Evaluation - Question2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?


In representation there are 7 different areas which we can cover when it comes to representation, these 7 areas are: 

• Social Class and Status
• Gender
• Sexuality
• Regional Identity
• Age
• Ethnicity
• Physical ability/disability

Binary oppositions are a key factor when it comes to representations, for example gender which is represented by mise-en-scene, manly un-revealing clothes for males, bright coloured revealing stylish clothes for females, we can pick out binary opposition for all of the above areas of representation.

In Suburban Zombie we tried to include verisimilartude in our text, to do this we followed the common fashion of "hoodies" in the youths of today. Media texts existing today which use this aspect of representation are films such as Harry Brown where this idea is taken into play all the way throughout the film. 

A scene from Harry Brown.

We made the blood out of Ketchup as we didn't have time to purchase anything else that was better. We asked our cast if it was ok to bring old clothes to the set so that we could make it more realistic with blood. 

Characters shown in our opening are:

• Matt Johnson - Protagonist
• Sam Boyes - Protagonist
• Zombies

Factors which influenced our representations:

• Current youth culture
• Recent media texts

Matt Johnson: typical badass , smoking - rebellious, rough character.

Sam Boyes: badass, smart, serious facial expression and violent actions.

Zombies: typical Romero zombies, hoodie zombies (Shaun of the Dead)

Sam Boyes - Colin (Colin)

Matt Johnson - Ben (Night of the Living Dead)

Regional Identity is one of the important area's of representation in our media text, as both characters are rough, rebellious northerner's we can see this from the dialogue, when Matt Johnson uses the Yorkshire Slang, "Dinner Time" this immediately signifies that he is from a rural part of Britain. From the clothes that they wear we can see that they are youths (hoodies) yet we see that they counter type the stereotypical northern thick backwards image, and use teamwork to slay the zombies.

Summary:

Overall we have mixed both the stereotypes and counter-types of the northern man. If i had chance to reshoot, and change the cast choice i probably would not, as there is not enough spotlight on the north of England as foreign countries do not see anything from Britain other than  middle-upper class white people from London.