popular gender stereotypes, however there are no residual ideologies being suggested as any gender groups are not represented in a residual way, only conforming to current ideologies.

Mise en Scene doesn’t play a huge role in our representation of young, white, middle-class males. We are all wearing our own chosen clothing; therefore our clothes are simply down to individual choice. I would personally say this is positive, because the individuality shows variety in youth clothing, and we haven’t negatively stereotyped our clothing to that associated with youths nowadays e.g. hoodies and tracksuits.

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Non-verbal Language- It would be fair to say our acting is quite poor, therefore we cannot sufficiently judge our non-verbal language to make statements about the social group we have represented. If anything, we have all played ourselves, not taking on any roles. This is again, I feel, positive because self-character and individuality are being portrayed through young people, a social group often so negatively portrayed in modern society.

Camera Work – We have given camera precedence to the males in our opening, due to the obvious reason that they are the main characters. The lack of other social group representatives being shot on camera may suggest that we have re-enforced popular conventions of thriller, a white male protagonist centred on side characters. The fact a young female is presented to the audience as being nothing more than a girlfriend may be seen as negative, and again enforcing conventions of popular thriller.

Sound - Our sound plays a very little role in representing different social groups , its main use being a mood changer that is in sync with images being shown to help convey changes in pace or emotions.

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Macro Issues

The slightly gangster nature of this opening could be seen as re-enforcing traditional traits of masculinity. The social norm for a male is to be seen as very masculine, a willingness to be aggressive and generally part of a high standing social group. In our opening the mere fact they are part of a gang would suggest they exhibit all those stereotypical male traits, conforming to social norms and ideologies. The gang member is shown to have a girlfriend, suggesting another male trait should be that of a female partner. Also, the lack of female gang members is conforming to social norms that females cannot exhibit masculine traits if they want to perceive as feminine by society. Our opening can also be seen as re-enforcing popular conventions of thriller movies, our main characters are both male. An example of this can be seen in the successful thriller movie Seven (1995), both protagonists are male, with the antagonist also being male.

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