Wednesday 24 November 2010

Evaluation - How does you media product represent particular social groups?

The main social group that we are presenting in our media product are teenagers.
In the media teenagers are stereotypically presented as antisocial 'yobs', news articles are frequently written about how the young generation of today spend their time illegally drinking and taking drugs resulting in violent crimes and underage pregnancy. This is an extreme view of teenagers however our representation of the teenagers in our text does not challenge this view, it just portrays it in a milder manor.
This meant incorporating in our narrative that our characters are sexual active, drinking and smoking into our plot. We had originally planned on inputting drug references as well however we found achieving verisimiltude with that rather difficult so instead we left it out. 
Another typical label of youths is the term 'Hoody' which we also incorporated into our text through the costume we picked out for the cast, the males as well as one of the females, in only one shot, are seen wearing hooded tops. The countertype for this typical teenage image is our final girl, as she is seen wearing wearing a smart black blazer. This helps to anchor the preffered reading that she is the final girl and doesn't partake in typical teenage activities which are seen as immoral.

Yorkshire as a region is steretypically represented as being an area full of eneducated working class farmers, this has come about from television programmes such as 'Emmerdale' and 'Heartbeat'. Also some well known films such as 'This Is England' have been set in Yorkshire, and once again the predominent class seen in this film is the working class which isn't renouned for being very intelligent. In effect we did nothing to either match or reject this stereotype, other than the fact that the characters are camping in an rural location which is more typical of teenagers northern regions than perhaps those in the south or living in inner cities. Our cast were not nessessarily given lines which would protray them as being unintelligent, however it is possible that this could be picked up by an audience as a negotiated reading.

Because we have used a local cast from the region of Yorkshire we avoided casting our characters as 'AB upper class' as this would have been less believable that they were upper class with yorkshire accents.

As well as this if we wanted a wider target audience appeal so we needed to widen the class bracket we worked with, therefore having middle class characters allows more people to be able to relate with their characters.

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