How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The filmmaker uses micro elements to encode the specific macro representations in to the text for the viewer.

The viewer decodes these representations to read meaning from the text.

• In order to try and create meaning and transfer a message through a text you need to use micro elements

• Micro Macro

• The micro levels make the text, character, and technical elements, which all fall under codes and conventions made represent the macro.

The technical elements include:• Sound• Mise-en-scene • Camera • Editing

• The macro level is the overall representation of the film.

These are made up by:• Issues • Themes • Character codes

• My media product offers a mediated version of the world.

• I aim to portray reality by representing particular social groups by using micro elements from the four different technical categories

• I aim to do this by looking at these social groups in the wider sense citizens from a particular economic class), and in a more targeted sense (truants, victims of bullying).

• The seven key areas of representation are based on people, places, events, time periods and themes.

• These seven key areas are age• Gender• Ethnicity• Sexuality• Class and status• Physical ability/disability• Regional identity. All of these areas adds up to verisimilitude Verisimilitude is “truth to life”, the appearance of being true or real. It refers to the construction, in a text, of a plausible, believable world.

Mise-en-scene

• Micro elements from the technical category of mise-en-scene are employed in my product to construct specific representations of a social group and class. The social group I was focused on was criminals

• My product contrasts between two different social groups, both from a similar economic class. Because 2 are criminals, the female is the victim and is forced into prostitution and the other is a normal man who is the hero, but these two characters are under the “victim” catergory. These two targeted social groups are oppisite to one another, but they both fall under the same economic class.

• The key representative area focused on in my product is class and status. Issues of personal hygiene and poor dress sense of the truant, accompany the connotations of a negative attitude towards uniformity.

Gender

• Genders have been treated in many different ways depending on the time period.

• My film intro is set in modern time, there is no major division during the male and female gender in today’s society, but there are still some people who treat women like objects behind closed doors.

• In my intro there are 3 males and 1 female. The female is the victim, one male is the protagonist and the two other males are the antagonists.

• This lives up to the stereotype of the woman being the person who needs help.

• A stereotype of low class criminals is that they have no respect for anyone or anything.

• I live up to this stereotype by making my two low class antagonists abusive towards the female as they are meant to be her “pimps”

Ethnicity• There are many different stereotypes based on many different ethnicities. • All of the people that are shown in my film intro are of the black ethnicity.• There are many negative stereotypes of black people, for example:

• Criminals/drug dealers • Sexual prowlers/ promiscuous • Lazy • Angry

As my intro involves only people of this ethnicity this is what some individuals will think about. I thought about this as it is linked to the themes and issues of my intro.

Class and status

• Class and status is one of my themes in my intro. • All of the individuals shown in my intro are all of the same class and status but all have

different personalities.• People usually just judge a whole class or status over a wide range of people but if you looked

individually you would see they are not all the same.

• I showed my actors were of a low status by what they were doing, where they were and what they looked like as there was no dialogue to tell you.

• They were searching for a girl and when they found her the girl ran away this shows this was me trying to show the crime element of the low class and status.

• They were all wearing clothes that a normal person would wear but some looked a bit shady and scruffy.

• My intro is set in Croydon, an urban area.• The main scenes were shot in an dirty, dark, confined alleyway. I chose this specific place as I

wanted to show the low class area of Croydon to represent the characters in my intro.