How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Why I chose certain actors to play the parts in our film? Do they fit the stereotype? Was it important to use the stereotypes? What did I intend with the representation?

Actors
The two actors chosen to play the parts in our movie were Phoebe and Sohni. The choice firstly was affected by the results our group got in the market research.

Because we would have two female actors in our film, we would focus on their similar features the cast would have and how the actors are usually portrayed in different films, so that the cast we chose fit with their appearance in films.

Protagonist girl or victim girl?

Phoebe

Stereotypes
The results of the market research showed that the audience would like to see a girl victim in the movie and only two less people would want a female protagonist. We therefore have a girl protagonist- Olivia and girl victim- Leila. We wanted to the cast in our film to fit the stereotypes, as the audience could relate to them easily and makes the film more realistic to the modern days. The character Olivia played by Phoebe fits the stereotype of a young blonde girl who is usually the dumb, innocent and fragile targeted victim in the film. When watching the movie, our intention for the audience would be for them to think that at the end of the movie, Olivia will be targeted by the Yurei, as this is normally the conventions of a horror film. But as the film comes to the end, the audience realises and finally sees, that Leila is the victim, not Olivia. It not only breaks the conventions of a Yurei film but overall, of a horror film. We chose to break this convention of a horror film to shock the audience and build an enigma.

Gender
We chose to work with female gender rather than male genders as this fits the conventions of horror films, as in all the films, the female is often the victim and the male is the antagonist. We therefore decided to not show the antagonist in the movie but give a link that there is the Yurei character that may be a man. Once again, we decided to follow the conventions of a horror film, often, a Yurei film, portraying the victims being female rather than men because its difficult for a man to be a victim, as the stereotypes they represent is courageous, strong and more like a hero rather than an innocent, dumb and weak man that would always be the target in the movie. Due to the stereotyping of gender in horror films, if we were to use two boys in our film that would be targeted throughout, it would look unusual and even funny for the audience as that breaks the not only the stereotypes of male gender but also the conventions of all horror films. Lastly, before asking any of the questions in the market research, we asked if the person answering this quiz is a female or a male, to which the result showed that 66.7% of the people were female and the rest 33.3% were male, which gives us an idea that the possibility of who would watch our film would be more higher for females than males, therefore, if we use two female characters, there would be a higher chance of the audience relating to that specific character.

Social groups we didnt focus on

Firstly, when completing the market research, one of our questions was to specify your age. As you can see in the screen shot below, only 8 people fitted the category of 21+, which tells me, as the director, that the highest percentage of the age category that uses the internet are between the age of 16-20, therefore, for example, when promoting our film on web sites such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, it is more likely that it would be promoted successfully by teens and young adults if they are our target audience, rather than people between the age of 40-70 as they dont use social networking sites and the internet. We therefore didnt use elderly actors in our film, as the target audience we aimed for, teens and young adults, would be put them off. We also wanted to meet the conventions of Yurei films, with the victims being of a younger age, and something they can easily cope with is the fast pace of the storyline, with what the elderly would find harder to portray.

Social groups we didnt focus on

When thinking about the class and status, we didnt want to focus on either low class social groups or high class groups because we would not like to alienate particular social groups and have a variety of people watching our film. If our film was successful enough to be shown in cinemas or the internet, its not like we would want only high class people to watch our film, therefore we would put the cost of the tickets and viewing of the film higher, so that the lower class social groups would not be able to afford it. On the other hand, I would keep the costs similar, as in cinemas, all the movies are at the same price range, therefore not to isolate any particular groups of people.

People should not be labeled upper class or lower class and they should not be put in particular groups. We would not want to focus on a particular social class, rather, give the opportunity to every social class group to watch the film and truly enjoy it, as we do believe, there is no difference. Even though people watching the film will definitely stereotype the actors and relate to themselves but the point is, we didnt discuss this as a problem that might occur.