How does your media product represent particular social groups?

AGE

The character I played (The victim) was in her later teens, to show this I dressed stereotypically, wearing a pink jumper, black leggings and holding a handbag with headphones in. The headphones were specifically used to show my age and the modern technology of today, reinforcing my age as teenagers are usually seen as 'glued to their phones' and obsessed with the latest technologies. I feel we presented the age of the girl in a clear way allowing the audience to identify the age of the character and why we included the clothes she wore and headphones etc.

Gender

In our opening to our thriller there is only one gender, women. However, we have shown to completely contrasting representations of women; one is mentally unstable, emotionless and out of control whereas the other is emotional, curious and how you expect your normal teenager to be.

Women are usually seen as the victims in thrillers because they are more vulnerable and scare easy, if we had included a man, the murder may not have taken place as the male is usually seen as the 'hero' in this sort of situation.

However, we used an over the shoulder shot of the unstable girl watching me as I put my headphones in which suggests that in this case the villain is also a girl as well as a victim, contrasting to the normal storyline in films.

Ethnicity

Both are white British girls, this may show the area it is set in as not all areas are mixed race and some are majority white. The location is a field next to a pond, this shows it's not a busy over populated area like a city. Most of mixed race people are in cities and busy places, so the location used is actually evidence that the thriller is set in a minor multicultural area somewhere in the UK.

WHY...

We decided to show these two contrasting representations of the same gender and similar age to show how a certain age or gender cannot be labelled as a stereotype for the population of that certain age/gender.

It shows the audience how there are different stereotypes of everyone. We want the audience to be aware of the fact that we are not trying to suggest in anyway that every young girl will someday develop a mental illness nor are we saying that they won't this is why we included two representations of the same/similar girls.