EVALUATION QUESTION TWO

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our thriller opening mainly focuses on the representation of gender however it does feature aspects of other social groups such as age or social class. The representation of gender throughout our clip was kept conventional to the thriller film genre in order to keep the simplicity throughout and for the audience to be able to immediately determine which character plays which. In most thriller films females are presented as having characteristics of weakness or subordination,resulting in them becoming the victim of the antagonist. Males however are usually presented as a binary opposite,powerful and dominant, this representation is seen throughout the media and shown in thriller films, especially with a protagonist and antagonist, in a way to create a clear power difference between the genders and allow for the two characters to be defined easily. A perfect example of this is 'The Shining', the antagonist of the film is a male who attempts to kill the victim who is a female,this stereotyping reinforces current social structure and conforms to traditional gender roles.
(http://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1hsu6l/the_shining_axe_loop/) 

A contemporary example of a film that reverses these gender roles is 'Fatal Attraction', throughout the film the gender roles are challenged as the female character antagonises the male, presenting him as a less strong character and keeping the females power dominant throughout. However this power is taken later in the film as, inevitably she is murdered. 
This theme of the deviance of a female character is often stopped by having the character die or go through some form of retribution, commonly this plot is seen in film noir's femme fatale and originally was a way to present that a female's deviance will lead to punishment in one way or another. This representation again seems to fit the traditional gender roles within the media of female 'weakness' and males as a strong figure, and is another reason why we chose to fit these stereotypes in our opening. 

We kept the traditional 'innocent' female character, maintaining subordination against our male antagonist through the costumes. The protagonists costume, as mentioned in the costume post, is muted with colours such as grey,pink and beige to heavily contrast our antagonists dark and dreary costume consisting of black and dark greens. As mentioned before the intextual reference for costume came from the character 'Amelia' from 'The Babadook' and although she was much older than our protagonist we felt the muted colours of her costume allowed a youthful innocence to be presented that was perfect for our female character.  

The representation of age in another feature in our thriller film. Although the age of each character is not revealed it's fairly clear that, because the age of the actors, they could be teenagers or young adults. The antagonist of our film however is established in the beginning quite clearly as a 'man', the recording from the news report reveals this, and so presents two ages within our opening. 
The relationship between the young adult and teenager is extremely negative, the young adult is the antagonist and teenager the protagonist and victim. The interxtual reference for age was also taken from the character 'hannah' from the TV series 'Remember Me', Hannah is a young adult who, the same as our character, is presented as a young adult with the use of a bus. The bus allows the audience to recognise that maybe, although she is old enough to drive, she has not got the money to keep a car and therefore is a fairly young person. 

The representation of social class is shown through Geoff's character, he is presented as a drug user or someone how may be homeless-this representation is shown through costume and is references in the costume planning post. Class is not necessarily shown in our our thriller however both protagonists take the bus to the location, this could infer a lack of money or a lower class status however we did not focus on this idea as our film was mainly concerned with the representation gender and age.