Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Media products can effectively represent social groups and social change by making characters in a way which would represent their social group; this would then make that production more appealing to that social group. We did market research to find out what social group our production would appeal to and to find out more information about them. We found that our production appealed to people in their teens to 20s who have a keen taste for thrillers. Here’s an example of the questions we asked.

 

We represented the stereotypical views on gender very well as we had Annabelle as a typical damsel-in-distress character and James as a typical overpowering, dominant man figure. We used this purposely to follow the conventions of a typical thriller and show the dominance of men in society, this also reflects the status of women in modern day society. This shows that our production is in touch with modern films, but it also sticks to retro ideals by having a typical innocent figure getting killed. We got inspiration for this idea from films such as: Leon and No Country for Old Men. Our film challenges social conventions by not having a hero to save the day; this technique is found in most films which include peril and danger, for example: Batman. We particularly wanted to represent teenagers as we ourselves are teenagers and our market research showed that they are our target audience and that our film would mostly appeal to them. We represented them by using our film to convey the perils that teenagers can face in modern society; we did this by having Annabelle look like a typical teenager; this shows that this kind of danger can happen to anyone, especially teenagers. We’ve also followed social trends by giving our film an old-fashioned look by using dull effects to create a retro feel, this is important as people are going back to liking old-fashioned things with cars such as the Volkswagen beetle and the soda machine becoming more prevalent. 

 

Iconic retro images such as this are similar to what we want to create, with a runaway train giving it the retro feel; this makes our film extremely popular to teenager Indies. This social group usually compromises of teenage males and females who have a keen interest for alternative music and films; this social group is the one we wanted to represent as we knew from our target market research that they’d be likely to watch it, and they’d appreciate anything aimed at them as their motto is that they’re ‘misunderstood’.