Thomas Gilbert - Evaluation Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Both of the characters in our film that we see walking around the car park are aged 16-17. This would aim the film at particular social groups that are older teenagers maybe just finishing school or in sixth form/college.  They might be having a stressful life at school because of all the work or possibly exams. This is who this film is aimed at as maybe they can feel for the characters more because they are similar age to them and they lived similar lives until this tragic event occurred.  



Example of social groups:

Chloe Grace Moretz stars in the film 'Equalizer' and she is currently 18 years old, this is a similar age range of our actors and when filming she was only 17. But despite her age, she played someone a lot older in the film as women tend to do so more than men. They dress her and make her look older than what she is just for the part in the film, but for our film we did not need to do this as their ages and how old they are in the film works perfectly fine. When someone like Chloe is in a film, it opens the film up to a larger audience, especially younger people because she is one of the only young people in the film. This is why our film is aimed at this certain age range as it appeals to them more than it does to older people.

Cameron on the other hand which is our actor for this character shown on the right is a male and plays his age rather than a fake one. This doesn't have much affect but what is does is it allows Cameron as an actor to have more freedom and do what he naturally does because technically he is playing himself. We also let Cameron wear his normal clothes so he just looks like a normal teenager. One similarity between Chloe and Cameron in their roles in these two films is that they seem to be taken advantage of, maybe because of their age and that they cant do much to stop it. For example, in 'Equalizer'  Chloe plays a prostitute that works for this Russian business that doesn't treat her well, and it gets so bad to the point where they beat her up. In our film 'Anniversary Killer' Cameron is targeted as one of the victims of the killer but we don't know quite what happened to him, all we know is that it cant be good.

The last character in our film was the killer and he was played by me, i am 17 but because in the film, I am wearing a mask you would never be able to tell who it is and how old the person is unless you look up the actor. For the audience, they have no idea of how old the character in the film is and what he looks like so it keeps it a mystery which the audience will only find out if they watch the whole film. As you can see in our opening, all the characters were male and white, they were all male because we thought it best suited our film and we had 3 male actors at the ready so it was a lot easier to get together. Also the representations of a male as the antagonist and the villain support the conventions of a thriller as the male gender do dominate thriller films, normally you will see females as the victims. The ethnicity seems to be not noticed as much in thriller films as it is kind of a blind side, but you mainly see white male actors. For example in 'Maze runner' the main 3 actors are all white. However the film 'Equalizer' this challenges the stereotype as the main character is black.