How does your media product represent particular social groups ?
The beginning of my film opening involves two young boys walking out from what it looks to be like school, as we can see from what they are wearing: is smart attire suggesting that they are students. Both Protagonists of the film opening are males which is a stereotypical convention of the horror/thriller genre as they associated to being more dominant and cope with such pressure that occurs in a thriller/horror film opposed to women. All three characters in the film are Black, which challenges the stereotypical convention of a thriller as characters in this particular genre are pro-dominantly white, movies like "No Good Deed" and "The perfect Guy" also challenges the stereotypical character expectancy of a horror film. The idea that the two main characters are well spoken who use clear dialect and are full time students again goes against the stereotypes of black people being portrayed in the main media and youth culture especially in films such as "Adulthood", "Dionne in Clueless", "Menace 2 Society" as they are portrayed as poor, uneducated, super violent, criminals, loud or tokens to society so from casting three black people (beside the antagnoist who is intentionally made to look bad) i wanted the other two characters to be somewhat relatable to a specific black social groups; those who do go to school, speak well, dress well, gentle behaviour, act normal etc but so that audience who are of other ethnicity's can see that too.
STEREOTYPES
eg. In menace 2 society black dudes are portrayed as though they violent by nature making the audience reenact what they saw, create a stereotype and "flee" from black people in encounter as they believe that how they all are.
AGE
THE BEHIND is aimed at 16-21 year old being our main target audience, to imply that this is our target audience we used actors of the similar age (17,18), this utilises the audience interest as they are able to relate themselves as the characters putting themselves in their shoes instead of using unrelatable characters making the audience feel disoriented and isolated when watching the film or trying to interpret the story line.
GENDER
We were supposed to aim our film at both genders as originally we were meant to use both genders when filming (2 boys, 2 girls) but due to the lack of commitment of certain actors we had to use three males instead, if we used both genders we understand that it would have given us a larger audience something to consider if we could do this task again, As from our final film our storyline does lean onto one gender but from target audience questionnaire and a discussion from my focus group results did show that the male respondents were more interested in horror films than females reason being that our male audiences was our primary audience and females being our secondary audience.
Costume
To connote with the theme of the genre being horror/thriller, the colours of the costume would have to been dark colours such as black, dark blue, grey etc. as it is the main association of a thriller film
Jamal
- Black coat (zipped up throughout the movie) and dark blue jeans, greyish blue shirt with a tie, to imply that he is a student whilst the colour of his clothes symbolises with the theme of horror
Josh
- Black coat, dark blue/green jumper, black trousers, white shirt to imply that he is a student whilst the colour of his clothes symbolises with the theme of horror
The Figure
- The figure who is mainly dressed in black connotes with the idea being unknown and fearful creating curiosity within the audience into questioning who the figure really is but also showing his status which to cause danger and threat towards the other characters
