How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our group carefully considered the ways in which to represent age, class, gender, and race. The purpose of our thriller opening was to highlight how the least expected could carry out an act of violence, and I think we pulled this off well by presenting a character who acts as an unlikely antagonist. Therefore, we decided to present our protagonist as wealthy man of a supposed higher social status, and this stereotypical representation only serves to emphasise the jarring juxtaposition between the man's status and the crime he is about to commit.

See 0:11

The first scene gives portrays a stereotypical representation of gender. The centralised position of the man connotes a sense of power over his wife. This is further reinforced by the wife's lack of importance within the frame, as well as the fact that you don't see her face throughout the piece. Moreover, the way in which he doesn't face his wife symbolises a lack of respect. The initial representation of the man begins to show the protagonists extreme right-wing views (which adds context to the plot of the thriller), but also reveals his narrow-mindedness, focused on his hate for the Prime-minister.

Another important consideration was our representation of wealth. Subverting the notion that terrorism purely comes from different (extremist) cultures, we opted to go for an idealistic British-Caucasian, which would go against audience expectations. We felt that, on a commercial level, this wouldn't cause offence and would give us the broadest target audience possible. His nondescript clothing only further reinforce how normal and bland he is, giving the piece a more menacing tone as he goes against the terrorist-archetype.

See 0:21

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Giving our protagonist an age was subject to a lot of debate within our group. Our initial thoughts was that our character should be middleaged: a man in a middle-life crisis, fed up with the world. However, mainly due to the logistics of finding a suitably aged character, we decided to go with the decidedly younger Callum Carroll, who we felt could pass off for a man in his twenties. This worked well, as I now envisioned our protagonist to have a revisionist, idealistic-attitude to politics a la Hitler. Moreover, this opened up an entirely new demographic who could be tempted to see the film in it's entirety and (thankfully) the positive feedback has reflected our thinking behind this.

Our protagonist throughout the opening.

Again, the preconceived idea that there is a correlation between class and moral-righteousness was an idea we wanted to manipulate. We wanted to unnerve our audience by grounding our character in reality, which would in turn make him a more believable protagonist. We used his house as a backdrop to the first few shots to denote his wealth, and this is reinforced by his expensive clothing, as seen in the images on your left. The shots in which he mingles with the public (See 1:19 for instance) it further reinforces the idea that danger is hidden, and again it taps into the present fear of terrorism that is ingratiated in our minds as a society. Therefore, I think, by avoiding cliche, we've been able to make a character who is very real, yet still poses a threat. See 0:27 to 0:30 approx.