Sana Haq - 2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

In our opening sequence we have decided to represent different types of social groups such as;

1. Students; the reason why we have chosen to represent students is because we felt as if it would be easier for us to relate to and that we knew there would not be any issues with the locations we decide to set our scenes in as we were only allowed to shoot within the school. As well as all these issues we knew that by having our central characters as students it would appeal to our target audience (which is highlighted in  question 4.), this is because it would be a simple but effective way of allowing the audience to connect with the characters. As we our students ourselfs we knew it would be easy to plot the story line by having our characters and audience similar ages to us.

2. The Asian Community;

we have decided to focus on using our central characters representing the Asian community because we felt that this would be the perfect opportunity to go against stereotypes and show Asians in two completely different ways.

First;

As most people would see that a different ethnicity other than the white community are suggested to be outsiders (foreigners) and a threat to society, therefore we decided to centralize outsiders in our opening and allow them to dominate our thriller to make a different ethnicity the 'norm'. We felt that we could break the concept of 'outsiders being a threat' by going against this term for one of our characters. The effect of this is that it would allow the audience to see a variety of personalities and life culture. In the shot above, the victim has been shown as wearing no makeup this allows the audience to fully understand from the very beginning that there's a clear difference between both characters. Even though our initial reaction was to have the victim being played by a white teenager, we decided to dismiss this concept and keep it interesting for the audience and not to make things too cliche, therefore having an Asian play a victim role was simply intriguing.


Second;

By having the victim being played by an Asian, we felt very strongly to also have the culprit (the stalker) being played by an Asian. By knowing the stereotype of different ethnic groups being shown in the film industry we felt that we could play along with this and have our culprit shown as an 'outsider'. By listening to the voice over the audience begin to see the deceitful side of the stalker as she has been said to be from Texas, however adapting to the British culture and picking up on the accent very quickly. This gives the audience a feeling of the sense of secrecy by hiding her true identity from others. Also by being Asian, her voice represents her to only be an outsider by her actions, not by the ethnic group she's from.