1. How does your media
product represent particular
social groups?
2. The main social groups in our film opening are age, gender and
ethnicity. Our opening features black male and female teenagers,
young people are stereotypically trouble makers and hang around
in hoodies etc. Young men and women have different negative
stereotypes, young men can be seen as lazy and controlling and
young women can be seen as flirty, showing themselves off and
like playing around.
In our opening we have kept to these stereotypes, the gang in our
opening are seen hanging around the main street and in hoodies.
We chose to dress the characters this way to stick to the
stereotype and help the audience understand the characters
background and the theme of the film.
3. The female in our opening is first represented as a loving girlfriend but then the
audience soon realises that is not the case, she is then represented negatively
through her actions. She is shown to be unfaithful to Ray, giving the audience
negative feelings towards Chaz.
The males in our opening are shown as ‘hoodies’ hanging around in the streets
causing a disturbance for others wanting to use the town cashpoint as they are
lent up against it, potentially being intimidating for some passers-by. This
represents them in a bad way, sticking to the stereotype of the age group
teens.
When the audience first meet Ray he seems the dominating character in his
relationship, he appears to be leading the conversation between the two and
has is arm around her.
4. When we later see what Chaz is doing, she is living up to the
negative stereotype of teenage girls as she is going behind her
boyfriend’s back and is meeting someone else, one of Ray’s
friends. This makes the audience warm towards Ray and have a
bad feeling about Chaz and Lakeem.
When Lakeem arrives in the scene a thud in the music gives a feel
of unease and make the audience sense that he might be up to
something, the same then happens when he looks over his
shoulder to check Ray and his friends had gone.
This music represents him badly and the clothes he is wearing also
helps this, he wears a big black jacket, easy to hide behind.
5. The social group ethnicity plays apart in our opening, all our
characters are black. The negative stereotypes for people of black
origin is that they are thieves, troublemakers, drug dealers,
fighters, involved in gangs etc. in our film opening you don’t see
the characters doing any of these things but you get the feel that
they are involved in a gang.
Most of the time in our opening our characters are represented
badly, we did this because our film is all about unfaithfulness, and
flaws within a tight knit group of people.