Evaluation, Question 2; Social Groups

Q2.How does your media product represent particular social groups.

When creating 'Nameless' we wanted our characters to represent people aged between 20 to 30 years old. The reason why we decided to do this is because the characters are meant to be young, city professionals. What makes our thriller suspenseful is the fact that the audience would not expect the characters to be involved in something negative, it makes them question the situation.

To represent particular social groups we used different types of Mise en Scene and camera shots. Our opening is similar to a movie called : 'Collateral' , there are a lot of similarities with 'Collateral' and 'Nameless' because it was a film that we was inspired by.

Here are some examples of how we used props, costumes, and locations to represent a particular social group;

Costumes

Each character was dressed in a business wear conveying their social group (professional business workers) and their age. We would expect business people to be dressed in a suit and generally we would expect adults to be dressed in suits for the obvious reasons like work. The use of clothing in our opening contributed to the actors roles being more realistic. This is very similar to 'Collateral' being that most of the characters are in suits to convey their social group.

Props ; Mobile phone

We used  mobiles, to represent a social group.Although blackberries are now associated with a large majority of all age groups and social classes, they were originally targeted at business people. By business people I mean professions who work in city jobs like banking. We therefore made our characters all use blackberries connotes that the characters using them are professional business workers and this is how we wanted to represent the characters.This is very similar to 'Collateral' being that there is a scene where one of the characters are on their mobile phone, to connote their, profession and social group.

Taxi

We originally had a scene where one character arrives at a location in a taxi. However the taxi was a black taxi and these are not only traditional British vehicles but represent a form of transport for the higher social classes. Usually you wouldn’t see school children get a taxi to school but business professional and inner city workers regularly take this form of transport to work and around. Black Taxis are fairly expensive. Consequently by using this form of transport we wanted the characters to be represented as middle class professionals and we wanted them to appear like they were wealthy. Once again, this is  similar to 'Collateral' being that a taxi is used, it forms the basis of the entire  plot.

Barclays Bike

There is also a scene in the film where a character gets off a Barclays Bicycle. Our film was filmed in London; people within our target audience are likely to be from London, because they can relate to the movie. Therefore we can assume they know these bikes are aimed at people heading into inner city work, this connotes that the character works in the city and it represents the fact that the character as older then the actual actor is.

Location (Apartment):


Lastly we used a high market apartment to film the phone scene where the main character comes out of a lift. The location makes the audience associate the character with wealth and style because the surroundings are up market and in association with wealthy people. This is very similar to 'Collateral' being that various wealthy locations are used to represent a particular social group.