2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The opening to our film is set in a family environment in the centre of London. We wanted our characters to fit the stereotype of a warm, loving family with kids. However, we deviated away from having a mother for the two daughters in our film, and kept it a single parent family. I believe this showed the audience the strong bond which can be formed between a father and a child when a mother is not present, because normally the mother is considered the main caregiver. Especially in this case, the two children are daughters whom would normally relate better towards their mother, but the absence of a mother makes their relationship with their father stronger. This in turn makes the struggle for the father to find his kidnapped daughter more passionate and dramatic. On the other hand, one may view fathers as being naturally worse at caring for children than mothers, and therefore when the daughter is kidnapped, the audience may view this as the father being naïve or ignorant for leaving his two young children vulnerably home alone.

We had to choose the actors to play our characters very carefully, as we wanted to make sure that the right representations were carried across to the audience. For example, for our two young actresses, we had two completely different ideas to make them seem younger and more vulnerable. The eldest daughter we tried to portray as being an angst teenager who would be disobedient towards her father’s demands and subsequently lead to the kidnapping of her younger sister. This look is similar to that portrayed by Taylor Momsen in Gossip Girl. This also encourages people of her age to come and view our film as they can relate to her actions at that age in life.




Next, we decided to choose a very young actress to play our youngest daughter so she could create this cute child image; playing with her dolls, talking to her dolls, listening to beautiful music while dressed up. This image which we wanted to be portrayed in our film is the same as that by Drew Barrymore in E.T and Abigail Breslin in Signs.

Finally, in our planning we had to decide on who would play our dad. We came up with the type of real actors that would suit the role that we wanted to be played out and came to the conclusion that someone like Jason Isaac would suit our role as being a caring father but also have the potential to be brutal, strong and forceful at the same time. This idea of the main man in the film being masculine and macho falls in line with the hard lead for men in thriller films. Nicolas Cage in Kick-Ass is a suitable example of the type of image we would like to be represented   in our film, especially as Cage also plays a father who has a 'dark' side as well. 

For cultural background and social status our family is within the bracket of middle-class and British. They live in a big house in the centre of London and later on in the film as the father’s past is revealed, we uncover a secret, spy lifestyle which pays well for him. The absence of a mother adds to the “good father” image which has been created in the opening to our film and is fast becoming more popular in today’s society. The audience will naturally feel sympathetic towards the father as he lost his wife to illness a few years before the time our film was set. It also exemplifies his heroism at the end of the film and therefore makes the ending more dramatic and interesting. I believe verisimilitude is heightened in the opening of our film because of the mundane nature and family environment of which it is set in. This will suite and interest a lot of different audiences as many find it difficult to relate to things so unrealistic or non-representative of the society we live in today. 

JK