EVALUATION ACTIVITY 2

How Does Your Media Product Represent Particular Social Groups?

Our protagonist Ivy is similar to the character Casey Becker from scream. Casey Beaker, is a student at Woodsboro High School. Her character is very conventicle in the genre, physically attractive but very naïve. One night she is home alone and becomes the target of the antagonist ghost face. 

To make our opening two minutes, we gained inspiration from the movie scream. Scream is a very popular horror film that most people have watched and due to its popularity scream 2 and 3 have been released. The original movie influenced the production of our film, SEEN 23:59PM,from mise-en-scene to the storyline/content in the film. 

In addition, after watching Scream and other horror films we realised that stereotyping is very important in the genre. This is because it affects the way the audience view characters, due to the portrayal of different groups and individuals in the media. 

Casey Becker represents the stereotypical vulnerable and defenseless girl in a horror movie. She has characteristic the audience associate with the typical victim such as being blond –dumb and a teenager- unaware of danger. Additionally, because she is a girl the audience can automatically assume she is inferior. This is because of the stereotype women are the weaker sex. 

We wanted to present some of the conventional characteristic through our protagonist Ivy. This is because we wanted the audience to be able to empathise with the character; for that to happen there needed to be some Cécile the audience expect. However, we also wanted to subvert to the stereotypical character in order to make our movie distinctive from other horror films.

Like the character from Scream Ivy is totally oblivious to her surroundings, but unlike Casey Becker she is not completely clueless.   

The personality of our protagonist totally subverts to the character from scream. This is because throughout the film Casey Beaker is in constant fear and terror whereas Ivy is not portrayed as naïve or stupid. This can be noticed in the scene where Ivy receives a mysterious text, which she chose to ignore. Our aim was to show our protagonist as responsible, independent and a strong female character different to other horror movies. I think we successfully showed this in our opening to minutes, for example the scene where Ivy is holding a knife. This implies Ivy is not afraid and will fight to protect herself.

Appearance wise our protagonist is slightly different to the character Casey Beaker. Ivy has black hair that connotes intelligence and elegance different to Casey who is blond and is stereotyped to stupid.    

Despite that through the use of mise en scene there are similarities between the two characters. The obvious one being they are both teenagers, who attend high school and both happens to be victims of the antagonist.    

Furthermore, clothing worn by the character from scream is very casual as she is just lounging around the house. This makes her ordinary and retable to the target audience. In our film Ivy is seen wearing pajamas to highlight the movie is set late at night and to represent the natural/common setting.