The media product represents teenage girls ages 13-19. It portrays common issues this social group faces such as cyber bullying and eating disorders. The characters are depicted as typical teenage girls to help the target audience relate to them. The film aims to realistically portray the struggles girls face, such as loneliness and depression, in a social realism genre.

1. QUESTION 2
How does your media product represent particular social groups?

2.  During the production of our film, we had to make sure that the
occurrings in my film opening represent a certain social group. The issues
targeted in our film are most relatable to teenage girls, and we have
considered aspects such as common issues in today’s female adolescent
generation, as they consist of the problems our characters are faced with.
The opening to our film is aimed towards girls between the ages of 13 –
19 and it represents today’s younger generation as there are many young
girls facing the predicaments displayed in the clip. We decided on the
genre of Social Realism as films of this genre portray a lot of real life
issues, which makes the film satisfying to watch as we feel we can relate to
it, and we can relate it to our own lives. We researched many social realism
films to make our film fit in the genre as best as it could, and also get a
good idea of how our film should be.

3.  Cyber bullying and eating disorders are the main
issues targeted in our opening, and these issues are mostly
common with females rather than males, although these
things do happen to boys, it is more typically stereotyped
with girls, especially of a young age. This is why our
characters are two young girls. The film is somewhat
stereotypical as the characters images are fairly typical, as
they are portrayed as two ‘normal’ young girls, located in
a school environment, and their costumes consists of
casual clothing and minimal makeup, they have gadgets
such as iPhones and are involved in social media, this is
to highlight the fact that they are just regular high school
girls, so our target audience can find themselves relating
to the characters and find it interesting to watch, due to
them similar to the characters.

4. WHAT DOES OUR FILM HAVE IN
COMMON WITH OTHER FILMS
 We have ensured that aspects such as costume, script, editing and
filming have been used in a certain way to make the final product fit in
with the genre of ‘social realism’ as other films of this genre have quite
serious plots rather than fictional or comical, as they portray real life
issues that are negative and perhaps upsetting to watch. The opening of
our film is quite sad and moving which compliments the genre of social
realism as the other films also consist of upsetting scenes such as death,
murder, crime and more. We have manipulated the script, costume and
filming to attract the target audience so that they would be interested in
the film, and warm up to it more as they can relate to it as young people
going through these things, so that a typical teenage girl can enjoy the film
when watching it.

5.  In our film, we’ve portrayed the stereotype of teenage high school
girls in a somewhat negative way, as our film shows the negative side
to be a teenage girl, and represents the struggles that many girls have
to go through on a daily basis and the things they have to go through
while dealing with them such as loneliness, depression, self harm, and
more. We tackled social issues through the portrayal of cyber bullying
as this is hugely common as social media sites are used constantly by
the majority of the younger generation, and statistics show that 52%
of young people have reported cyber bullying.

6. SOCIAL GROUPS
 A large population of young girls are at pressure to be a certain way, they
look up to celebrities such as singers, actresses, models etc and a lot of pressure
is put on them by the media to be and look like these celebrities in order to be
beautiful and have worth, otherwise be classed as ‘ugly’ and this leads girls to be
under huge pressure and become victims to bulimia, anorexia and other forms
of self harm. Our film portrays this as one of our characters is challenged with
bulimia and it is shown how disturbing it is and how she deals with it, and the
impact it has on her life, mentally, physically and emotionally. The typical
teenage girl would be happy, with lots of friends and likes to shop and attend
parties, but our film shows a darker side to the typical teenage girl, and portrays
sadness and depression instead.

7. AGE, GENDER AND
ETHNICITY
 Our target audience is girls ages 13 – 19 as the characters are
between this age and the plot is more targeted towards them but we
found that boys, and older people could enjoy the film as it is
extremely possible that they can relate to the issues portrayed in our
film, as cyber bullying and eating disorders can happen to anyone at
all. The characters in our opening are both young girls of a Asian
descent, however there is no offensive material towards other races,
gender, or age groups and our film is open to everyone and it targets
all ethnic groups and races, and there is nothing stopping any age
groups, race or males in watching our opening at all.