Evaluation Question 2

How does your media product

represent particular social groups?
 In the first opening scenes of ‘Shadowing’ that myself and the
rest of Fugitive Productions created, represents and shows the
different social groups such as; age, gender, stereotype,
sexuality and class.

When planning our film, we all had to take into consideration

the different social groups, and then try to work around them
and decide what we wanted to create in our film.

As there are many different social groups around, we needed to

be careful when showing a social group in our film that we didn’t
offend or upset anyone, therefore keeping our film simple but
using stereotypes from different social groups carefully.

Gender
Louise Chick, who played our main female
protagonist was exactly the sort of character we
were looking for. Louise has very blonde hair, with a
pure face giving the audience a sense that she is
very innocent and angelic like. Because we asked
Louise to wear a white coat, it reflected this even
more. We chose Louise because of this look so that
in our film it would look more effective with the main
antagonists being male.
With regards to the ‘gender’ category, our film
offers both male and female characters . However,
myself and the rest of Fugitive Productions
decided that we wanted to make the main
protagonist a female. Being female, it
automatically makes the character vulnerable and
innocent. When holding auditions for the cast in
our horror film, ‘Shadowing’, we all decided that we
wanted a young girl to play the protagonist. This
was because we decided that our main antagonist
characters were going to be male, therefore
keeping the typical horror generic conventions.

Matthew Bonner and Keegan Featherstone were chosen as

our main two antagonist characters. We wanted males to play
our main antagonists because males and genuinely stronger,
stereotypically more powerful then females. Therefore, we
chose Keegan & Matt because they both are quite big boys,
with dark features giving the audience the feeling of ‘trouble’.
Also, when we were filming we asked Keegan & Matt to wear
dark clothing, so that they keep themselves covered, but
show enough in the film to see that they are ‘powerful’
characters.
 In our film, all of the characters are around the same age in real life. Keegan and
Louise are 16, and Matt is 15 however in our film we decided that we wanted to
make the males around 21 and Louise around 19. This is because realistically,

Age males aged 16 and 15 wouldn’t stalk and murder different women, in order to
create a women with mixed features and bodily parts. We wanted Louise to be
around 19 because in our film, the character is just walking home from work.
Therefore, it corresponds with the lighting when we were filming to give the
audience the impression that it is late afternoon/early evening.

As you can see, this scene is set in the late

afternoon, in a forest. The female character is walking
home from work, but unaware to her she is being
stalked by the two main antagonist characters.

From this screen shot you can see that one of our male
characters, Matt, doesn’t look 15 because of the way he
is positioned and standing. Also, the way he is dressed
helps his look further.
Also, in our film we look at sexuality, class and stereotypes.

The sexuality comes in because the norm is that males get together with females. Therefore, because the
male antagonists are stalking the female protagonists there is a social normality about it. However, if we
had two female antagonists stalking the female protagonist, it would be against the public conception of
‘the norm’ therefore we wouldn’t want to offend anyone. However, same sex relationships are more normal
than they were although would people come and watch our horror movie, or would we be able to pass it off
as a horror genre.

The different class can be seen through our main protagonist. Louise is blonde,
with very clear skin and very well spoken. Therefore the audience can perceive
her as middle-class. The two main antagonists however come across as a lower
class, because they are dressed in hoods and dark clothing. Now, we are
stereotyping the characters as well as giving them a social class group. This is
because in the news, you often hear about ‘hooded thieves’ and gangs, therefore
automatically we all assume they are lower class and un-employed. Also, we think
about the way the antagonists are acting, and put it together with the way you
socially behave. Also, we want to be able to advertise and promote our film to the
different class groups – A B C1 C2 D. We are hoping to aim our film at the groups
B C1 C2 D because these are the people aged between 15-25 that are un-
employed or in college/school. Therefore we will have to advertise appropriately to
them.
Therefore, I think our media product represents particular
social groups well. However our main focus is age and gender
because I think this is what people look for when wanted to
watch a horror movie. Here is a link to our groups “
Target Audience Profile”.