media

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

2. The filmmaker uses micro elements to encode the specific
macro representations in to the text for the viewer.
The viewer decodes these representations to read meaning
from the text.

3. • In order to try and create meaning and transfer a message
through a text you need to use micro elements
• Micro Macro

4. • The micro levels make the text, character, and technical
elements, which all fall under codes and conventions
made represent the macro.
The technical elements include:
• Sound
• Mise-en-scene
• Camera
• Editing

5. • The macro level is the overall representation of the film.
These are made up by:
• Issues
• Themes
• Character codes

6. • My media product offers a mediated version of the
world.
• I aim to portray reality by representing particular social
groups by using micro elements from the four different
technical categories
• I aim to do this by looking at these social groups in the
wider sense citizens from a particular economic class),
and in a more targeted sense (truants, victims of
bullying).

7. • The seven key areas of representation are based on people,
places, events, time periods and themes.
• These seven key areas are age
• Gender
• Ethnicity
• Sexuality
• Class and status
• Physical ability/disability
• Regional identity.
All of these areas adds up to verisimilitude
Verisimilitude is “truth to life”, the appearance of being true or
real. It refers to the construction, in a text, of a plausible,
believable world.

8. Mise-en-scene
• Micro elements from the technical category of mise-en-
scene are employed in my product to construct specific
representations of a social group and class. The social
group I was focused on was Drug users
• My product is showing the social group of drug users and
the deprived. It also shows the drug dealer, even though it
is unknown if he takes drugs or not, but I used a cigarette
to show he smokes tobacco.

9. • The key representative area focused on in my product is
class and status. Issues of personal hygiene and addiction
are a massive theme in my media product. As in the
beginning you see a messy room and all the drugs and
syringes on the floor.

10. Gender
• Male and females have always been treated differently throughout time
• My film intro is set in modern time, there is no major division during
the male and female gender in today’s society, but in my media product
if you look deeper you can still see some divisions.
• In my intro there is 1 male and 1 female. The female is a drug user who
is addicted and venerable, and the male is the Drug dealer. This lives up
to the stereotype of the man being in control as he controls what she
gets or not
• A stereotype of drug dealers is that they are messy and all over the place
• I look at this stereotype by arranging her room in a certain way and
making her frantic. Also the area that it is shot in looks deprived.

11. Ethnicity
• There are many different stereotypes based on many different ethnicities.
• All of the people that are shown in my film intro are of the white ethnicity.
• There are many negative stereotypes of white people, for example:
• Drink too much
• Most Likely to get into drugs
• Dumb
As my intro involves only people of this ethnicity this is what some
individuals will think about. I thought about this as it is linked to the themes
and issues of my intro.

12. Class and status
• Class and status is one of my themes in my intro.
• All of the individuals shown in my intro are all of the same class and status but all
have different personalities.
• People usually just judge a whole class or status over a wide range of people but if you
looked individually you would see they are not all the same.
• I showed my actors were of a low status by what they were doing, where they were
and what they looked like as there was no dialogue to tell you.
• The girl was getting drugs whilst the guy was selling it, which is Class A criminal
activity
• They were all wearing clothes that a normal person would wear but some looked a bit
• My intro is set in Tadworth on the estate, which has a connotation of chavs and danger
• The main scenes were shot her messy room and outside on the empty deprived streets
of Tadworth. I chose this specific place as I wanted to show the low class area of
Tadworth to represent the characters in my intro.