Wednesday, 16 February 2011

Media Evaluation - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Not only did we look into films in our research, we also studied representations. Religious, ethnic and social backgrounds were the starting point of our research, mainly to show us the ropes. We then took it further – looking into representation in film. For example, in one of horror’s sub-plots, the ‘teen slasher’, there are two main characters – the victim (usually a beautiful, young blonde girl) and the killer – a tall, dark, mysterious man wearing a hooded top (traditionally to hide some hideous disfigurement he feels ashamed of…).
We looked to less conventional thrillers when looking for inspiration for our own – we decided that we didn’t want to do the traditional bank-robbery or murder mystery thriller; not only would we -most likely- obtain less marks for something like this, we wanted to create something memorable, that would stand out to the audience. As such, we decided to create an antagonist who started as a happy bride (portrayed by our use of close-ups of the character’s facial expressions and her body-language) and changed to create a darker character, but also to create a feeling of transformation (perhaps in some ways similar to the killer in ‘The Silence of The Lambs’?). Also, the kitchen knife is a convention of the traditional female role.
In contrast, our -potentially- victim is male. You see him running and appearing in the background of some scenes. There is also a scene in which he is getting ready for the wedding, and the voice-over (his inner-thoughts) says that he “can’t do this”. You get the impression that he is vulnerable, especially with the close-ups of his unhappy facial expressions and when the camera appears to watching him; the audience is put into the place of the camera in real-time.

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