Evaluation : Question 6

How does your media product represent particular social groups ?

Throughout creating my opening sequence I tried to think a lot about who I was actually targeting and whether they were part of social groups or certain types of individuals, also by researching what my target audience would actually look like. This was hard to define as many different types of people could relate to the story line of the opening sequence.

One of the types of social groups or individuals that could be represented in my opening sequence is young women. In today’s society girls from the youngest age of 12 are getting into relationships more so with males that are slightly older. In most cases these young girls do know who they are getting into a relationship with but with social networking sites and technology advancing it’s far easier for young girls to be targeted especially on the internet, by people they barely even know who make them feel like they’re wanted and in some cases these older males do harm the younger girl. In my opening sequence I tried to present the crime of domestic violence quite sensitively but by also showing quite forwardly that girls can become a victim quite easily. I did this by presenting the male character James as a dark shadowy figure, connoting that he has a lack of identity, that no one really knows who he is, not even his partner Sarah, which can relate to girls getting into relationships with older men that they haven’t met before, nobody really knows what they’re like and could change at any point. Alongside individuals the crime of domestic violence can target groups of young girls. If one girl is a victim of the crime, it won’t be long until friends start to realise whether that be by physical marks or changes mentally. In my opening sequence instead of showing what the character Sarah should have done to deal with the domestic violence I decided to represent what she shouldn’t have done, hopefully sending out a message to younger girls that are victims that more crime isn’t needed, that killing that person isn’t the rational thing to do and that actually telling somebody about the problem is more effective.

Another social group that can be personally represented throughout my opening sequence is males in general in friendship groups, gangs or individually. The crime of domestic violence is shown quite sensitively in my opening sequence, but the message is still clear toward men, that it is wrong to harm girls and men too. It portrays the question of ‘If you could see yourself committing domestic violence, would you still do it? ‘. Males can also be represented in the opening sequence through the use of knife crime. Even though I represented Sarah to be using a knife on James, and stereotypically it is men that do commit knife crime, that woman can too. Some men have been hurt by women whether that is in a relationship or on the street. There are girl gangs that do hang about on the streets and can use weapons just as effectively as male gangs. The opening sequence can also represent males that are in gangs, as sometimes they could be peer pressured to do things to look more popular than they actually are just to impress friends, whether they want to do it or, the opening sequence shows that males need to think about what they’re actually doing rather than just doing it.

Other than personally targeting specific types of males and females individually or as part of a group, I tried to target people generally through the type of genre that I chose and through following Blumler and Kats theory, that people will watch the opening sequence for particular needs, biological, psychological or social needs.. I chose to portray a hybrid genre of a psychological crime drama, and researched what sort of people would watch this sort of genre for a film, and mainly did this through a questionnaire as shown below. From the questionnaire that I created on servey monkey, I embedded them onto social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter so that a range of young teens and adults could answer. The majority of the people that answered were female, possibly because they wanted to see how the crime of domestic violence would be shown, or to relate to the character of Sarah as they could have been through the same circumstances as her, or even to be aware that a crime such as domestic violence does happen and that they need to take precautions to stop it from happening. In comparison to men taking the questionnaire, as they may feel like they don’t need to watch this sort of thing happening as they may never commit such a crime, or on the other hand have committed domestic violence and don’t wish to remember what they did, playing on the psychological side of the genre. The questionnaire helped a lot as I could see who to mainly aim my opening sequence too, and what sort of target audience I would be attracting for further research.

The main audience that I targeted through my opening sequence was teenagers and young adults, through the representation of the characters Sarah and James. In today's society teenagers and young adults are usually represented unfairly, especially through being broadcasted on TV. For example, the 2012 London riots. Many teenagers and young adults were harassed and treated unfairly on the streets simply because of the clothes they were wearing or the friends that they were hanging about with. As well as the footage being shown on the TV was predominantly of teenagers and young adults, rioting, not showing what older adults did, or the reasons for doing them, putting a bad perception and a negative stereotype on young people from the rest of society. From looking at examples in the news and seeing how teenagers and young adults/ people in general were being presented negatively, I tried to present the characters of Sarah and James fairly, along with the crimes that they were committing. I did this by using Claude Levi-strausse theory of binary opposites, by showing Sarah to be committing knife crime. By doing this, I take the stereotype away from men being the predominant gender committing crimes, and showing that actually woman do commit crimes along side men, sometimes even more, giving men a more positive perception even though men are still shown to be the more dominant gender to commit crimes on television and in newspapers. 

Below I have created a wordle to show all the words that can interpret particular social groups, or individuals dealing with domestic violence or knife crime, along with the crime of domestic violence and things that could possibly be linked with it.

Overall I think that my media product represents social groups in many different way, whether that be targeted at different genders i.e. male or female, individuals by using Blumler and Kats theory and targeting them personally or psychologically linking with the hybrid of the genre (Psychological crime drama) or targeting gangs of people, and making certain stereotypes look better, or even representing them fairly throughout my media product compared to other media products such as the news that represent and stereotype these certain types of people negatively.