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

2. AGE We felt that having a young person would convey the sense of vulnerability that we wanted in our victim character we loosely based it around the character from The Ring, Who we felt was used to create this sense of vulnerability through her age and gender – something we will move onto later. We also felt that having a young person would give our character a sense of confusion as they are not in their comfort zone – psychiatrists office. We also thought that for our other character we needed the character to look a bit older to convey the sense of maturity and calm which is needed to fill a role of a psychiatrist. By making this character older we also wanted to get across that she was in control of the situation yet we didn’t want the age gap to be too big as in the plot the two character do in fact become friends.

3. Gender The reason we had two women in our film was firstly from the “victim” character we wanted to get across this sense of vulnerability which I felt could clearly be seen in a women as it is one of the stereotypes women have especially in thrillers – and film in general. We also chose two women as we wanted them to build a friendship throughout the film and I think we decided that if we had a man and a women it would be had to get away from the fact they might have a romance in the film. We also thought that a woman was more likely to strike a friendship with another woman. Also if the film were to be made the “baddie” was going to be a male character and we felt that this was adequate as we had two women and we could play on the stereotype that males are domineering, overpowering characters and females are more suppressed and weaker characters.

4. Gender Cont... We had to strike the differences between the two character so we could tell the difference between the psychiatrist and the victim. This is why we had the victim character in dark, black costume so that we could tell she is the victim as it strikes a difference with the more casually smart psychiatrist but the black is also used to connatate death, a central theme throughout our film.