Task 2

How does your product represent particular social groups?

The characters in our film

From our opening sequence, only one character is shown; ‘Ethel-May’, she is our main character and the plot of our film, is mainly revolved around her. Later on in our film you see other characters involved; the therapist and the foster family. They also play important parts. By only showing ‘Ethel-May’ in our opening, it will not give much to the audience, they will have to keep watching to find out about the other characters.

Ethel-May’s role in the film is to try and keep the secret that she killed her mum. The audience will find out she killed her, before the foster family do, this is creating dramatic irony. She also gets very jealous of the foster families children, so she tries to kill them as well. She is very manipulating and secretive.

The therapists role in the film is to comfort Ethel-May and to help her recover from the death of her mum, when Ethel-May confides in him and tells him she killed her mum, he has a different outlook on her. He is very worried she might kill him as well, he doesn’t tell the foster family she killed her mother.

The foster families role in the film is to give Ethel-May a safe home, but they do not know all that happened in her past, this makes the film more tense. Once strange things happen to the house and their children, they begin to worry, what Ethel-May might have not told them.

Ethel-MayWhat are the social groups represented in terms of gender, age, class, race .etc?

Ethel-May, looks and seems like a happy child, but inside she is very unhappy, and lonely. Her family was in a very low class, and had a low income. Her mum and dad had a very bad relationship, which made ‘Ethel-May’ feel very unloved and unwanted. When she was little, she was abused a lot by her father, this lead her to being very insecure and having a low self-esteem. This effected her school life, she had no friends and got bad results. Her father dominated the household, her mother was controlled by her, this lead to them separating and Ethel-May had no father in her life. From her early childhood, she developed her controlling and manipulative side. Comparing it to ‘Esther’ she also had a bad upbringing, which lead her to be the way she is now. Our target audience is young teenagers male and female, and in our film we had a young female.

Is gender represented in a stereotypical way? I.e. men dominant and women passive

Ethel-May’s father was very controlling and he dominated the household in her early childhood. Ethel-May picked up the dominating, controlling side. This is why she was dominating over her mother and killed her.

Main Character:

We based our main character on ‘Esther’ from ‘The Orphan’, she is a 33 year old women disguising as a 9 year old girl. By the way she dresses and presents herself, she looks very innocent, cute and sweet. But throughout the film, she acts very nasty and does a lot of terrifying things to try and kill the families children. This is just like our character ‘Ethel-May’ as she kills her mother and then tries killing her foster family, so I feel they resemble each other very well. The pictures I have chosen to compare; are both showing the spooky, mysterious side to them, but the way they act and dress, portray an innocent, sweet side, but on the inside they are very different. Our main character ‘Ethel-May’ doesn't’t show her face a lot, but in some shots you can see the dark, frightening emotion shown in her eyes. They both have a twisted mind, and are very manipulative towards other characters, for example Esther presents a innocent side towards the orphanage lady and to the parents of her foster family, which makes them think she is very sweet. On the other hand Ethel-May also shows an innocent side to her therapist and her parents of the foster family. But there are a few differences between the characters; Esther is younger than our character, she also wears a lot more darker colours and wears her hair differently. Ethel-May killed her mother at the beginning, whereas Esther came from an orphanage.