Opening Scene | Evaluation Part 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The social group of the three girls together that you see at the beginning of the movie resemble many stereotypical teenage girl friendship groups. I think this because the friends are shown talking and discussing certain topics that girls usually talk about. Also, one of the friends has their phones out which is effective when showing that they are teenagers, as teens are usually on their phone.

The friendship group in our opening scene can be slightly compared to the friendship group in the film 'Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging'. 

These girls are shown as typical teenage girls who go to school, likes boys, wants to go parties, etc. This group compared to the friendship shown in our opening scene are definitely shown as stereotypical teenage girls, where as the friendship group in our opening scene aren't really shown as that. There are quite a lot of differences between our friendship group and this friendship group, but there are a few similarities as well. This friendship group has a lot to talk about like our friendship group. This friendship group are shown going to and from school or to and from each others houses, likewise, our friendship group is shown coming from school or one of their friends houses.

The main character that gets stabbed in our opening scene could be compared to with the guy from 'The Phone Booth'.

This man is shown as a typical working man in New York City. In the film we see him take life in his stride at first, but then his life becomes endangered. Like the main character in our film, she was walking home like normal but then she gets in danger and she gets stabbed. This character doesn't get killed but he does get threatened and he almost gets shot. Even though this character has similarities to our character, there are also some differences. For example; this character is a male, but ours is a female. Stereotypically the male character is shown as strong and clever so he manages to get away from death, whereas stereotypically the female character is shown as weak and quite dumb so she ends up getting stabbed.

Our aim for the characters in our opening scene was to make them quite stereotypical so the viewer will know what character is what. We wanted the main character to be a stereotypical female, so she would come across weak and innocent and not able to save herself. The friends are quite stereotypical girls as well and we planned that because we wanted the viewer to identify that they are typical teenage girls. We made the murderer stereotypical as well because we wanted the character to be easily identified. We dressed the murderer in black clothing and a black jumper with the hood up so it was hard to see the characters face. We wanted that to add to the mystery and to also build tension. The stereotypical murderer is quiet and not seen that much, which adds to the mystery of the film. We wanted mystery to come across in our film so we made sure that we didn't show too much of our murderer. 

Having stereotypical characters in our opening scene means that our target audience would probably enjoy the film more as they know what the characters are going to be like. Our target audience was based around teenagers and young adults, which is why we used stereotypical characters as they would be able to relate to the characters more.