ISHAAQ TOLENTINO
AS MEDIA PRODUCTION SCHS 2016
How Does Your Media Product Represent Paticular Social Groups?
- The Villain - We planned that the villain of our opening title sequence was not going to say anything as this gave it more of a mysterious look; as you can see in the final production, he was not shown mass amounts during the 2 and a half minutes - we made this so that there would a lot of questions asked from the audience such as: Who is it? Why? and so on. we decided to dress Jack Banham to represent the villain of our film as he had the muscular figure suited for this specific role. Anoither factor why the villain was not shown as much was to question whether he played being a robber, murderer, or a terrorist. Near the end of the OTS we see that the villain has a gun for the symbolic visual code to represent the realism of violence, we decided to use it as it is a very common prop used in noir films as this gives the effect of tension, power and authority. We also decided to modernise this character as we felt that it would challenge the conventions of a typical villain in a noir film such as using a modernised gun and outfit. The outfit of the enemy was shown to represent his working class - the character was not wealthy as you can see in his position. The way he walked and handles his items showed a really intense characterisitic.
- The Everyman - As a production group we decided to make our noir film modern, this made us change mostly the visual aspect of the noir conventions - we made our main protagonist, the detective, have the typical conventions of an everyman; we took into considerate the mise-en-scene as we felt that it played a big role within this production. Our everyman wears a watch and smart clothing which indicates that he is presented to be in the middle class, however, the clips shows the everyman mostly relaxed and sitting down which represents the working class as he is working. The white shirt and tie represents a quintessential everyman which implies his status. The everyman (detective) is a young male which is a typical convention of an everyman in a noir film - we decided to use a young male for our everyman as it shows his vulnerability and can easily be controlled. We decided not to have a white British/American as the everyman as we wanted to tackle the challenge of the typical noir conventions; this made it more realistic as in the modern society, a detective is not always a white male. This made the film a lot more intriguing to watch as it is not a typical noir film but has similar conventions.
- The Victims - The victims in our film does not fit in with the typical conventions of a noir film so we decided to class our film as a neo noir. We decided to add several victims instead of only one so that we increase the mystery and suspense to the opening title sequence and the film. We wanted the victims to be in the middle class on the social class as we wanted them to be the main target for the villain (criminal). You could tell that the victims was all middle class as the mise en scene was focused on for example the watches of the hostages and how they dress in general but the focus is there watches making them an easier target compared to a working class person. As you can see we went far from the typical conventions of a film noir due to its modernistic approach to the film instead of having the retro props with jazz soundtracks, as we thought that wouldnt fit in with our film, so we changed every aspect of the characters and their background.