Q2: how does your media product represent particular social groups?

Representation of a group means the portrayal of their expected behaviour and stereotyping. Usually in the media serious teenage crime is shown to be committed by working/lower class males living in an inner city urban environment.   Usually in our genre the social groups represented are typically adults aged from 25 plus who have planned and are in control of their actions. They are usually cunning and mysterious. In our product we aimed at the particular stereotype of a troubled teenager.  She lives in semi-rural area with housing estates and open spaces. She is a middle class white female, not the usual type of person thought to commit violent crime. They would typically be well off and lead a comfortable life, but our character has acted completely differently to the norm. Without context it looks like we have portrayed the character in a negative light but this is because of circumstances outside her control.  We wanted to portray the main character as an everyday teenager caught in a bad situation and not being able to understand or comprehend the severity of the situation and thinking if she doesn’t face it, it will go away. The genre we were working on was ‘thriller’. Keeping to the stereotypes of this genre, the audience is kept in suspense with twists and turns in the plot until the ending unfolds. We wanted our target audience to relate to our title sequence so made the main character a young female, which isn’t usual in a the thriller genre. We wanted to show that the victim of the crime was another young girl so used the newspaper headline and text message to relay this. This way we didn’t give any clues or background to the victim and viewers only knew her name and age leaving them wanting to get more information about this character, what had happened to her and by who.

 The target audience of our title sequence is male and female aged between 23 and 30. We picked this particular age group as they are not long out of the age range represented in the film and would understand how teenagers often get into situations beyond their control. We set out to challenge the common stereotypes in this genre but still maintaining the usual norms and challenges expected in teenage life.