How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Script: 

The dictionary definition of Social groups is: A social group is a collection of people who interact with each other and share similar characteristics and a sense of unity. A social category is a collection of people who do not interact but who share similar characteristics.

The main social group shown within my film opening is the younger generation, people in their early twenties. It is somewhat difficult to give a generalised view of people in their early twenties, when speaking about teenagers most have in common that they are still in education. My age group that I am representing could be at university, have a job or even have children, a family of their own. For the opening sequence it was not essential to have an in depth understand of the psychographic characteristic of the victims, merely their demographic.

The victims within the opening sequence are all in their early twenties and the viewer is informed of this via the voice-over news report. They also see the victims as this voice-over is happening, whilst watching they can quickly see that there is a similar characteristic among the young women that they not only have their age range and gender in common but that they are all brunette. This is made extremely clear to the viewer as slow panning shots follow the length of their hair.

In films girls of this age range are often subjected to the male gaze theory. Laura Mulvey created the term 'Male Gaze' in 1975. She believed that in film audiences have to 'view' characters from the male perspective, in older times the film industry was dominated by men and this may have impacted how the women were viewed, whilst that element is slightly outdated it is still evident in films such as Transformers that women are often filmed from angles which are somewhat compromising or follow the curves of their bodies.

The camera angles used within my opening sequence did follow the women’s bodies to a certain extent but this was not to represent them within a sexual manor. As a group we decided not to draw on the male gaze too much as the shots within the opening sequence were about the patterns between the victims and murders rather than the individual characters and their bodies. We took care to dress the victims in outfits which were not revealing, they were respectable young women who the audience needed to feel sympathy for, not be judging them on their clothing.

The killer within our opening sequence does not appear to have a sense of unity with anyone else as we showed him being isolated and alone. We wanted to present him as being different and despite being a similar age to the victims, we do not know if they have anything in common except for their age range, this was left to discover later on within the storyline.