2) How Does Your Media Product Represent Particular Social Groups?

For our film opening, our main focus of social groups were gender and regional identity. This was mainly down to the fact that we did not choose actors that best reflected our genre, where the age stereotype could have been used as well if we had done so. Also with the regional identity, it was a practical choice more than anything as we all live and go to school in London. Therefore, our film opening represents particular social groups in the following ways:

GENDER

These are gender stereotypes accepted by the media today.

You can see examples of these gender stereotypes for films of a similar genre to ours in characters such as Sam from Attack The Block and James Bond from the James Bond films.

Sam getting mugged in the opening of Attack The Block.
She is vulnerable and emotional. 

James Bond fighting a villain on top of a train, shown to be aggressive. 

MALE REPRESENTATION 

For the role of our henchman, we chose a male character over a female character due to the stereotype surrounding men as being aggressive, dominant and controlling. These are all negative representations of the male sex, and as we wanted our villain to be noticeably bad to the audience and so associated him with these traits.We tried to make the henchman as unrelatable as possible for the same reason, to make sure he was disliked by the audience. He is similar to the character Roy Batty in Blade runner, creepily passive at times when at others, overly aggressive.

Below the henchman can be seen grabbing, pushing and chasing after Leora, all of which are aggressive and typical of a villainous male stereotype. 

FEMALE REPRESENTATION 

The female representation in our opening is quite opposite to that of the stereotype. We deliberately cast a female in our opening to oppose and conform to certain aspects of the character we wanted. Stereotypically women are seen to be weak but we made Leora Strong-willed, independent and physically active to oppose this. However, we wanted to make sure that the relationship between the Henchman and Leora was one in which the Henchman was obviously more powerful and so played on the vulnerable and physically less able aspects of the female stereotype. Leora outsmarts the Henchman however in the final shot, by using her teleporting device to escape.

Leora is irrational and aggressive, opposing the stereotypes
 listed above

Leora is instinctive and uses her means to outsmart the henchman

Leora is an aspirational character for our audience. She is brave and smart, and manages to oppose the gender stereotype, defending herself independently.  This is what makes the audience admire her and want to be like her, especially seeing as

REGIONAL IDENTITY
Although regional identity is hard to distinguish in our opening due to the generic forest setting, we did try to introduce it to the audience where possible.

ACCENT/LANGUAGE
The accents of the characters in the clip are noticeably British and are typical accents of people who are considered 'from London'. They are also talking English. Here is the audio clip for the dialogue in our opening.

SETTING

We deliberately made the London skyline visible when Leora teleports at the end of the opening. This was to make it as clear as possible where Leora had teleported to to the audience.