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

Our film focusses on representations of age and gender. We only have two characters in our opening sequence and, throughout the rest of the film, most of the important characters are teenagers. Therefore, we didn't really need to worry about how we represented other age group as there are no older or younger characters that have a significant role in the film.

Age
There are many different representations of teenagers in film and TV. Teenagers can be represented as troublemakers who are rude and loud, do drugs, party and break the law. In Skins, both boys and girls are generally represented in this way. In other cases, generally in American shows or films, teenagers can be split into social groups. For example, in High School Musical or Mean Girls, the characters are grouped into the jocks, the cheerleaders, the nerds, etc.
We chose not to follow any of these conventions and instead represent teenagers as sensible, young, adults. Our characters are similar to the main characters in Scott Pilgrim but are just a bit younger.

Gender
Again, we chose not to conform to the stereotypical representations of male and female teenagers. We decided to switch the traditional gender roles, having a girl breaking up with a boy and having the boy cry about it and become emotional. We did this to create humor and to make the film more interesting as it is differs from other films by breaking conventions.  

Our Characters

Michael
Michael is a fairly typical teenage boy. This makes it easy for the target audience, (teenage boys and girls), to relate to him. He likes music, video games and girls. However, he is also very awkward and we used this part of his personality to create humor in our sequence.

Michael runs away after being dumped by his girlfriend

Michael's awkwardness is slightly over-the-top and exaggerated from what a normal person would be like. We showed this through the fact that he runs away from Lara in order to escape the awkward situation that he is trapped in. His reaction to being dumped also shows that is quite submissive and timid. This is all supposed to create humour but also create some sypmathy for Michael.


Lara
Lara is not meant to be a likable character as the audience is supposed to sympathize with Michael and be on his side. We made her quite a cold character for this reason. She breaks up with Michael very bluntly and shows little empathy.
She is not a typical British girl because we needed to make sure it was obvious that she was not a nice character.

Michael tries to hold her hand

We showed that Lara was quite cold using her actions, facial expressions and her dialogue. As they are walking together, Michael reaches for her hand. Lara pulls her hand away, gives him quite a patronising smile and then looks the other way. When she says that she wants to break up, she doesn't sound apologetic at all and doesn't really offer much sympathy other than asking if they can still be friends. These are the first impressions that we get of her and they make her seem quite uncaring and unsympathetic.

 

 

Overall, we have tried to show through our two main characters, Michael and Lara, that gender roles and traits are much more complex than the obvious stereotypes that are portrayed in many films and TV shows. Michael is the quiet, emotional 'girly' character and Lara is the authoritative, quite unsympathetic 'manly' character. We swapped the roles to create humour and to show that gender roles don't have to be as stereotypical as what is shown in many films.

 

Generally, I think that the message we send about teenagers is generally positive. While Lara is quite a cold person, we have represented her much more positively than the troublesome, drug-using teenagers of shows like Skins. Michael also shows that teenagers can be very emotionally fragile and caring. Again, this contradicts stereotypes of teenagers.