Reflective Evaluation - Katie Bee Q2

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






Representation is a major factor in making a film as this is what attracts certain audiences. Representation I feel is where you must display a certain degree of truth to a particular age group for example 16 year old boys with x-boxes. I feel without representation audiences would struggle to connect with the characters and the clear indication of who we are representing would confuse them. Also this is what we want our film to represent. As you can see below I have analyzed social groups and there representation. I have used images and clips from films to make me points clear and what I am explaining can be visualized. 

1.
This is a clip from Dark water. We can clearly see the two main protagonists are both female. This is a typical generic convention in ghost horror films. The social grouping of these two characters are both white females and this is once again very common in the ghost genre. The women is roughly estimated in her late 20's early 30's and is a single mother struggling in a new city. The little girl is between 5-8 years old and this is one of the key elements to a ghost sub genre because they are usually the ghost or connected to them in some way. Both characters follow the stereotype for the sub genre which add to the suspense and fear.

2.
This clip is from The Grudge 2. The 2 main protagonists are both white females. They around the 15-19 years old and is the typical stereotype for the ghost ghost sub genre. The ages of these girls show they are vulnerable and perhaps quite clueless and would usually be in danger or put themselves in it. These characters in no way challenge the stereotypes and this is what makes us know we are watching a ghost horror. These conventions add the fear and create tension which lets the audience feel scared.

2.
My planning has allowed me to understand the social representation because for example females are usually in danger and vulnerable and males are the strong, brave type who tackle the problem.

 These are our test shots of our actors. We feel these apply to the generic conventions as we have a little girl who is the threat. She is 10 years old but can look much younger. Although we do not have the traditional female character we feel the male is also perfect. Although this slightly challenges the stereotypes we want to create new ideas and let the audience experience new films. However the male does tick other conventions being white and young.

Our story includes several generic conventions of the ghost sub genre. We have a vulnerable character who is in danger but is unsure what the danger is. Then we have the ghost girl who is haunting the young male. She is small and perhaps lost. As you can see in our story board there is the suspense with the male hearing voices and turning the light on with nothing being there. Then the ghost appears then disappear we see this theme in many ghost films. As a typical ghost film script ours is very similar with silence and a frequent "Hello" and "who is there", "who are you". We include these in our script, we also include screams and gasps.

Our target audience is people aged 15-18 and both genders. We learned this from IMBD reports on other ghost films. As there is no none-to mild violence and there is no blood and gore shown we feel this is suitable for to be a 15. As I researched Dark water I discovered this film was a 15 for these reasons and more. There was no gender which was significantly higher than the other and no race was objectified or discriminated against. There was actors from all genders and races but they were predominatly white. We feel this allowed us to be open with whom we choose to act and that a 15 certificate is perfect.

3.
 Our sequence: A young white male is in bed when he hears laughing and moving around. He turns the light on to find nothing there.

Existing sequence, Dark water: A young white women goes to see what is causing a leak in her roof, she goes up stairs to find no one but an apartment completly flooded.

As we can see in both existing and our sequence we use the same race characters but the only difference is that perhaps the female is a bit older and well we use a male instead of a female but as I stated earlier this breaks the boundrys and challeneges the stereotypes. We represent him as a phsycically macho male but as he goes to search what is happening we see his masculinity come crashing down as fear takes a grip of him. This is similar to the seqence in dark water, the female appears quite masculine as she is brave and willing to take a risk but we can see the fear and tension through her face and body.