How does your media product represent particular social groups
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Transcript of How does your media product represent particular social groups
How Does your media represent particular social groups?
First lets look at the characters in our
seuqence
Agent No. 1• Asian
• Young
• Male
• He seems the cooler of the two agents.
• He seems in charge (he has the tracker, and he answers the questions)
• Seems to be the protagonist and so audience like him because of positive portrayal (due to emphasis in framing and dominance over sequence)
• Character portrayed as an adult aged 20-25 despite actor being younger
• Seems professional (wears suit, and sunglasses, has tracker and gun on hand etc.)
Agent No. 2• White
• Blonde
• Male
• The less cool and more inexperience of the Agents (he panics, waves his gun around, makes empty threats etc.)
• Seems to be the protagonist (or sidekick) and so audience like him because of positive portrayal (due to emphasis in framing and dominance over sequence)
• Suit makes him seems professional.
• Character portrayed as an adult aged 20-25 despite actor being younger
Protagonist• White
• Male
• Young
• Black hair
• Blue eyes and ability to turn invisible indicate some superhuman element to him
• Portrayed as the most powerful of the characters (through hyper masculine framing, and by being the last one alive)
• Character portrayed as an adult aged 20-25 despite actor being younger
• The most conventional representation out of the ones in my sequence
Conventional protagonistof Action Sci Fi movie • Male
• Young (20-30)
• White
• Dark Hair
• Typically Masculine (Physical and mental ability, good social skills, good at job)
• Willing to take on challenges
• Handsome
Examples:• Neo (The Matrix)
• James Kirk (Star Trek)
• Cobb (Inception)
• Xavier (X-Men:First Class)
• Wikus (District 9)
• Kyle Reese (Terminator)
• Luke Skywalker (Star Wars)As Chris’ character fits this descricption you can see that our protagonist was conventional
Indian Characters in Action Sci Fi Films
• Oriental Asian characters feature a lot in Action films (Particularly in the Martial Arts Sub-genre) however non-Oriental Asian Characters are scarce
• In Action Sci Fi , Asian characters are even rarer, particularly Indian characters, who are heavily under represented
• In fact I could not find a single example of an Indian character
• The only example of an Asian character who isn’t Oriental which I could find was the Arabic character “Yusuf” in “Inception”, who is a supporting character, providing drugs and driving skills
From this you can see that Yadash’ character broke conventional representations of characters in Action Sci Fi movies.
Decisions we made while casting our film
We decided quite early on that it would be better to only use group members as actors as they would be easier to organise
We also put Chris as in the role of the Protagonist as he ticks the most conventional boxes as a conventional character (White, short dark hair, male etc.)
We choose not to worry about portraying characters older than ourselves as we thought that age would be irrelevant in our opening sequence
Gender in our sequence
There are no girls whatsoever in our opening sequence
We dressed in suits which have accentuate masculinity
We gave each character a gun, which has masculine connotations
Each character points their gun into the camera at least once in the sequence, which seems intimidating.
The absence of women in our sequence is typical of an Action Sci-Fi movie and shows how dominant men are
Race in our sequence
Our sequence contains an Indian character
As previously mentioned Action Sci Fi movies do not tend to feature many Asian characters
Yadash’ has a positive representation; he answer’s all of the other agent’s questions, and has the tracker on hand for when it is needed.
He is also the only one of the agents who offers any sort of resistance to the protagonist
He does however get killed by the protagonist who is white which could be seen as a negative aspect of our representation of this character