2 REPRESENTATION OF SOCIAL GROUPS

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The opening to our film Home, which is a psychological drama, has a modern urban setting and features the prominent social group of a young British soldier who has returned home from war. Audiences generally need to comprehend the narrative of a story relatively quickly and therefore filmmakers include 'types' which allow the audience to relate to the characters and understand the narrative far quicker, and it should be made clear the difference between characters as well as identifying who is the protagonist along with the genre of the film.

In my film, it is clear to the audience that our central character is a young army veteran who has greatly struggled with his service and now suffers from PTSD, drawing inspiration from John Watson from BBC's adaptation of Sherlock. There is also a mysterious ex girlfriend, of whom the soldier loved but has now left him, relatively bubbly and full of life to contradict her boyfriend, who has to adapt to the man who is not the same as he once was before he left to war.

In order to research the different kind of social groups that are represented in my film opening, I have made a Pinterest account and made a board about representation of social groups in my film. The feature to easily add posts that you see to your 'board' makes it very simple and clear to use, and thus when viewing the board you can clearly see the posts that you have pinned to it (for instance, you can see all my pins about representation in my film clearly and easily).

This is going to be useful to me as I will be able to discover what other people think about representation, and I will be able to see the things that they have shared and can learn something new about representation from what is shown. 

Open Pinterest HERE

Additionally we went to a lot of trouble in order to better develop our characters by Hot Seating them in a mock interview to try and explore their thoughts and feelings that you don't see during the film opening. We drew on the advice of Pen Densham, an Oscar Nominated Filmmaker and his book Riding the Aligator, and thus included interviewing the central character (shown below is Film Escape, the website where I found information regarding Pen Densham's approach).

Below is the script that we created for the Hot Seating Interview of our Central Character


Interviewer: Corporal Brown, how long was your tenure in Afganistan?

Corporal Brown: It was 2 years. Not as long as most but it felt like forever, like i'd never be home.

Interviewer: And what does it make you feel now that you're home again?

Corporal Brown: I don't know. I don't want to use service as an excuse but it's hard to come home from war. All the death and screaming that i have seen really changes you. I feel as if i could never look at myself in the mirror again.

Interviewer: Why couldn't you look at yourself again?

Corporal Brown: The life that i took. The life that ended right in front of me. I can't get away from them. I still see them when i close my eyes. They're never going to leave my head