Evaluation Pt. 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

We had a target to implement as little as possible social group conventions as possible into the film, as we had limited amount of characters. We intended to create 1 character as a Girl. We want her to follow the final game strategy. We challenged this stereotype by allowing her to being the antagonist in the film. Sarah, who was played by Becky Shipman, incorporated serious elements, being thorough with the act, as we wanted her to represent a strength within her and the other character, Steve. We wanted to challenge these conventions that are typically shown and subvert these gender types as well as possible. We intended to do this because when we talked about 28 Days Later, we looked at how these genre conventions subverted and supported throughout different timing of the plot in the film. We wanted to create dynamic characters which had more of a meaning than what we originally wanted. We used the main character, David, played by me, to be masculine and vulnerable. This was done because he woke up from a long sleep, and the confusion portrayed should be significant enough to cause him errors within himself, when he got hit by the bat, this was an example of a mistake that she should have stopped. 

The ideology of Sarah was that we wanted her to look like a powerful person, so the POV shots that we used that was from a low angle showed the authority from a first person perspective. We didn’t intend this to happen however it did look like that after we had done it and we saved that footage so we could use it in the final piece. We also made sure that she was loud enough so that the audience could hear her intense voice. We raised the volume on some of what she said through raising the volume by 10%. The editing wasn’t changed much for this character as she portrayed her strength and her subverted conventions towards the audience well enough through the acting. We also made sure that the mise-en-scene was beneficial enough, this was done through the acting mainly because we couldn’t change the colour of the scene or the colour correction because it would look odd to others. We only added some post-editing on David’s actions. His body was attacked and it showed his perspective through loss of focus like at the start or when he got hit at the end when his eyes closed. 

Steve’s not very well shown in this export that we did, however we intend on elapsing him in the feature-length film. This is because of the fact that he’s only the main muscle of the group. We made a slight hint that he’ll be more of a character later on by showing that Sarah runs at the end on her own but Steve runs with David which shows them two are going to be good together. We tried to do this through the shots that we did, with Steve and David running on the last 5 seconds of the film. The social group of Steve was very ambiguous at the time as I don’t want the audience to know what social group he is in. We wanted this to become clear in a feature length film so that we could keep the audience thinking who people are. We also didn’t want to involve him much in any of the scenes so in the scenes where Sarah was the center of attention, I (Darren) decided to view him as little as possible, being the out of focus person in the shot as a little feature when holding the camera as a POV.