How does your media product represents particular social group?

1. Evaluation 2:
How does your media
product represent particular
social groups?
By: Mingma Gurung

2. Our media product represents certain social
groups because of our target audience, who
belong to a specific social group. This is
shown through the uses of ‘Gender’, ‘Age’,
‘Sexuality’, ‘Ethnicity’, and ‘Class’.

3. When thinking of gender while planning the movie we wanted to challenge
the typical mainstream movie’s gender based stereotype. This was done by
making the protagonist (male) as a weak character and the female character
(Evie) is presented as an antagonist who has a lot more power than the
protagonist. Therefore, we have disputed the stereotypical convention of
making the male character more dominant and powerful. However, like
every other mainstream movies we had also put the protagonist as a male
character because changing every aspect of the movie which are followed
by almost every movies would be unique but could also be risky of making
the movie confusing and uninteresting.

4. The main target audience for our movie is 15+, but we predicted that mostly
people aged 17-22 are more likely to watch the movie because audience with
similar age will be attracted to watch the movie more than other who age older.
This is mostly because they can somehow relate to some situations and the sub-
genre of ‘Psychological’ generally appeals to that certain aged groups. The older
version of protagonist, Ethan is seen as a 20 years old but is actually 15 years
old. The main reason why we chose him to play the protagonist is because we
weren’t able to find anyone who had similar age as the character, but our actor is
tall and looks mature so we can get away by making him 20years old. Younger
version of the protagonist is 15 years old but the actual actor is 13 years old, the
actor is average tall and the age difference isn’t too far apart. This means the
actor is perfect for his role. The protagonist’s mother who only appears in his past
is aged 25 years old but in reality the actress is 17 years old. It was quite hard for
us to make her look old and mature, so we mostly focused on her clothes to make
her look older than her actual age. For this reason, we made her wear more
mature clothes such as knitted top. Finally, the psychiatrists, Nathan is aged 29
years old and our actor is 25 years old but our actor looks older than his age,
which means making him play the role of 29 years old wasn’t a problem.

5. In our movie we included both male and female characters,
where the male is protagonist like every other mainstream
movies and the female is the antagonist. There are rarely any
movies with the female taking the antagonist role. Mostly
female are given the role of the heroine as they are seen as
weak character or the helper who wouldn’t have much power.
Other than that if the female character was to play the evil
role, then she would most probably be the antagonist’s
assistant like in ‘King’s men’ Gazelle who plays as an evil
character but is the assistant of the antagonist. Another thing
we changes was the usual personality of most protagonist,
who are shown as macho and courageous character.
However, our protagonist is someone who is vulnerable as he
can’t face his problem as himself; he is helped by the
psychiatrist.

6. Another factor that our movie represents character from different ethnicity
such as Asian and African: the protagonist and the psychiatrist as their ethnic
background is Nepal and the protagonist’s step mother who’s ethic
background is Somali. From this, it is very clear that we didn’t follow how the
mainstream movie portrays the ethnicity because they mostly portray a white
character as their protagonist and sometimes a black character like they did
in ‘Focus’ as Will Smith being the protagonist but mostly a black character is
given a role of the helper, villain or the mentor of the protagonist. However, it
is very rare to see an Asian protagonist. Jackie Chan is probably one of the
most famous protagonists who represent the Asian ethnicity as he did in
‘Rush Hour’, when he played as one of the protagonists. Therefore, making
Asian actor as the protagonist will mean doing something different than most
of the mainstream movies.

7. Finally, we have represented middle class
as it would be the most realistic class for
our characters to come from as our plot is
based in an ordinary individual’s life. Also,
middle class is the best option for our plot
as he would have to be able to afford a
psychiatrist. We have used convention to
present middle class through the clothes
our characters.