How does your media product represent particular social group?By Suhena begum

For our film opening we used children to represent high social class. We did this using mise en scene. We used a girl and boy aged 10/12 because our plot required young children to conduct in our film opening as children are seen as vulnerable. The mise en scene we chose for the boy is a shirt, trousers and a bow tie. This conveys him as classy and fashionable and his white shirt has the connotations of him being innocent and pure. The little girl wore wore a blouse and skirt and had plaits on her hair which conveys to the stereotype as high class citizens wear blouses and skirts.

Both actors had dialogues which portrayed them as being well spoken. In addition, the setting further reinforced their social background as it was set in a spacious park surrounded by flowers and trees.

Blouse- portrays her as being elegant and sleek

Skirt- displays her as being girly and petite.

Plaited hair- makes her look child-like, cute and we got this idea from batman returns

Our main character is Asian because he was available at the time and was willing to act in our film opening. However, from our research the main guy in action superhero is always a white man but we used sadiqur who is Asian in our film opening. Despite being Asian he also conformed to the stereotype of superhero’s as they tend to be good looking and well built and we felt sadiqur had similar traits.

Casting was difficult due to the time limit that we had and we had to compromise with sadiqur as we could not find a suitable white boy for our film opening

Protagonist- Sadiqur

Our film opening also shows ethnic diversity as we also had white character in our two minute film opening. We chose to include another ethnicity instead of just Asian because we wanted to conform to the stereotype of white people being dominant and well educate which we found out from our research, for example, Spiderman, batman etc. have casted white men as their super hero and other characters starring in the film are white. Therefore we used Jacob Manzi as a doctor as he is white and his appearance matched our idea of doctors which are presented in other films.

From our research we found out that not all films have a diversity of ethnic groups so we decided to challenge this stereotype.

We have casted an Asian as the nurse ‘Nadya Nasrin’ because Asians are associated for going into the field of medicine and is stereotypically viewed this way by many people which we conformed to. This also suggests that although she is a nurse, she is still working below the white dominant doctor. Moreover, she was available during our filming period and we did not have enough time to look for someone with a different ethnic background.

If we had created the whole film then we could have included more ethnic groups to subvert the stereotypes of actions films. This would have also broadened our audience and attract different ethnic groups to watch the film.

We casted young actors, ideally we would want cast older actors but however, due to the limitations of being college students we had to cast teenagers.