How does your media product represent particular social

groups?

Key representations In my film introduction, I made sure that the audience were straight away able to relate/acknowledge what the film is about and what’s going on (mischief). We want the teenage audience to straight away guess that the film is targeted at them. Some key areas of representation:

Location Regional IdentityGenderEthnicityCostumeClassAge

There are key elements used in real world social realism films, such as using an estate for location, the use of tracksuits are used for outfits a lot of the time or by focusing on working class to fit the stereotype. Therefore, in order to get our media product to match these real world products, we planned ahead and made sure of what key aspects we need to focus on in order to match correctly. We did this by researching and watching several social realist films e.g. Adulthood and One Mile Away and making notes on them.

costume, ethnicity and location

By dressing our actors up in hoodies and tracksuits, it is portraying the teenage stereotype correctly as this is how many young British boys represent themselves as it perhaps brings a sense of intimidation to the public. To have our film appear conventional, the main protagonist is mixed raced. This portrays the stereotypical look of a violent teenager up to no good.

The location right at the beginning shows the area in a dark setting with street lights on and a grey, dusty fence. This is so that the working class ‘look’ of the area is clear to the audience and signify negativity or trouble.

As you can see on the right, we’ve made use of young faces and dark costumes. We decided to choose black costumes as it connotes intimidation and evilness. This fits in well with the behaviour of our characters and our genre of media product as it matches the other key elements of social realist films. As you can tell between the different media products, the age, gender (male) and ethnicity is very similar. Many of the protagonists in British social realism films are of a different background other than white British. In Kidulthood, the main protagonist is of Turkish/North African decent and in One Mile Away he is black. Therefore we believed that having our main protagonist mixed raced made it look more conventional

Anuvahood; Kidulthood; One Mile Away

The Way Out

media portrayal of teenagers

It is clear to us that the media tends to represent teenagers in a negative and usually, awful way. I have gathered some right wing vs left wing news papers and how the two differ when it comes to teen representation and clips from movies giving a clear demonstration that it is targeted at them by using some key elements to fit the negative stereotype.

Examples of left and right wing UK newspapers

Left wing- The Mirror- The Guardian

Right wing- Daily Mail- The Times- Daily Star

Neutral-The Sun - The Independent

Left wing newspaper (mainly targeted at working class) beliefs usually look to the future, aiming to support those who cannot support themselves and believe in equality. Whereas right wing (mainly targeted at conservatives) beliefs usually lean over to a traditional point of view and believe in survival of the fittest, meaning they believe that we should all look after ourselves and believe they shouldn’t have to pay for other peoples education and health service.

From my research and prior knowledge coming across newspapers, I’ve found that right wing newspapers tend do portray teenagers in a much more negative way. Left wing newspapers attempt to avoid to represent them in such a dreadful way however they frequently do.

In the next slide, you will see the ways in which the two represent teenagers...