Evaluation Question Two

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

In the first draft of our film script, we had originally decided that our main character would be a boy. However, due to the fact that all of the actors interested in being in our film were girls, we had to change this to fit our resources. I think that changing our main character to a girl gave more dimension to our piece. In our current society, most of the action or horror films focus around men and boys, however more recently female leads have begun to come into play like Jyn in Rogue One A Star Wars Story. This new inclusion of more female roles is becoming more prominent, so I feel that including a girl in our film made it more up to date and current with some trends of modern film.

Ellie and I both attend an all-girls grammar school, and we are surrounded by girls in our school lives, so we are both more familiar with the representation and behaviour of girls and so when it came to choosing framing for our female character, I think that helped. As well as us as producers going to an all-girls school, most of our peers who would go see the film are also girls, and since we were trying to appeal to our peers for the two-minute opening I think this would have worked well. But I think that the fact that our only character being a girl doesn’t exclude boys from watching and enjoying our film either. In our survey, out of the sixteen people who did our survey, ten of them said they would prefer to have a female lead, so we feel that this was a widely preferred option.

We also decided that we wanted our character to be a slightly younger girl, because we feel like this would add a sense of vulnerability to her character. By having her be around fourteen, it makes her seem more like a child, and the fact that she’s all on her own makes the audience worry over her more. If she was older, around fifteen or sixteen, she would have seemed more independent, and would have appeared less vulnerable. She is also the only character in the whole film, so it gives a sense of isolation. She only appears with her dog there, with nobody else.

Also as the figure steps in front of the screen, it becomes clear that like the shadow is a lot bigger than the girl is. This adds to her sense of fear you have for her. Because the figure is so much larger, it’s clear that they could easily overpower her. This was also added to at the end of the piece, where she falls down. She is on the floor at the very lowest place she could possibly be, and this adds to her feeling of powerlessness.