This document discusses the representation of social groups in a media clip. It represents Laura as the stereotypical weak female but also challenges stereotypes by showing her bravery. The chaser, initially intended to be male, is an anti-stereotypical powerful female character. The clip portrays Laura as middle class through her nice clothes and electronics while the chaser, shown to have little, represents the working class.

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

2. WHAT SOCIAL GROUPS ARE INCLUDED IN
YOUR CLIP?
• Laura: The stereotypical weak female
• The chaser: An anti stereotypical character, a woman with
power
• The middle class
• The working class

3. LAURA: The stereotypical female
In our film, Laura featured as a typical woman role – a damsel in distress. We kept this
particular aspect very conventional as we found in our survey that we sent out before we
began filming that most people liked/expected to see a women that was portrayed as
“weak”, we wanted to listen to those who gave feedback and therefor used Laura, we also
thought that going down the route of using a male may have come across a little
unbelievable and we didn’t want it to appear unrealistic. However, we did challenge the
stereotypes a little towards the end of the short clip, as Laura runs away from her attacker.
This shows her bravery which isn’t often shown in women. Also, we wanted to break the
stereotypes that women always need to be saved by a man, we showed Laura as
independent and able to save herself.

4. THE CHASER: Anti-stereotypical female
Initially we wanted the chaser to be a male, this way it would mean that we fully conformed
to most of the stereotypes that surrounded the thriller genre. Due to unavailability of the
male that we were hoping for we had to improvise and use a female, however I am more
than happy with the result. I actually prefer the use of a girl, it makes it little more unique
and different, we felt like the fact that it was two girls gave it the opportunity to become a lot
more personal – with it being two females it’s a high chance they probably know each other
as women don’t tend to have a violent nature within films (especially when unprovoked)
which makes the audience create a lot of questions, and makes them doubt Laura, the one
who they first saw as the victim – “she must of done something to make the chaser hate her
so much?”. We clothed the chaser in all black clothes to show the contast between her and
Laura, she has dark connotations of death and hatred whereas Laura is wearing more
colourful clothes which highlights her innocence.

5. THE MIDDLE CLASS
One of the themes we hoped to shadow throughout the piece was this idea of conflict
between the middle and working class. In the clip we can see that Laura is not at all
deprived in any way, she is fully clothed head to toe in nice clothes, she lives in a nice
house, has access to food and we can also see in the clip that she has various electronic
devices – such as a phone, laptop and a TV. We used Laura to portray a typical middle
class female.

6. THE WORKING CLASS
We used the chaser to represent the working class. We are not introduced to the chasers
house at any point, suggesting she may not even have a home. She has ripped jeans and a
baggy old hoodie on which hints towards the fact that maybe she doesn’t have a lot of
money. The fact that she is carrying around a knife with her and has a lot of built up hatred
shows the audience that she is a broken girl. Our aim was to try and insinuate that The
Chaser was bitter and angry about everything that Laura had, when she herself has so little.