Media.

1. How does your media product
represent particular social
groups?
By Brook, AJ, Amy, and Harriet.

3. Social group example number one
• Teenagers are often stereotyped as being thugs in hoodies that participate in
activities which are not good for health (e.g. drugs), and also committing
crime.
The media is the main way these
stereotypes are put across. They
portray teenagers in articles as yobs,
and only include stories which put
the teenagers in bad light.

4. •
•

6. Comparing a social group to what we
represented in our media product
Samuel Loch is a schizophrenic man; mentally ill people often
are represented as crazy people who are locked up in
asylums, and are more likely to become psychopaths.
Schizophrenic patients, such as Sam, as often put across as
violent.
In ‘Friday the 13th’ a murder is committed by an ill man, and
in The Silence of the Lambs an unstable man is extremely
violent. Most films alike these give the sudden images in your
head of someone in a straitjacket trying to escape and
screaming, whilst locked in a padded room.

7. • We portrayed mentally ill people with reality. At the beginning of the film, Samuel
Loch seems like a normal guy with no illness – alike this, most mentally ill people do
not come straight off the bat as ill, in fact most of the them seem normal until you
come to notice slight differences. An example of a difference is when we see Ellie Loch
on the swing, and then she disappears. You stop seeing things from his perspective
and see the reality, which makes you realise not everything is as it seems.
• Sam is presented as a tense character with something underlying in his memory. We
know he’s tense from how he often clenches his fists, and the music suddenly becomes
full of suspense.

8. Mise-En-Scene
 Costumes play a big part in differentiating social groups, e.g. teenagers, if portrayed as thugs, wear black
hoodies that cover their faces with dark tracksuit bottoms. Sam wears casual clothes which are used to
show the reality.
 Another big thing is the props, most of which are in Sam’s home. The props in the kitchen make it seem
messy and unkempt, which, to an extent, shows mentally ill people are disorganised.
 The lighting in the product is quite bright, and coupled along with his facial expressions of smiling in a few
scenes, it brings him across as a normal everyday guy you might see in public. However, bringing in his
tense faces that occur every once in a while, it casts a shadow over his normality. This poses the idea that
mental illness is a shadow that follows someone around everywhere they go, but sometimes when the
light is brighter than ever, the shadow appears darker; as the person realises they’re not ‘normal’, and
there is something wrong. For example when Sam was in the sunny park looking tensely over the lake with
Ellie in the background, he is trying deeply to forget something that keeps following him everywhere.
Mental illness takes over the person, leaving the person to become a silhouette of who they used to be –
they look like the same person from the outside, but the inside is muddled.

9. SOUND/MUSIC
 The music is quite often deep and slow, giving across the tense feeling. This
gives the impression that mentally ill people are troubled on the inside. It’s like
a piano being played on the inside of them, and each note played sends a spiral
of thoughts around them that no one else can see of hear.

10. Cinematography
• Some of the shots are [extreme] close ups which show Sam’s expressions in
a clear manner.They are quite daunting shots which make him appear
hollow and scary in the sense of ‘Is he okay?What’s he going to do?What’s
wrong?’ – it makes the audience feel mentally ill people are stuck on one
path; when they go one way, they act non-violently, but they can turn.They
feel this because it seems Sam is going to do something frenzied when he
stares into the void.

11. CONCLUSION
• We presented mentally ill people in a realistic way, which shows how they honestly
are. This is a good way of presenting them because the audience get the message
across that they are normal but have a few problems. It is less harmful for people
that have mental illnesses because they do not have to explain why they aren’t
going to hit someone.