Evaluation 2 - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

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How does your media product represent different social groups?

We took inspiration from many different movie characters when creating our main protagonist Kyle Stanley, as played by David Lewis in our thriller movie ‘isolation’.

Our aim as a thriller company was to create a typical, male character with an everyday life, who would later become the victim of a cruel, psychological crime, expressing strongly that things like this can happen to anyone. We took inspiration from many victimised characters of the successful, horror movie series, ‘Saw’. The character that stood out to us when creating our character would be Adam Stanheight, portrayed by Leigh Whannell in the first Saw film. Adam is depicted as the main protagonist alongside Laurence Gordon. Stanheight is conveyed by Whannell as a family man with an ordinary life and job as a free-lance photographer. However things then take a turn for the worst when he becomes a victim of the twisted, disturbed criminal, Jigsaw. Stanheight is portrayed as being oblivious to where he finds himself as does Kyle in our thriller movie.

There are many similarities between Kyle and Adam Stanheight. The main similarity that we chose to invoke is the vulnerability that is portrayed within our thriller through the use of facial expressions and body language. This counteracts the usual personality of these masculine characters, and emphasises the power and control that the criminal has over them. The image of Stanheight below portrays him as shocked, and in some ways petrified by the events taking place around him. Kyle Stanley is confused throughout our thriller as he wakes up in an abandoned barn in the middle of nowhere after his drink being spiked the night before.  However the protagonist in Saw differentiates from Kyle Stanley as Adam is depicted as showing an aggressive personality. “I went to bed in my shithole apartment and woke up in an actual shithole.” This quote portrays Adams loud mouth attitude, the colloquial language used also reinforces this, whereas Kyle’s personality and reactions contrast to that of Stanheight, because although we brought the shock horror of the protagonist that potential viewer’s desire, we also made our character more composed and collected in the same type of situation.

In the Saw movie, Stanheight is portrayed as wearing a plain white t-shirt and jeans. This is a casual approach to the costume with simple clothing of an everyday male character. We aimed to create this, but with more of a smart casual approach as Kyle had been on a night out with friends when the spiking took place. As the image below shows, Kyle is pictured wearing a plain white buttoned shirt, plain black skinny jeans and a plain black jumper. When worn together, this creates the perfect smart casual effect that we were looking for, basing our idea on the Saw character.