How Does Your Media Product Represent Particular Social Groups?

Evaluation Task 2

In our film we decided to feature teenagers as our main social group, excluding young and elderly people. Further to this we also included some middle-aged characters further on in our film in the form of teachers. We decided to use these social groups as they are most relevant to our teenage demographic and we have seen this in other teen angst films such as 'Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging'. However within this teenage population there are lots of other social circles that we have chosen to incorporate into our film.

Firstly we have decided to use Rose our main character as the typical outsider of social circles that strives for popularity. Rose is the new girl in our film so she naturally suited this 'lone wolf' character. However we decided to use Rose because she is the typical good-looking, tall and shy girl that has the potential to become popular within the social circles. Rose is very similar Cady Heron from 'Mean Girls' because much like Rose she strives for this goal of becoming popular and loses her true friends in the process. We decided to incorporate this typical social group of the outsider as it adds an added dimension to the typical 'bitchy' female groups. Rose is also very similar to Cady with regards to appearance as well as personality. For example as you can see in the image both characters start off by wearing dull coloured and ordinary clothing that is suitable for school. However as the film progresses with their popularity we see their clothing evolve into   more extravagant and unsuitable for school. This represents this rebellious social group well as it clearly represents the characters as they change. Further to this both Rose and Cady have Red hair which is important as it forebodes the series of farcical events that the pair cause in both films.

The second social group within the teenage demographic that we decided to feature is the stereotypical 'bitchy' female group that is very popular in many teen angst films like 'Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging' with the character Lindsey as the leader. In our film we used Lucy Lou as the head of this group because of her typical tall, attractive teenage girl appearance that we saw from Lindsey. Although we decided to use Lucy Lou as a character with long dark hair compared to the typical blonde like Lindsey as this feature conveys Lucy's dark side under her fake personality. This character trait is seen in our title sequence as she knocks Rose to the ground when she first sees her. We felt it was important to incorporate this because our target demographic will find this typical social group very relatable as it is very common within teenage girl groups. Further to this all of our research suggested we should conform to this typical teen angst convention as all of them seemed to have included including, 'Mean Girls' and 'Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging'.

Another social group that we decided to convey in our film is the stereotypical good looking boy that all the girls want. However instead of conforming to the typical convention of just having one like 'Robbie' in 'Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging' and many other teen angst films. In our film we have used Tommy and Dexter both as this teenage heartthrob character. We decided to expand this social group and have two boys competing for the main character Rose as it adds a unique feature to this convention. Dexter is the stereotypical tall, dark haired, good looking and fashionable boy the same as Robbie. Dexter's love for female attention is emphasised by his look round at Rose as soon as she walks into the room. This is similar to Zac Efron's hair flick when he gets out of his car in '17 Again' as both convention portray the characters confidence. On the other hand we introduce the other heartthrob character Tommy in a very discrete and portray his character as shy as he walks into the shot looking down at his phone. However his confidence with females is then introduced shortly when he helps Rose to her feet and engages with her. We felt it was important to incorporate this confident male heartthrob lead characters because it is a very popular convention of teen angst and is engaging for our young female demographic.

To support these teenage social groups we also decided to include an older social demographic throughout our film through the use of teachers which also worked as teachers is a typical convention of teen angsts as they are set in schools. We wanted to subtly include this older social group without them taking a major role in our film as we felt this would be most interesting for our target demographic. We also saw this in our research for example in 'Ferris Beulluer's Day Off'. To do this we decided to use long shots that have teachers in classrooms as this represents the social group in a detached way. These shots included mise-en-scene that is iconographic to school such as smartboards, desks, display boards, books and a computer. Further to this the teacher that we decided to include is a male from Canada. His accent therefore enhances a wider social group due to difference in ethnicity, representing todays multicultural society, while maintaining our white actors as this was decided due to our demographic.