Question 2- how does your media project represent particular social groups?

Question 2- how does your media project represent particular social groups?

Only two characters are prominent within my whole media product. My antagonist and my female victim. I choose to limit the amount of characters within the filming in the hopes to achieve an effect of isolation and solitary for our female victim. With no one else around suggesting that she is alone and therefore more vulnerable. My antagonist is a man dressed in black with his identity concealed with a smiling mask. An image of our antagonist named ‘Smiley’ can be seen to the right. I used the name Smiley to identify and represent my antagonist as I thought the contrapuntal concept suggested a sense of insanity, as in he is always smiling and believes that what he is doing is funny. This suggested mental instability within the character that makes them scarier and therefore will increase the tension and suspense within my film as a result.  An antagonist is an essential component of any successful generic thriller film and therefore we thought it imperative to incorporate one into my work. Without one not only would we be unable to use many of the thriller conventions that work parallel with the generic antagonist of a thriller film such as a female victim, I would also be unable to have a generic thriller plot that follows the protagonists/victims as they evade my antagonist and eventually kill them. Therefore I thought it necessary to include one, making our thriller film more conventional and maximising marks. 

The next and final character prominent in my thriller opening is the female victim Cara. Her small height and blonde hair made her perfect for the role as she conformed to all the necessary conventions of a thriller film that surrounded a female victim. Cara needed to be represented within my thriller film as submissive and weak as possible in order for her to appear a vulnerable and therefore a conventional target for the antagonist and I would argue that she done this well particularly at point 0:45 where her facial expressions of fear really conveyed the effects we where trying to portray. Again I thought it necessary to include a female victim to be a part of my thriller opening for the same reason I thought an antagonist was appropriate. It is these characters that make a thriller film conventional. My thriller film would be ineffective without them as it wouldn’t be conventional. 

I would argue that gender is represented in a stereotypical way however throughout my media product. With the female being the victim and a male being the killer it follows the common stereotype present in many past thriller films (Psycho) as well as present thriller films (Taken) and remains to this day a generic thriller convention. It is for this reason i chose to represent them in this stereotypical way as it is one of the most frequently used conventions in the thriller genre and therefore must be present within our work if we want to produce a film that’s conventional.

I would argue that both characters would appeal to my target audience of young teenagers (13-16 years old), as they are both in a way relatable to them.

Female victim ‘Cara’- The relatable age of the victim (late teens) to the target audience of teenagers helps the viewers engage with the narrative more as they feel as though this is or could happen to them or a friend.

Antagonist ‘Smiley’- I thought vary carefully about how I was going to make Smiley appeal to my audience and I eventually came up with an idea. My group and I identified clowns to be a relatable fear amongst our target audience of young teens and so we looked to transfer this fear into our thriller opening to create a mask. Using inspiration from Stephan Kings 'IT' we where able to find an appropriate mask that we thought would be effective in representing clown like quality’s and therefore appeal teens in the to audience that where afraid of clowns as this would then increase tension and fear in our film.