Evaluation 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The social groups represented in my film are mainly just teen males and also 'hoodies'. Hoodies are considered a threat to modern society, as the media usually portray hoodies as menacing youths, usually males, that cause trouble and do illegal things such a underage drinking and taking drugs, typically. The antagonist in my film is a hooded young male, so we are taking the hoodie stereotype and using it for our benefit.

Films which represent these social groups include: Superbad, a comedy about three teen males and their awkward journey through adolescence; F, a horror about murderous youths attacking adults; and Eden Lake; a horror/thriller about a couple who go on a idyllic holiday only to be hunted down by a group of sadistic adolescents.

The poster for Eden \Lake.

In order to represent these social groups well, we focused on the mise-en-scene and what we visually included so that the audience could pick up on social groups that was used in this opening.. For the hoodie group, we simply showed the antagonist in a plain black hoodie, but the hooded protagonist was also carrying a blooded knife. Hoodie youths are often portrayed in media as knife-carrying threats to the rest of society, and with the antagonist in this carrying a knife -and killing someone with it- it plays up to that stereotype. 

The use of blue in the bedroom also suggests to the audience that the characters in the opening will be male, before they even seen all of the characters.

I think our representations were successful as we showed the generic conventions of the male hoodie group, although we probably could have made it clearer that they were teens to fit in with the male teen social group.