EVALUATION ACTIVITY - 2 (Giordano)

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


Our thriller opening sequence shows a adult male aged between 18 - 25 years old, who at first seems to live a normal life with a successful job. We see this in the way that he is dressed in a smart suit and tie.

However what is kept at bay from the audience until the last few seconds of the opening, is that he is a psychotic killer.

An evident character that our psychotic protagonist is similar to, is that of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho (Harron, 2000), particularly in their similar appearance (Made evident from the GIF's below)They are both young, male adults, alongside both having white skin tones and dark brown hair.

Looking at costume, both characters are dressed similarly (suits and ties, Business dress), giving the impression that again both character lead successful and normal lives. In 'American Psycho' Patrick Bateman by day is a head manager of a huge wall street firm, yet by night he unexpectedly work colleagues and street prostitutes, therefore being classed as a serial killer.

I believe that our protagonist is also very similar to this, at first glance you would think that he is a successful businessman yet as the narrative unfolds it is shown that he is a killer, this therefore sets up our protagonist to be the main role in our opening sequence.

Our Protagonist

Patrick Bateman (American Psycho, Harron 2000)

Furthermore, we also decided to change the predictable victim of a serial killer, which in most thrillers tend to be a venerable woman. In our case we decided to use a black male to play the part of the killers victim. Usually we expect to see black males fighting their way through the films and or tend to be presented as criminals and law breakers dressed in tracksuits and hoodies tops, especially in the thriller genre. Examples of this include, The purge and training day (see examples below).

The purge character (stereotype black male)

Training day character (stereotype black male)

Female victim stereotype (The call)

The different representations are portrayed in four key areas, these are - angles and movements, mise en scene, editing and sound, camera shots.

Camera shots:

Our thriller opening also uses a variety of different camera angle shots. An example of this is towards the end of the opening, when we see a low angle shot of the protagonist looking down at what we later find out is a dead body. Low angle shots are used to show his power in the opening. Sharply contrasting this is when the camera tilts down towards the floor to reveal a dead black male. This shows his lack of power and is nothing compared to the protagonist in this scene.

Mise En Scene:

Mise En Scene plays a huge part in our thriller opening. The costume in which we decided our protagonist to wear (a suit) suggests to the audience that he is of upper or middle class. Props also plays a key part in our opening. The watch in which the protagonist outs on his wrist also symbolises his class and perhaps wealth.

Editing:

When it came to the editing of our opening sequence, we put all of our footage together and it was five minutes in length which was far to long. We therefore had to cut out certain scenes and extend others, an example of this is the shaving scene. The fact that we edited the entirety of the opening to be in black and white, and also an eerie piano score playing over the opening, the simple shaving scene is looked at different and is very tense and unsettling.

Sound:

For sound, we decided as a group to use a dark and eerie piano score, to create a tense and mysterious fell throughout the opening. I think that the slow piano score almost compliments the back and white effect used throughout the opening.