Q2 evaluation
- 1. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
- 2. Age The opening for Deaden Hikes doesn't contain many actors, as we only have Iyra and the Runner. These two characters are both female and aged 17, but we portrayed them as looking between 18-20 because this is the middle sort of age range our filmed is aimed at, because it has a BBFC rating of 15, and our target audience is 15-24. We wanted our runner to be in this age range because it shows that she is not fully an adult yet and is still vulnerable and open to danger when she is least expecting it. Although Iyra was looking suspicious, the runner still went out of her way to help her because she thought it was the right thing to do. This allows the audience to see that the runner isn’t too aware of ‘stranger danger’ and that bad things don’t always happen in the dark, as our thriller was filmed in the daylight. Our thriller will more than likely be seen as inappropriate for younger children as it may be seen as disturbing or too frightening for them. The teenagers in our thriller are portrayed as 'normal' teens. We consider to thriller to represent working class people of a 'normal' background. The audience will be able to relate to the characters as they are 'ordinary' making them more involved in the thriller.
- 3. Characters When comparing our two characters they are both extremely different as the runner is very independent and stable with her life, whereas Iyra is completely the opposite because she is unsure of life and isn’t really sure where she is or what she’s doing as she has just escaped a mental asylum. The characteristics of the runner soon change though when she enters Iyra’s path as she goes from the hero to the victim rather fast.
- 4. Ethnic Groups There is a lack of input of ethnic minorities in our thriller opening as both of our characters are white British. However, this doesn’t reflect on the rest of our thriller, as we would make sure that there isn’t just one ethnic group as this wouldn’t take into consideration everyone who will be watching our film. This was only the first 2 minutes though so we didn’t just want to include a token character for the sake of it.
- 5. Stereotypical Our film can be classed as stereotypical because it shows women as being weak and vulnerable. However, our thriller also contradicts this because usually, it would be a man who kills a woman, where as in deaden hikes it’s a woman that is the villain, killing the runner. My thriller shows that women are capable of being both good and evil and its not just men who do bad things.
- 6. Mental illness During pre production when we was planning our thriller, we wanted to be very sensitive about issues to do with mental illness, however, as we started planning our thriller with the storyboards and screenplays, we started drifting away from being very sensitive about the situation, but this doesn't mean that further on in the thriller the situation will be touched on, maybe when it shows her background in the mental asylum in the main film. We shown Iyras mental illness through her tying herself up to the tree, looking hopeless, and with the shot of her where we used the same clip over the top of itself (shown in the picture below). We did plan on putting voices inside her head on this shot, but we went against it because we decided not to have dialogue in our film, as it leaves room for interpretation.