Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation Question 2: How Does Your Media Product Represent Particular Social Groups?

Social Class: In our film opening we represent two different social classes using the two main characters. The two main characters are the Man (Jason) and the Girl (Nancy) however we also see a picture of a third person by the name of Freddy (Nancy’s boyfriend), we do not get to see him in person in the opening though. The girl in our opening is living in a middle/upper class house, we can tell this because of the girl having two cars on her property. The house is semi-detatched; neat and tidy which is typical for this social class. The man is portrayed as working class, mainly because of the job he is doing, being scruffy with the clothing he is wearing, having dirty hands and knocking mugs of coffee over and not mopping it back up.

Gender: Our film opening has both male and female characters and we wanted to adapt the stereotypes into the opening. We had the girl in the kitchen and getting tea for the man who is typically doing the job. We adapted some archetypes into the opening too as we had the scream queen (which was actually a twist because she was the killer) as the girl in the film. We chose to have a scream queen because of the male gaze. Males will be attracted to the film because of their being a blonde protagonist.

Sexuality: The two characters within our opening are straight (hetrosexual). We thought this would be the best choice because in the slasher genre there isn't a wide range of homosexuality. It would have also been hard to find two actors/actresses that wanted to show their homosexuality on our film so we chose to go with that decision

Age: We aimed our film at the age range of 15-24 mainly because most of the films within our genre are in this age range and we thought it would be easier to find actors within that range. I created a post in more detail on the Target Audience. Both of our actors are within our core target audience so they would actract an audience similar to their age. Typically for a slasher the audience would be male becaue of the gore, horror and sexual actions within it.

Ethnicity: Both of our actors are white and British because the area we live in is predominantly white British. With us only filming the first two minutes of the film we would have had a chance to get some actors from a different background in and have a wider range of ethnicity within the film.

Physical Ability/Disability: We don't portray the characters of having any disability. This is probably because we were not looking for anyone who had a disability for several reasons. Just like for the sexuality section I believe that it would be extremely difficult for us to find someone who had a disability and would feel comfortable acting infront of the camera but also having it shown to alot of people on Facebook and YouTube etc. People with disabilites are not common in slasher films however, there is a very famous character in  'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' called Franklin Hardesty whom is in a wheelchair.

Regional Identity: Due to our film being set in Yorkshire, regional identity is portrayed by the characters, using things such as Yorkshire dialect "bloody hell!" but also the location and props etc. The establishing shot is of the counrtyside and stereotypically people think of people in Yorkshire to be farmers. Also the fact the mechanic is working class and asks for four sugars in his tea could also signify he is poor/working class and a stereotypical Yorkshireman.

The male character in our film

Michael Myers from Halloween

The Man: in our film opening is portrayed as a typical Yorkshire man, a dirty unhealthy farmer, the social class is typically working class and we could show this from the man’s speech but also the clothing he is wearing and the job he is doing in the first place. Therefore using this stereotype we could easily get our point across what the man will be like. We chose the clothes he wears very well to portray his occupation but also as a intertextual reference to the slasher film Halloween. We tried to make the man’s age seem around the 30-50 range however we don’t show any anchorage of this in the opening. We did not have any actors available in this age range so we had to improvise; we used narrative enigma to hide the actors face so we never saw that he was fairly young. Having the man in this age range, we thought would attract an audience of a similar age range because they could relate to him. We wanted to adopt the typical “old man” stereotype and make him grumpy and miserable.

Here is our Scream Queen

Alfred Hitchcocks Scream Queen

The Girl:in our film opening is portrayed as the typical teenager; she is wearing a hoodie and talks with slang and an accent. The teenager stereotype is very strong as older people complain all the time about them hanging around in hoodies causing trouble. We chose a girl with blonde hair because we could easily portray her as the typical scream queen in a horror film, however we decided to cross her with the teenager stereotype so instead of wearing very revealing clothes just for the male gaze we decided she should wear a hoodie so that she had strong teenage stereotypes. We also portrayed the girl as working class because she was from Yorkshire and the typical Yorkshire person is from a working class background. We showed the girls sexuality because she gets called by her boyfriend (Freddy), when the phone (the phone also connotes that she is upper class because it is an expensive phone but it also connotes the time period because people wouldn’t have that type of phone 10 years ago.) rings it has a picture of the two hugging each other but it also has three x’s after his name to denote a relationship. The revision timetables on her wardrobe connote her age and also that she is organised.