Question 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

What type of characters are in your film - age, gender, race, social class, profession, nationality? There is only one character that we see through out our opening title sequence and that in the main character, the teenage boy. He lives with his mum but she is always at work so he is alone a lot of the time hence our film being called 'Latchkey Kid'. He is a 16 year old white British boy who I would say is working/middle class. I think that because he is the age of a lot of our main audience this would help bring in more people to watch are film, mainly because they might be able to relate to him in many aspects.

Are they typical or untypical of the genre (are they typical teenager, mother, typical villain etc.)? I would say that our main character is typical of a Thriller film. This is because he is a mysterious boy which gives the audience questions about him so right away its doing what a normal Thriller film would do. He actually isn't a typical teenager that you would see in a Thriller but just because of the questions he creates and the way he is he makes it feel right to be in a Thriller film.

What can you say about their representation – i.e.. what type of male (aggressive, male predator) or female (helpless female), or what group (tribe) do they belong to (Italian mobsters or British hoodies)? I wouldn't say that our main character really belongs to any specific group (Hoodie,gang,nerd) and this is because he doesn't really have any friends and he is alone a lot of the time. But there are real teenagers out there that are probably like him so they could relate to him but also I think that once and awhile every teenage might feel like he does so in that sense all teenagers would like our character and would like to see our film.

How does your choice of mise-en-scene (costume / props / décor / setting / makeup (& appearance) / figure expression) give the audience clues to the ‘type’ of character(s) you have in your film. One of the main things which we got back from our feedback about our opening title sequence was about how good the props and costumes were and telling them about the boy and what he was like. So we had lots of props set up in his bedroom to really show what his about so for example Sherlock Holmes poster or glasses and spy books etc. Also just by the way he moved and acted showed the audience that he is quite shy and he is alone a lot of the time so this really showed them what his all about.

Do your characters reflect those you have studied in other films? Give examples of similar film characters (with images / links etc.) When thinking about what type of character we wanted in our film we did a lot of research and we kind of based him on a boy from a book that we read at GCSE and that book is called 'Martyn Pig' in that he is a boy who really likes spy novels and murders and his dad is a drunk so he is also alone a lot of the time just like our character.'Martyn Pig'