Evaluation Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

In our Thriller opening, we looked at social class in terms of social groups.

Firstly, for our main character, the detective, we wanted to give the impression of a hard-working, serious-business detective. To fill this role, Donley wore a suit and had a briefcase to give the audience the impression he had just come home from work, found his wife dead and the murderer fleeing the scene. In the "future" parts of the opening, the detective was the only lit up object in the scene, the background, the rest of the attic, was in darkness, when he was at the desk it was only him and the desk that were lit up. We used the dress code, suits, from Out Of The Past and The Big Combo, two iconic 1950s noir films, mixed with Morgan Freemans detective image, only being more worn down, from the film Seven, which played a larger part in influencing our production. We used mostly midshots and over-the-shoulder shots on the detective to give the audience the impression that they could be there actually watching him. He appears mostly in the attic, a dark, secret hidden place, or the house, this gave him the image of being a domestic, family man.

The detective’s wife was relatively easy for us to decide on, because she only played a few seconds during the opening, we only had to think about her costume, so we agreed on the typical dress for women in the fifties of a dress and cardigan. His wife is only in the opening for a matter of seconds, so we had to represent her as the character she is effectively. We had her standing directly in front of a window, this lighting gave her this impression of purity.

For the murderer, we agreed we didn’t want the cliché balaclava, black jacket and gloves. During the initial planning stages we thought about the murderer being a patient who escaped from a mental hospital, drawn in from watching Shutter Island, but because we never included any of the newspaper articles we made about an escaped mental patient, this concept was never given to the audience, so the murderer character remained as just the typical murderer.