How does your media product represent particular social groups?
First Character: The Protagonist:
Our female protagonist represents stereotypical social groups of age and gender. The female stereotype of a vulnerable, girly and weak victim is clearly used and shown in our opening. Her teenage age also connotes to this stereotype and represents how this character is too young to take care/protect herself. Here is a similar example from the film taken.
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| Close up Shot of protagonist in our thriller. |
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| Close up shot of protagonist in Silence of the lambs. |
Here camera shots are also used to portray the despair and vulnerable state of our victim. The close up shot lets the audience see this and as our character is of similar age to our target audience, our target audience can also relate to her despair. These camera angles are commonly used in thrillers such as 'Silence of the Lambs' and 'House at the end of the Street'.
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| Close up of Protagonist in our thriller. |
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Close up Shot of Protagonist in House at the End of the street.
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Second Character: The Antagonist:
Our second character however breaks the female stereotype of weakness as our antagonist is female. This role is usually associated with males as the stereotype of males suggest they are stronger, bigger and more violent. As we challenge the stereotype, it makes our thriller stand out and the audience is intrigued as to what happened in the past to lead our female antagonist to follow the protagonist,
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| Dark lighting of Setting (alleyway) and antagonist in Batman Begins. |
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| Dark lighting of Setting (alleyway) and antagonist in our thriller. |
We added to the thrill of our opening by filming at night as a dark setting is typical in a tense scene. It also broke the stereotype that females are 'girly' or 'weak' as it made our female antagonist look scarier, creepier and in control. The hooded costume is commonly used in films when there is a stalker following a victim. This also added to the scary look of our antagonist.
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| Hooded figure follows characters in Now you see me. |
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| Our Hooded antagonist in our thriller. |
How have we represented gender, ethnicity and age in our thriller?
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