Evaluation Question 2

Question 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Karl Marx's concept of ideology is based on the idea that different social groups have different amounts of power, these inequalities in society create stereotypes about different groups of people. Although these stereotypes can be negative, they are used in media to help the audience to understand characters more easily. Using stereotypes can help the audience to make assumptions about the character and therefore understand the storyline more clearly.

Representation is the portrayal of someone/something in a particular way, stereotypes are used for representation of characters in films.

In our thriller opening there are only two characters that the audience are introduced to. A young male jogger and a elderly female. The jogger is a teenager/young man which instantly allows the audience to create a stereotype on him based upon his gender. The audience may assume that he is unruly or immature. In contrast, the elderly lady may be stereotyped as mature, boring and wise.

Teenagers, especially teenage boys, are portrayed in a negative way in media. They are often seen as violent on the news and many people may make judgements on teenagers because of these negative stereotypes. Sometimes television shows portray teenagers as irresponsible and disrespectful.

A mood board I created for some stereotypes made about teenage boys.

Our elderly lady. 

We challenged this stereotype by represented teenagers in a positive light by showing Ami's character helping the lady with her shopping and offering to walk her home. This shows that he is considerate and polite. 

Our character of the jogger. 

The elderly lady is therefore shown to be weak, this is also reinforced through mise-en-scene as she uses a walking stick and walks extremely slowly.
However, this stereotype is challenged at the end as the elderly lady is in fact a young woman in disguise. Our main character and villain in our thriller is a woman, this is not like most thriller where a male plays the villain. In one way, this shows that the woman is smart in order to avoid being caught. In most films, women may be shown as inferior to men because they are physically weaker, which is why they are not usually villains.

A mood board I created for the stereotype of a detective.

One stereotype that we follow is male detective, the voice over at the end of our opening sequence is a man discussing the series of murders. In many thrillers, the detective is a male, we chose to have a male detective to make the character easy to understand.

Here is the response from two 18 year old university students when asked about the film and the stereotypes in it.