How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The filmmaker uses micro elements to encode the specific macro representations in to the text for the viewer.

The viewer decodes these representations to read meaning from the text.

• In order to try and create meaning and transfer a message through a text you need to use micro elements

• Micro Macro

• The micro levels make the text, character, and technical elements, which all fall under codes and conventions made represent the macro.

The technical elements include:• Sound• Mise-en-scene • Camera • Editing

• The macro level is the overall representation of the film.

These are made up by:• Issues • Themes • Character codes

• My media product offers a mediated version of the world.

• I aim to portray reality by representing particular social groups by using micro elements from the four different technical categories

• I aim to do this by looking at these social groups in the wider sense citizens from a particular economic class), and in a more targeted sense (truants, victims of bullying).

•  The seven key areas of representation are based on people, places, events, time periods and themes.

• These seven key areas are age• Gender• Ethnicity• Sexuality• Class and status• Physical ability/disability• Regional identity.

All of these areas adds up to verisimilitude

 Verisimilitude is “truth to life”, the appearance of being true or real. It refers to the construction, in a text, of a plausible, believable world.

  Mise-en-scene

• Micro elements from the technical category of mise-en-scene are employed in my product to construct specific representations of a social group and class. The social group I was focused on was Drug users

• My product is showing the social group of drug users and the deprived. It also shows the drug dealer, even though it is unknown if he takes drugs or not, but I used a cigarette to show he smokes tobacco.

• The key representative area focused on in my product is class and status. Issues of personal hygiene and addiction are a massive theme in my media product. As in the beginning you see a messy room and all the drugs and syringes on the floor.

Gender

• Male and females have always been treated differently throughout time• My film intro is set in modern time, there is no major division during

the male and female gender in today’s society, but in my media product if you look deeper you can still see some divisions.

• In my intro there is 1 male and 1 female. The female is a drug user who is addicted and venerable, and the male is the Drug dealer. This lives up to the stereotype of the man being in control as he controls what she gets or not

• A stereotype of drug dealers is that they are messy and all over the place• I look at this stereotype by arranging her room in a certain way and

making her frantic. Also the area that it is shot in looks deprived.

Ethnicity

• There are many different stereotypes based on many different ethnicities. • All of the people that are shown in my film intro are of the white ethnicity.• There are many negative stereotypes of white people, for example:

• Drink too much• Most Likely to get into drugs• Dumb

As my intro involves only people of this ethnicity this is what some individuals will think about. I thought about this as it is linked to the themes and issues of my intro.

Class and status

• Class and status is one of my themes in my intro. • All of the individuals shown in my intro are all of the same class and status but all

have different personalities.• People usually just judge a whole class or status over a wide range of people but if you

looked individually you would see they are not all the same.

• I showed my actors were of a low status by what they were doing, where they were and what they looked like as there was no dialogue to tell you.

• The girl was getting drugs whilst the guy was selling it, which is Class A criminal activity

• They were all wearing clothes that a normal person would wear but some looked a bit• My intro is set in Tadworth on the estate, which has a connotation of chavs and danger• The main scenes were shot her messy room and outside on the empty deprived streets

of Tadworth. I chose this specific place as I wanted to show the low class area of Tadworth to represent the characters in my intro.