JG: Evaluation Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our opening sequence shows young, white, middle-class teenagers negatively as there is a local tale warning them about the church, therefore it isn’t a bright idea to go investigate. However they represent traditional masculine gender roles and want to prove they aren’t scared and in order to show this they go and explore the church with the aim of finding out if there is any truth behind the tale. This is shown by mise-en-scène as it is a rather eerie and spooky location and you can see by their facial expressions that they aren’t afraid.

We used the location to express this idea of no fear as the two teenage boys are walking up a hill to an old church on a gloomy day and it seems to be in the middle of nowhere, we can tell by how natural they look that they aren't scared and that they don't believe in the tale, hence why they investigate.

As we can see from the image above, taken from our opening sequence, we used lighting effectively to create the atmosphere: for example the darkness of the Church builds suspense and the audience feel that something could happen at any point especially when it is accompanied by our creepy soundtrack that helps put everyone on edge. Throughout the opening sequence we use various camera techniques to create different effects.

For example, this image was in the entrance of the Church and we panned over it as it is old and also created enigma as later in our opening Michael dies and the audience is left hanging, thinking how he died. The continuity of our whole opening also shows a typical masculine trait seen in both horrors and thrillers of excessive confidence, or bravado, as at no point do the characters stop and hesitate when walking to or entering the Church.

An increasingly common ideology about British teenagers and young adults nowadays, that has been created by how they are represented in both movies and TV, is the idea of gang culture. Gang culture is all about being and looking 'hard' and is commonplace in cities. However it has also spread throughout the country into towns, hence why you have youths in places like Tonbridge, for example, impersonating gang culture by acting 'hard'. This is shown in our opening sequence by the incredibly casual way that our characters walk towards the Church. This is emphasised by the costumes such as trackies and trainers displaying them as copying  gang culture by acting 'hard'. Their body language reinforces this by displaying an attitude that nothing can harm them which is evident from their confidence. Therefore the look and actions of our characters reinforce the ideological discourse amongst British youth that gang culture is cool and is acceptable to be imitated.