How does your media product represent

particular social groups?

Design and Answered byRachael Brooks and Holly Allright

Who and what (people, places, themes, ideas, time periods) have you represented and how in your

film?• Our film was set in our own school, it is a period building

originally built in the 1300’s• The Gothic windows, detailed interiors and the ghostly

cellar was a definite to include in our film. As the school is very aged it made it quite easy for us to make the time period change from the past to the present believably.

• We decided to use the cellar from the rumour of it being haunted- we took a ‘day trip’ in to the creepy underground damp cellar and found loads of history, there were crosses, remains of an old kitchen and old pictures; one of which had been damaged. We included these it to our film as flashes of close ups.

• Holly and I decided to use young innocent looking girls for both the present and past but with different types of clothing these were stereotypically the ‘good ones’ and for the ‘bad one’ we used each other for one character to randomly appear as the villain.

• Our themes of religion, death, revenge, resurrection, and presence of the unknown. These were included by quick iconographic snap shots of crosses, the ‘bad’ girl and other unusual looking things to establish a sense of unease and uncertainty. Our overall idea was to have the story line of a girl who was murdered and comes back for revenge more than once.

Who is included and excluded by the text we have created?

The main story characters have been included such as the villain, two girls from the past and two girls from the present, and we have excluded any secondary characters.

We made sure our actors represented a variety of ethnic groups both to preserve a sense of realism and to avoid alienating member of our target audience.

As it our text is a thriller and is aimed at a teenage audience we decided to represent typical teenagers as our main characters, this way our audience can indentify with our characters. We used a juxtaposition of the colour characters in the present against the black and white characters in the past going up the same staircase, to represent the way the past was repeating it self with similar type of girls in the present.

PAST PAST PRESENT PRESENT

What form of ‘realism’ have you constructed, and why?

By using the old school and ordinary looking girls it has created some form of verisimilitude; we did this to let the audience get to know the type of characters they would be familiar with already, this fits in well with the conventions of a thriller where mundane normality is often set up only to be disrupted by supernatural events.

The unrealistic side would be how the teenage girls went curiously looking round this school, this would be unlikely to happen in real life. However, conforming to the conventions of a thriller, our characters are strong and brave young women who show themselves to be up for the challenge they face in the rest of the film. Also the resurrected ‘presence’ back for revenge introduces the element of supernatural.

What role do the mise en scene , acting, dialogue, music and style of camera work (‘micro’ elements) play in the construction

of verisimilitude (the ‘macro’ level of the textual world)?

• Hand held camera was very shaky and was able to create a type of atmosphere where there is worry and the characters are in a rush. We also used steady camera shots to allow the audience to see where the characters were going.

• At times there was quite a contrast between the slow creepy music and the fast moving girls. We wanted to create the effect of an underlying ‘presence’ which would make the audience feel uncomfortable.

• We included no dialogue throughout the film as we felt it would be more effect with just the music, whereas the dialogue could have distracted from the creepy and uncomfortable atmosphere. All though we shot some o the film with dialogue, we made a conscious decision to cut it out during the editing process.