Evaluation Task 2 - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

How does your media product represent the area of Class and status as well as Ethnicity?

The media extract that we created from the institution that is ‘us’ has the characters mainly adhering with the stereotypes. I am going to look at how camera angles, Mise-en-scene, Editing and Sound help discover how these four things begin to communicate how Class and status as well as ethnicity are portrayed to our audience.

First of all I am going to focus on the variety of camera angles and shots that we used. We are shown an extreme close up of our victim who is attached to the chair; we therefore see the frightened and fearful emotions shown on his face. As an audience we feel sympathy towards him here we have a created a character that is adhering to the stereotype that ‘white middle class’ people are good and almost always innocent in such situations. Through a mid long shot we really see the stereotypical representation that the man working for the Special Forces playing the ‘hero’ role is good as well as middle-class. We see this through his professional gear and serious facial expressions. He is also adhering to the positive stereotype that middle class workingmen are honest and responsible all of the time. In contrast we see how the stereotypical representation of the ‘villain’ is shown through camera angles. As an institution “we represented” him from two different sides to begin with we shot with low angles showing how he has power over our victim, but we adhered to the stereotype that the ‘villain’ never wins and the plot changed when our ‘hero’ special forces man entered. From then on our working class villain was only shot using high angles which portrayed him as smaller therefore of lower status then the middle class men and this had particular significance when he lay dead the audience were ‘looking down on him’ in a negative way. Showing us the negative way in which the media represents lower class people and those of different ethnicity.

I then went on to look at Mise-en-scene and how this helps to reveal ethnicity, class and status in our thriller. I first looked at costume and how this plays a huge role in the representation of the various characters. For instance we represented our villain wearing a costume, which was all black, which connotes death and adheres to the negative stereotype that all villains wear black. In terms of showing his working class background and foreign status we dressed him in rugged, dirty clothes this adheres to the stereotype that foreigners are dirty and may not present themselves as the ‘typical Wight good guy’ would. He also has a black balaclava mask that covers his face for a lot of our thriller therefore we cannot see his emotions and so can’t relate to him, we also feel he is trying to hide his identity as an audience you then feel he is untrustworthy and this makes us feel intimidated and fear the unknown. 

In contrast we have the binary opposite of our innocent victim whom we represented in a white shirt which connotes purity, innocence and heroism with smart black trousers and shoes suggesting he may play an important role in society this adhers to the well known stereotype that middle class men have smart clothes and hold high positions of responsibility in society. His shirt however is covered in red blood suggesting he has been beaten up therefore the audience are aggravated by the negative treatment this man has received which has taken away the purity of the all white shirt. I then looked at another section of Mise-en-scene we tried to represent which were facial expressions. We only see the villains face up close once here we see his anger and therefore feel concerned for our victim and his safety, as he appears to be in serious danger we sympathies with him. Another area of miser-en-scene that plays a large role in our thriller is the prop we chose to have our villain with a big black gun, which immediately acts as a warning for the audience letting them know that there is potential for danger. Here our villain is adhering to the stereotype that all criminals carry weapons on them. The gun connotes violence and because of whom has it unpredictability. Contrasting with our villain we have our hero Special Forces man who also carries a gun. However here the audience does not feel threatened instead we have represented our character to look in power and therefore the audience is actually relived at the sight of the gun as they feel protected going with the stereotype that guns in the hands of ‘honest’ men are nothing to worry about, here we see how the same prop can have such a different impact depending on which character is in contact with it.

Next I went on to look at how my media product represents ethnicity, class and status through editing. We used slow motion as our villain turns around to try and shoot the Special Forces man. This helps emphasise and focus on how evil he is, the audience also then immediately side with our special forces man adhering to the stereotype that hero’s always come out better then the villains and often win. We also used fade-to-black at the beginning of our scene when we first see our victims face, showing him looking vulnerable this helps put more meaning on his body language and face that looks scared, this creates the audience to fee concern and realise just how much danger he is in. To represent how ethnicity is shown we used lots of short shot duration for our foreign villain man, this means the audience don’t get long to analyse him therefore they feel like they cannot understand him or his motives and the audience is left feeling distant. This is very important as it adheres to the terribly negative stereotype that people of different spoken language are outcasts, as they cannot be understood in everyday society. We also used longer shot duration in our editing, which help represent social class and status as well as ethnicity. The long shot duration were of our middle class hero and victim, signifying they are more important therefore the camera gives them more time on screen to be watched by the audience in comparison with the working class man. Going with the stereotype that the higher your class position the more recognised and trusted by society you are.

The last way that representation can be showed in my thriller is through sound. Arguably the most important aspect in portraying ethnicity is through the use of diegetic sound such as the dialogue this is when we hear our villain speak and the audience’s suspicions that he is foreign and not English are confirmed when we hear him speak Spanish. This shows how he is ‘different’ as the language he speaks is unrecognisable to the audience they feel intimidated and therefore associate him with a bad and negative image. We purposefully represented him with a Spanish voice as this adheres to the stereotype that foreign people often are the villain in both the media and in real life and automatically because we cannot understand their language we jump to the conclusion they have something to hide.

In contrast both the white men speak English adhering to the stereotype that all white men are decent people whom are clean and have nothing to hide. We also used the diegetic ambient sound of gunshots. We used this as it helps set the violent tone of the thriller and reveal just how dangerous things can get when different ethnicity’s and people of various social class fight.

Overall our video extract uses camera angles, mise-en-scene, 
editing and sound to help explore the representation of class and status as well as ethnicity. I think it is clear how our media product represents these two areas. The end leaves the audience with a clear idea that all the characters in this thriller opening seem to be adhering to their stereotypes, and we do not have any characters that are challenging or subverting to the stereotypes you may see within a thriller.