Question two- Comparison to existing products

Social groups represented in our product:

Our product features social groups and representations, such as, teenagers and youth (age), representations of gender, Disabilities and class/status.

To begin with, age is represented in our product via youth. The protagonist in our piece is represented as young and able bodied. He shows no signs of physical disability or a lack of physical skills. This also links to ability. We created this representation in order to create a contrast between mental and physical states. We represented youth in order to create this representation and contrast. Youth was also represented as criminal but vulnerable at the same time. We created representations of criminality by use of props and costume. The prop of money used in the flash back showed some sense of illegality as a young

man shouldn’t be able to acquire that much money legally, nor should he be being chased at his age, this is also how we created themes of vulnerability for youth.

Going back to representing able bodied-ness within the social group of age. A text, which uses similar representations to our product, is ‘Looper’. The protagonist in ‘Looper’, ‘Joe’ is shown to be able bodied through both, his actions, but also by mise-en-scene. The location shows that he is able bodied, as it is remote. He is in a cornfield, presumably in the American country. This shows able bodied-ness as it is difficult terrain to cross and would be difficult to access. This adds to over all representation of youth. Another representation of youth is ‘Joe’s’ costume. Similar to our protagonist’s, ‘Joe’s’ costume is dark, yet fashionable for his time. This represents youth to the audience as the protagonist’s know what is fashionable and of the time, and older character’s may not be as knowledgeable and may be wearing outdated clothing. As it is dark in colour, it connotes mystery and possibly illegality. This shows that other thriller films are using the same representations as us, just to create slightly different meaning and to allow a different niche of the audience to identify with the characters.

Another representation and social group in our product is that of ability/disability. In our product, we depict the protagonist as being physically, very well abled (as shown as part of the representation of youth), but as mentally unstable and paranoid. We represented the protagonist in this way, as it is stereotypical to the genre and sub-genre. We showed our protagonist to be paranoid particularly during flashbacks by showing him grabbing his head and slipping to the floor, so we showed it predominantly by his actions and also by the lighting. Use of shadows both on his face and in the location add to the representation of shadows and that something is always lurking behind them. A real text, which also uses lighting in order to represent paranoia, is ‘The Machinist’. In ‘The machinist’, lighting is used to create shadows on the face of the main character. Shadows are a stereotypical convention of genre and are used to represent paranoia as they represent the unknown. In our product, we used shadows, not only on the face, but also in the location in order to create an effect of paranoia and almost a sense of self-destruction within the main character. This is too shown in ‘The Machinist’. However, we used location to help represent disability as well as character. Within the representation of paranoia and mental states, come representations of loneliness and not belonging. Our main character is shown very much to be lonely and is shown to not really fit in anywhere. ‘The Machinist’ also shows this. However, they show it by showing the man to be almost dangerous in his ways, where as we show our main character as this through isolation.

Lastly, we have representations of gender. This representation crosses with a lot of other representations. It crosses with ideas of crime from age/ ‘Looper’ and ideas of insecurity and paranoia from disability/ ‘The Machinist’. To begin with, only the male gender is represented in our product. Men are represented as criminals. This is a very stereotypical representation of men as they are commonly seen as criminals and most likely statistically the most criminal gender. These representations are, again, shown via use of a dark, street style costume, which gives strong connotations of criminal behavior. And also by the fact that he is running. People often say ’Those who are innocent, do not run’, this could be argued that our main character is not innocent and therefore runs. But, we could also link it to the male representation of paranoia and reason that he runs due to his paranoia. In a sense, the two representations are battling with each other until the question is finally answered at the end of the film.

In the screen shot to the right, females are being represented to have an inner fight, just as our protagonist/antagonist has. She is shown to be having some mental conflict, which is a stereotype for women as it usually the me who remain calm and level headed. In our product, we chose to change that and create a mental conflict in the male character’s head. There is another difference between the two representations. Our uses more stark lighting whereas ‘Prometheous’ is much darker. This shows possibly a more twisted representation of the female gender in ‘Prometheous’.