Evaluation; How does your media product represent particular social groups?

I feel like our coursework has portrayed certain social groups through acting and the plot, it is hard to comment on social groups involving our plot due to the fact there is only one character in our opening( except the person ringing the doorbell) However I feel like we have still used conventions of this particular social group for example the boy.

The main character in Forsaken is portrayed as weak and vulnerable, he is only 11 years old and therefore finds it hard to defend for himself. It is very stereotypical to use a child as the person in distress. This is typical of a thriller film because it is always necessary to have somebody defending for their life/ worried about their safety. The boy is seen to be running and trying to escape from the house at the end of the opening, this shows that he would not stay to fight what was trying to get him (typical of a "hero" convention) , instead he try's to run away, typical of the thriller conventions.



We have dressed the young boy appropriately to represent his social group e.g. young and vulnerable. He was wearing pyjamas, this represents the fact that it is night time, it is cold and dark. This is typical of the thriller convention because mostly bad things happen at night and when the lighting is dark, this then gives him an even lower chance of surviving due to the fact some children are scared of the night and being alone.

Similar to our film opening, The Shining uses a little boy who is also alone. Even though there is some age range between the boy in The Shinning and in our film they are still both young boys who are portrayed as weak and vulnerable/ in danger.




There is really only one character in the opening of the Forsaken, however the audience understand that somebody is trying to get to him/ is in his house. There is only one scene of which we used another member and this was the doorbell scene. We needed somebody to ring the doorbell and therefore we used one of the members dads, this is because you can tell the difference between a woman's hand and a mans hand. We wanted this character to be male because stereo typically men are seen to own the power over other characters in a film/ thriller film. This social group e.g. men are either portrayed as the villain or the hero, in this case they are the villain. I think that it was a good choice to use a mans hand for this scene instead of a woman's hand or no hand at all because it gives the audience an idea of who is trying to get the child and what is in the house with him.
In Forsaken we stereotypical used gender to portray the man as the villain/ powerful however we went again the stereotype of the "damsel in distress" and have chosen the boy to be portrayed as weak. In addition we did not stereo typically use race or class in our film for example we would not have chosen a person of another race to be the villain. However we would not say that the boy was of a high class, you could tell this from what he was wearing and his surroundings, he was a realistic/ normal boy. I think that this has given us an advantage due to the fact it suits our target audience.
Our target audience is 16 and above, even though in some thrillers the convention is to use a person of a similar age to the audience so that they are able to relate to it, however we did not do this, this was due to the fact that we only had a few options of who would be our main actor, therefore we thought that one of the group members siblings would be the best options. However I still feel like the social group we used would still be a hit with our audience, this is because they would feel sympathetic over the young boy.