SLICE Evaluation Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

My thriller opening shows a groups of teenage girls, in the typical thriller, a group of teenagers are normally represented as the people causing trouble because the fall into the sub-culture of "youth" this is known to have a bad connotation. Teenage girls especially are read with the connotation of "helpless" and "damsel in distress" this is until their help is required. Even when female characters help out and save the general protagonist, the male protagonist is still assumed to be and seen as the main hero. The antagonist is also seen as the big macho male who is generally very built up and walks with a mysterious manner.

Considering the costume of the character in my thriller I wanted to convey the effect of normality and the character in the film being unaware to the chance of something going down hill. The effect of this is so when the antagonist is finally seen, the audience would not expect it. With thoughts to the flexibility of the costume I needed the costume to be fairly loose so that the actresses could climb around the climbing frame and dancing around the park. With the look to the general actresses and their overall look, wanting them to look natural I asked them to wear what they would normally would wear on a day out to increase the natural persona of people representing that age. Another consideration is the colour of clothing the actresses are wearing; red is usually seen as something quite sensual, seeing as these were portrays as innocent teens I tried to stay away from wearing red.

Another aspect is when people think of teenagers they do not think of a group of people dancing around a park, they usually think of a bunch of people who are surrounded by drugs and alcohol, they also think the teenage girls especially as being those who are not wearing not much clothing. I wanted to go against this and actually portray teenagers to not be trouble makers. In fact not many teenagers are "off the rails" but these are the teens portrayed through the media and the news. Some may say having a bunch of teenagers dancing around an open space can be seen as fairly childish and pre-teen but this is more likely to occur than being "off the rails" especially in the open and in broad daylight.

Within my thriller opening there is the essence of one of the girls have dissociative identity disorder. When researching the affects of this disorder I found most of the videos were of people aged over 25, there was not any video showing younger sufferers even though people of a younger age can also have this disorder. When watching interviews with sufferers, I found some who knew of their conditions and others who did not know of their condition as they were interviewed when they were taking on the persona of someone else. Therefore my opening follows a recording of the girls then shows the actress with dissociative identity disorder looking back at the video and wondering why that video is there and who the people in the video are.

Alike any film, I had to show the age of the person other than their own look. To show the age of this person, in the background I had a McFly calendar to show the age of the person. however this can be said to not be a clear indication of age because the band McFly have been around for more than 10 years so there is quite a range in fan ages. I also placed some juice and books near the laptop where the person was watching the video. This was to show the learning age of the person to show they are still in school.